Next time I resolve to go to at least one new place each week, I hope I get over the compulsion to write them all down. I have traveled a lot this late winter and spring and have lots of new places to document.
One of the most exciting was my trip to NYC during the week of March 12, 2006. Since most of NYC is new to me, I'll just describe the trip. Unless I specify otherwise, assume the experience of place was a new one.
My friend and I arrived on a Friday night and left on a Monday afternoon. This entry just documents the week ending Saturday night. Sunday and Monday will have to come under another entry.
We took the AirTrain and Metro from JFK to downtown, all new to me. (I had been on the Metro, but went from the upper West End to Wall Street with my good NY friend, M., several years before and now I'm also glad M. made us stroll by the WTC that night). When F. and I stepped off the subway car into the thinning crowds of Friday night commuters, we were bewildered by the signs and snaking tunnels. I recognized a street corner, we followed the signs toward it and found ourselves on a downtown New York street just as the setting sun touched the very tops of the high-rise office buildings around us.
Before I left the west coast, I had scoured online maps for T-Mobile Hotspots in the blocks surrounding our hotel. Without realizing it, I had memorized all the streets in a three-block radius of our hotel, the Millennium Hilton Hotel, overlooking Ground Zero. In all my studies of the online maps, I did not realize that we would be looking at such an historic place as Ground Zero each time we moved around during our stay.
I got another shock when I tried to get my bearings after climbing to the streets of NYC. Just a day or two before, I had spent half an hour studying photos of what that area looked like before and after 9/11. Not only did I recognized the street name, I recognized the buildings and scenes from the photos.
I turned to my friend and said, "Don't worry. We are only a block from our hotel." F. was skeptical, even after I told my friend my reasoning that, if the sun, which was invisible to us, is hitting the tops of the buildings above us and turning the buildings day-glo orange, both the hotel and the sun must be "that way" and we must go toward the sun, which we can't actually see. We found our hotel after just a block or so, just as I said. F., amazed, put me in charge of navigating the rest of the trip. Not only that, but we found a closer subway entrance just yards from our hotel.
As I settled in my room, I was stunned that it looked down into the Ground Zero. I used my cell phone's panoramic feature to capture the view, just after the sun had set. When I saw trains moving around in the depths of the pit, I thought they seemed like worms moving in a corpse. I don't know when the train station opened again, but it looks like a major hub for the Metro. It must have been reopened as soon as possible after the attack. (I have wanted to look that up ever since, but never quite found the time.)
We were late, late, late meeting my friend M. for dinner at Lattanzi Ristorante Italiano on Restaurant Row near the theater district. We underestimated how long it would take to find the place by taking the subway and figuring out which way to turn on which street. M. suggested the place because of its double menu is so charming. Lattanzis serves both modern Italian food and the food of the Jews living in Rome 2,000 years ago. We basked in the New Yorkness of the place, its emptiness while the plays were showing nearby, the white cloth table linens, the ornate lily-shaped blown glass chandeliers. It was a perfect setting to introduce two of my dearest friends to each other.
After dinner, we changed clothes again at the hotel and went to a night club in Chelsea, SBNY (Splash Bar New York), to be exact. I left my friend there around 5:00 a.m. (only 2:00 a.m. West Coast time) and caught a cab back downtown. I'll only say that I would go back, in certain kinds of company, but next time I'd rather venture to the near mystical, unattainable other club, Avalon. We never quite made it over there. After that Friday evening and Saturday morning, I am convinced that RedBull is a great drink to order at a club. The caffeine keeps you going and going and going...
On Saturday morning, my friend and I met around 10 a.m. (7 a.m. West Coast time) to find a place to eat. We took the subway to SoHo and ate at Fanelli's Cafe, where the service was haphazard, but the food simple, tasty and on the cheap side for NYC. We stopped in the L'Occitane store just across the street, where I found out that F. likes lavender. A lot. I also learned that if you want lavender, L'Occitane is the place to go.
