NEW YORK 2002
Or, Thomas and Cheryl go to the Big City
We can’t say there’s been a huge
groundswell for this, but several folks have asked us to write up a little
report of our recent trip to New York, and
we’re glad to do it. Mainly we owe it to all those who were so generous
with their advice and suggestions
to us about what to do in the Big Apple. We weren’t able to do it
all, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. If at times we seem a little
wide-eyed, remember, this was our first-ever trip to New York. We were
there for the annual American Booksellers Association convention.
Please note: there are lots of links to other websites
in this little report. They were all active when we first posted this in May,
2002, but as time passes some of them will surely cease to be good.
The Hotel
We got tons of advice on this topic, and finally ended
up staying at the Mayflower Hotel.
It’s on the southwest corner of Central
Park, and we loved it. The room was plenty big, with 2
closets and a “kitchenette,” which was really just a little
refrigerator and a sink. The hotel’s one block from a subway station, so
we could get to and from there very quickly. We did pay the extra $20 per day
for a park view, which we HIGHLY recommend if you stay at any of the hotels on
the park (there are lots of them). But even better than the view was just the
fact that every time we dragged back to the hotel after a long day on the town,
we could detour into the park for a little decompression time, usually with a
hot pretzel and a “soda.”
Actually, most of the hotel suggestions we got were in
the midtown area, around Times Square and the
theater district, but that part of town is just so full of people and energy
that we were glad to be staying a little ways away from there.
The Park
Central Park was the
biggest surprise of all to us. It is SO beautiful, and they take such good care
of it. We had decided to return home on a Monday, rather than a Sunday, just so
we could spend a whole day in the park, and that
turned out to be the best decision we made.
The Restaurants
We ate pretty high on the hog, but we ate twice at
only two places:
- Becco. On West 46th Street, on
Restaurant Row. One of several restaurants owned by Lidia
Bastianich, winner of this year’s James
Beard Award for best restaurateur in New York. Becco
has this deal: All-you-can-eat of their three pastas of the day, preceded
by either a Caesar Salad (very good), or a selection of antipasti (VERY
GOOD). They have a huge wine list, but every bottle costs the same, $20.
Extremely friendly staff, a real fun place to eat. Two of you can get in
and out, unable to eat another bite, for $80.
- John’s
Pizzeria. On West
65th Street, just
a few blocks from our hotel. Our impression was that there were very few
tourists here, mostly locals. Not fancy at all, and a nice respite from
the fancier places. A very good pizza with 3 or 4 toppings, a couple of
beers, and they’ll let you out for about $35. There is also a very
famous John’s Pizzeria in Greenwich
Village…..it’s the same folks.
Saturday, April 27
Flew into LaGuardia about 1:30, got to the
hotel about 3 PM,
then just got out and walked. And walked. And gawked. Went about 20 blocks north, bounced around that
neighborhood, saw Lincoln
Center, the Ansonia
Building, the Museum of Natural History,
the Dakota (site of John Lennon’s murder), dipped into Central Park right
there at Strawberry
Fields, where Beatles nuts gather in pretty large numbers to sing Beatles
songs and mourn, now, for two of the Fab Four. Then
back to the hotel to get ready for our first night on the town.
We walked the 14 or so blocks (North-south blocks are
pretty short, actually. It’s those east-west blocks that can get you.) to Danny’s
Grand Sea Palace on West 46th Street. It’s
sort of an Italian/Thai place, but we weren’t there mostly for the food,
but for the appearance there that night, in their Skylight Room (very intimate,
seats only about 50, if they’ll all scrunch up together), of our favorite
old cabaret singer, Blossom
Dearie. Blossom must be 75 years old, but she put
on one great 90 minute show, after which we did dine right there at
Danny’s. One tip: Go see Blossom. Another tip: Don’t buy the
“package deal,” which includes the show and the meal. That deal
gets you only a very limited menu at dinner. Our grade for the evening : A+ Thank
you, Frank and Ann.
After dinner, since it was only about 11 PM, we walked the 5 or 6 blocks on down to
Times Square, where it turned out
everybody was! Thomas tried to buy one of those $20 Rolex watches down there,
but our friendly salesman was rousted from his spot by about 10 policemen
before the deal could be consummated.
Then walked on back to the hotel, passing the site of
what would become part of our most memorable evening in New York. But not for another day or two.