We wanted to go to museum, but the hour was getting late to go to a big one like the Met. The lavender-selling clerk suggested the Frick Museum. We walked through the Upper East Side till we found the right line to wait in. Apparently, a Salvador Dali exhibit drew a crowd. The tickets for that exhibit were sold out. I didn't care because I wanted to see the Frick's regular collection anyway and F. had seen Dali's works while traveling in Spain. Two pieces in particular caught my eye. I was very happy to meet a new painter whose work I really like. The Lake by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, a tangled, monochrome landscape stopped me midstride. It's pastoral yet so ominous and dreadful. (Of course, the photo on the web site does not do it justice). The painting that made my jaw drop was St. Francis in the Desert by Giovanni Bellini. The colors are vivid throughout, yet the light on St. Francis glows. It astonishes me that it was painted in 1480.
After meandering through the exhibit, F. and I agreed we wanted to find nice place to rest, get something to drink and a nice snack. I told F. I knew just the place, a place nearby (the Mark Hotel). It was close enough to the museum for us to walk, but I insisted to F. that we walk through Central Park as much as possible. We paused from time to time to take photos with my 2 megapixel cell phone. I sat next Hans Christian Anderson bench and felt like a child again. The statue is proportioned so that adults feel like children as they interact with the statue. When seated, I only came up to the bronze man's chest. A bit further on, we saw a group of people pose for a photo as they draped over the Alice in Wonderland statue, so we only looked at it from a distance. They all wore the same bright blue shirts and it seemed to us that they were on some sort of scavenger hunt, one where they had to get a group photo by the statue. I'd been to the Mark and the Park before, but not to that part of the Park.
After a snack at the Mark, where we watched people gather for a wedding reception, we headed back to the subway station and back to the hotel.
I selected our Saturday evening activity at F.'s suggestion because most of the things we had done so far had been F.'s choice. I decided we would absorb the ambiance of a neighborhood by just walking around it. I selected the "shopping" district in Chelsea. I use "shopping" loosely, because we did not set out on our adventure until about 8:30 p.m., meaning we did not actually arrive in Chelsea until after 9:00 p.m., long after the stores closed. After trying to get cash and losing $80 at an ATM in a pizza joint, F. selected a restaurant for us, Niso's on 8th Avenue. After we ate, I wanted to go to the world-famous Chelsea Hotel.
On our way, I stopped in awe by the Salvation Army's Centennial Memorial Temple. It is an Art Deco beauty, massive and hopeful and dreary all at once. I adore buildings like that, the ones that speak so clearly to the yearning of the people who built them. F. got impatient with me, so I waved my arms toward the beautiful features and raved about how much I loved it and why and how NYC is such an awesome city where you find beautifully ugly things to love without ever expecting they existed all along. I had only read about such moments, but I felt in standing there with F. that I had found in NYC what I had come to find on that particular trip. I wanted instead to wander through the temple, but alas, it was shut off from us. I left my heart at 120 West 14th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. Eventually, I said my farewells to the concrete building with the heavy brass gates and the archaic motto, and heavy with the weight of the moment and the burden of know F. thought I'd lost my mind, we walked on down the street to the Chelsea Hotel.
We wandered around the lobby, soaked up the artwork from resident artists on dusty display there and we wandered back down 8th Avenue for late night hot coffee drinks to a bar, Flight 151. Flight 151 had half an airplane sticking out of a partially dropped ceiling, which made me homesick for the Bay Area's St. James Infirmary. The Infirmary, sadly, burned down under suspicious circumstances nearly a decade ago. That place made stuff hanging from the ceiling into an art form, with its antique hearse drawn by a large plastic horse and its large Wonder Woman statue. F. and I flirted a bit with the bartender, who struck me as more literary than the average bay-area barkeep. I asked him if he was working on a novel. He admitted instead to working on a screenplay. The owner dropped by to say "hello" and we complimented him on his place. He confessed that an Irish bar in San Francisco in Ghirardelli Square that serves the world's best Irish coffee inspired him to open a pub. None of us could think of its name.
Before long, F. got frustrated with the slim romantic pickings and mixed signals at Flight 151, so we parted ways again. I took a cab back to the hotel and F. took a cab back to SLNY.
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