Sunday, April 28
Cold and raining. We’d not brought our
umbrellas, but when the rain starts in New
York it is very easy to find an umbrella to buy. We strolled
on up to the West Side Restaurant on Broadway for our first breakfast of
bagels. Beginning to feel a little like maybe we belong here.
We had a noon brunch date
with some old friends of the family over on the East Side, just a
couple of blocks from the United Nations. It was still raining when we left the
brunch, so we walked on over to the UN and took the tour, which we’d
suggest you skip, although it might be more fun to go when they were actually
in session.
The weather was getting better, so we decided to just
walk our way back to “our” part of town, and just see what
we’d see, which turned out to be Grand Central Station, the New York Public Library, Bryant Park, Rockefeller Center, and
then on back to Times Square, where we went by the Broadway TKTS place,
where they claim you can get half-priced tickets to Broadway shows, and
they’re right. We decided on Top Dog/Underdog (at the Ambassador
Theater), which had just won the Pulitzer Prize for best drama a couple of
weeks before. A very intense, sometimes very funny, and ultimately very
disquieting play.
So now it’s about 9 PM, and we still haven’t eaten. And
that’s when we first went to Becco. Thomas
ordered the wrong thing, but Cheryl was smart enough to get the three-pasta
deal, which we’ve already raved about. We were almost the only people in
the place by that time on Sunday night, and it could not have been a more mellow end to our first full day in the city. The rain
stopped just as we left, so we walked back to the hotel, about 15 blocks.
Monday, April 29
A day we’ll never forget. We started out by
going to one of the very few breakfast places that had been recommended to us, Sarabeth’s,
on Amsterdam Avenue. If you go
there, you could do worse than to get the lemon ricotta pancakes, which are
very, very good.
Then on to the Museum
of Natural History, where we spent almost the whole day. We’d
both looked forward to the Baseball
Hall of Fame traveling exhibition, which was there, but we figured
they’d probably only have the second-tier stuff there, and maybe they
did, but what they did have there was amazing. When Thomas was a boy, he
suffered, with his grandfather, through a whole year while washed-up old Early
Wynn tried over and over to get his 300th career win, and they
rejoiced together when the old man finally made it. So what’s the first
thing we see at this exhibition? The game ball from Early Wynn’s 300th
victory! And then Wonderboy, Robert Redford’s
bat in “The Natural,” and then the actual bats used by Babe Ruth,
Roger Maris, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire
when they hit their record-breaking home runs (Barry Bonds wouldn’t
donate his bat, apparently. He is OFF OUR LIST.) Well, we won’t bore you with more
baseball stuff….suffice it to say that this was Cheryl’s favorite thing
in all of New York. A GREAT time.
Also spent a good deal of time at the Planetarium there at the
museum. Pretty interesting, and we’d really looked
forward to it, but on the whole we’d say it was a little disappointing,
given that it cost extra, and took up a good bit of time..
And of course we saw the famous dinosaur skeleton.
What we were unprepared for were the hundreds of other dinosaur skeletons. They
have collected a lot of those things.
By now the day was almost gone. We had tickets that
night for a play called QED,
which is essentially a one-man show starring Alan Alda, who plays Richard Feynman, the famous physicist. It
was a 7:30 PM performance, so we had an early dinner date that night with an
old friend of ours, a writer from Alabama now living in New York, who took us
to one of her favorite restaurants in New York, Gabriel’s. An excellent Italian restaurant.
We barely made the curtain for the play, which was
right around the corner at Lincoln
Center, and which turned out to be Cheryl’s favorite theatrical
experience of the whole trip. Alan Alda was great.
Then, after the show, we took what we thought was a
shortcut from the theater, only to find ourselves for the only time on the
whole trip alone on a deserted street in New York. It was a little eerie, but it didn’t last long,
as we did pretty quickly find a cab. “To the Iridium!” we told him,
the Iridium being that place we
passed on Saturday night, and where we’d learned that the legendary Les Paul
played on Monday nights only.
What a show. And it had not even begun when Cheryl
said she thought she recognized that guy playing backup guitar, who it turned
out was one Frank Vignola, who had put on the best performance we’d
ever seen in Montgomery two or three years ago out at the museum. Then old Les
showed up, and spent the next two hours inviting friends of his up to play with
him, and finally letting some fellow he did not know get up and play, and it
was like something out of the movies. The guy was Doug
Cameron, a jazz violinist from California, and he
brought down the house. Les let him play on and on, the crowd going nuts the
whole time. The party broke up well after midnight, but not before we’d
been invited by one of the performers, Jon Paris, a guitarist and harmonica player, to come see his show the
next night down at the Tribeca Blues Club. He liked
us because we were the only people he’d ever met who’d seen one of
his idols, Deford
Bailey, play the harmonica. That was 25 years ago in Nashville, at Deford’s 75th birthday party.
Sometime after 1
AM, we walked the 15 blocks back to the hotel. A great day.
Tuesday, April 30
Our first subway ride. We boarded right there at the
hotel, and got off down south at Washington
Square, in Greenwich
Village. Breakfast at Jones
Diner, two scrambled eggs, ham, toast, coffee and orange juice, all for
under $5. You can eat cheap in
New York (but you can’t get a biscuit,
or grits). We spent the morning just fooling around Greenwich
Village, and gradually worked our way south until we’d
gone as far south as you can go, to Battery Park. We started to take the Staten
Island Ferry, but didn’t, and now wish we had. It turns out that Staten
Island was the only one of the five New York boroughs we
didn’t visit. But instead we took the ferry out to Ellis Island,
and toured the immigration museum there. We could have, but didn’t, stop
at the Statue of Liberty. The ferry to Ellis
Island had given us a great view of the Statue of Liberty, and we
just didn’t feel like it was necessary for us to walk up inside it. We
learned later they weren’t letting people do that anyway.
Back to Manhattan, and then
we walked over to Wall Street.
Thomas had always wanted to see the Stock
Exchange, but they’re not letting tourists in right now, or at
least they weren’t that day.
Then to the World Trade Center site.
There’s not much to see, really. It looks like any other construction
site, until you go around the corner and see the fence with all the tributes to
the missing. It buckles your knees to be in the presence of such grief.
------------------------------
From there it’s not far to Chinatown, so we
walked up there and found a place to eat lunch, Wong’s Rice and Noodle
Shop, on Mulberry
Street. This was one of the few places we
really just wandered into, and there are undoubtedly lots of good places to eat
in Chinatown, but we HIGHLY RECOMMEND the rice
crepes with fried shrimp at Wong’s. Unlike anything we’ve ever had
in Montgomery. And cheap, too.
If you wander around Chinatown for very long, you soon
find yourself in Little Italy, where we did get
a little gelati for dessert, but it was getting late
in the day, so we caught a bus and headed back to the hotel. Chinatown and Little Italy both rate
another, longer visit on our next trip.
That night we hooked up with Cheryl’s brother,
an ex-New Yorker who just happened to be in town for a few days. He took us to
the “best hamburger place in New
York,” Hamburger Harry’s on West 45th Street. A good
hamburger, but not as good as the Hamburger King right here in Montgomery. But it did
have the advantage of being very convenient to the Shubert
Theatre, where we had half-priced tickets to see Chicago, a revival
of the popular musical. An excellent show, especially if you love the idea of
the extravagant New York musical,
which Cheryl does.
We got out of there about 10:30, and were supposed to head down to the Tribeca
Blues to see our new friend Jon Paris, remember? But we must admit we were
just too tired to do it. It was the only time in New
York that we just gave out. We went back to the hotel, and
went to bed.
Wednesday, May 1
East Side Museum
Day. We walked across the park, and took a bus up to the Guggenheim Museum, on
Fifth Avenue, this section of which is known as Museum Mile, because in that
space you can see not only the Guggenheim, but also the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Frick, and probably some others, too, but
believe us, if you check out all four of those in one day, that’s a
pretty full day. They were all great, except the Whitney, which if you’re
going to New York soon, and
they’re still having their “Biennial” show, skip it. Our
favorite was the Frick, a quirky collection of some amazing art, but the most
amazing thing we saw that day was at the Rooftop Garden Café at the Met, where
they served cokes in the little 6 ˝ ounce glass bottle, the way God intended
them to be. By the way, if you go to New
York and you don’t stay in a park-view room, you
should definitely go up to the Rooftop Café. It’s a spectacular view.
Come to think of it, we might have seen a few things
more amazing than the small coke, including the six or seven Vermeer paintings
we saw (there are only 35 in the whole world). And the medieval tapestries at
the Met. And the Picassos, Cezannes, Monets, Van Goghs. And about a
hundred others. But in fact we sort of over-museumed,
we now realize. If we go again, we’d not do them all in one day.
Believe it or not, some very good friends of ours, Lyn
Frazer and Jim Goodwyn, showed up in town that
afternoon, and after some discussion we all decided to go down to Greenwich
Village for a little dinner and late night entertainment. So we ate that night
at Le Gigot, a
little French restaurant in the village, and then walked over to Club 55, a
dive of a place where you could just picture a young Bob Dylan performing. But
it wasn’t Dylan. It was one Kendra Shank, a little known
jazz singer who is still paying her dues. Not our cup of tea, exactly, but the
whole scene was probably as close as we ever got to the “real” New York. Not only
were we the only tourists there, we were the only non-regulars there. Everybody
seemed to know everybody else, and nobody seemed to pay any attention to poor
Ms. Shank, except us, and we didn’t like her all that much! A long cab ride home.
Thursday, May 2
More museums, but a glitch
or two. We went to the American
Craft Museum, only to find it
closed for renovation. So we wandered over to the Museum of Modern
Art,
only to find a huge line waiting to get in. It turned out that they were
getting ready to close this one for renovations, too, and everybody who was in New York wanted to get in to see it before they did. It really
looked like a very long wait, in the rain, to get in. Except….we’d
bought a CityPass ticket, which is basically a
prepaid admission to several museums, including MOMA. Luckily, a guard saw that
we had the CityPass,
and told us that CityPass holders did not have to
wait in line, but could get immediate admission to the museum. They even let
Lyn and Jim, who had no CityPass, come with us.
And then….because
they were moving stuff out of the museum, they’d put all the
“good” stuff in one place. So in just a room or two we saw the gems
of the collection, including Cheryl’s all-time favorite painting,
Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy. Also van
Gogh’s The Starry Night, Picasso’s Les
Demoiselles de Avignon (only the most
significant painting of the 20th Century, in our opinion), Matisse’s The
Red Studio, and, well, you get the
idea. Add the two or three other really great exhibitions there, and MOMA ended
up being one of our very favorite experiences.
And then down the street
to the American
Folk Art Museum, where all our
minds were blown by the Henry
Darger
exhibition, which we will be
unable to describe to you. Darger was an unassuming
janitor in Chicago, but just before he died they discovered the bizarre, secret
fantasy world he had created in his apartment, including many, many paintings
on both sides of 20-foot long pieces of paper, detailing the struggle between
the Vivian sisters and their nemeses, the Glendelinians.
Bizarre, beautiful, disturbing, you gotta see it to
believe it. It was Thomas’s favorite moment of the whole trip.
Lunch at the Carnegie
Deli, then we went down to the JP Morgan Library, a really beautiful
building full of, mostly, old books and manuscripts. Hey, it really was JP
Morgan’s library. They also had, oddly enough, the original order from
Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon. How did they get that?
But we had to hurry back
to the hotel, to get ready for the book parties that night. First one was at
the Flatiron
Building, home of St. Martin’s
Publishers. The Flatiron is everybody’s favorite building from the
outside, but inside it’s sort of a mess. The shape of the building does
not exactly lend itself to an efficient operation. Still, very charming in its
way, and we did see Johnnie Cochran there. Asked him, confidentially, if he
didn’t think O.J. really did it, but he pretended not to hear the
question.
From there to a really
huge party put on by the AOL
Time Warner Book Group. You’d think that just after announcing the
largest quarterly loss in American corporate history they might have cut back a
little, but apparently they believe what we were coming to believe after a few
days in New York: “Hey, it’s only money!” This party
was the subject of an article in the New York Times, but you couldn’t
tell from the article that we were there. It was held in Bryant Park, a beautiful
little park right behind the New York Public
Library.
Then on to the last party
of the night, at the Empire State
Building. The party was held not on the observation deck, but about 8 floors
beneath that, in a big, ugly room, but after we left the party they did let us
go on up to the observation deck. Just as we stepped on the deck, though, they
made everybody leave because of lightning in the area. We never did get out on
the famous deck, but it was pretty cool to watch a thunderstorm roll across the
city from 86 floors up!
Friday , May 3
Ah, the biggest bone of contention of the whole trip.
One of us wanted to go down to the Today Show and watch their first Friday
concert of the season, but one of us didn’t. Reason prevailed, and we
went, but Cheryl did make Thomas leave behind the poster that he’s still
sure would have gotten us an Al Roker interview. It
turned out to be lots of fun, actually. We saw Katie, and we saw Matt’s head, and we heard
Al, and Sheryl Crow put on a really good performance for 8:30 AM.
Then we went to the booksellers convention. We
haven’t mentioned the convention before now, but it WAS the reason we
were in New York. Turns out
we stayed two hours, and left. We’d skipped the last 17 of these
conventions entirely, without any noticeable harm to our business, and we still
had a LOT of New
York we hadn’t seen, so we left, and never went
back, and we’re glad we did. But we did see Al Sharpton
and Dr. Ruth there before we left.
The very next thing we did was Thomas’s very
favorite thing of the whole trip. We went to the New York Historical Society, mainly
because we’d heard they had some original Audubon watercolors there. It
turns out they have all 435 of the original watercolors that make up his famous
“Birds of America,” but
they only display 4 at a time. A new 4 go on display every quarter, so if we go
there every 3 months, it’ll only take a little over 27 years to see them
all. It’s our new plan.
But they have lots (LOTS!) of other stuff, too, mostly
up on the 4th floor where it’s laid out sort of like an attic,
in the sense that everything they have seems to be on display, even the stuff
that’s really in storage. If you can go to only one place in New York, this is
where Thomas would suggest you go. Warning: if you go to their World Trade Center exhibit,
steel yourself. Everybody in there was in tears. People are not “over
it” yet, even if they think they are.
In the late afternoon, we left and visited the Lincoln Center Tower Records
store, where you can get anything. They even had a Kendra Shank CD. Remember
her? The one we saw in Greenwich Village the other
night? We didn’t buy that one, but we didn’t leave empty-handed
either.
Lyn and Jim had discovered a little restaurant on the
East Side, Mme. Romaine de Lyon, so we walked over there for dinner, and a very
good one it was. An after-dinner stroll down Park Avenue about 15
blocks to Grand Central Station, and then a taxi back to the hotel. Everybody
was bushed.
Saturday, May 4
Some weeks ago we had watched a TV show on the
building of the Brooklyn
Bridge, so we decided we wanted to see it up close, and this was the day.
We took an early morning subway over to Brooklyn, wandered
around there for a while, and then walked back to Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge.
When you reach Manhattan after that walk, you’re
right in the middle of a bunch of courthouses, all said to be really beautiful
inside, but they were all closed, either because it was Saturday, or for
security reasons, we never did find out for sure.
But we had somewhere to be, a long way from Brooklyn. We’d
managed to get tickets to the New York Yankees
game that day, which turned out to be the most beautiful day of the trip. About
72 degrees, and not a cloud in the sky, and there we were in the House That Ruth Built, and
where Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle and Berra and Ford and a whole lot of other great players had
played. And playing their most hated rivals right now, the Seattle Mariners,
with the most popular player in baseball on their roster, Ichiro. A great
game, too, led by the Yankees until the 9th inning, when their ace
reliever, Mariano Rivera, was roughed up for 3 or 4 runs.
After the game we caught the subway back, and were
deposited back at our hotel in roughly the same time it would have taken us to
get to our car in the Atlanta parking
lot.
We had no plans for that night, so we decided that Lyn
and Jim would enjoy seeing Blossom Dearie, and we
went back there. Blossom did not disappoint, but this time we did not eat there,
but but instead went back to Becco,
which was packed to the gills this night, unlike our first trip there. But they
got us in, and we all ordered the three-pasta deal, and we can’t
emphasize this enough: if you go to New
York, eat at Becco, and get the three-pasta
deal. It’s the best deal in the city(And we
should know. We’ve spent 9 whole days there.)
Sunday, May 5
Lyn and Jim went home, but this was the day we’d
reserved to spend the whole day in Central
Park, and we did, except for a foray across the street to a flea market
that is apparently a New York institution. But mostly we just wandered around
the park, eating hotdogs and hot pretzels, stopping and sitting for long
stretches, and just mostly people watching. Most people we know go to New York just for a
few days, and probably don’t have the luxury we did just to kill a whole
day in the park, so we know how lucky we were to get to spend this beautiful
day there. A great way to end our New York trip.
Except it wasn’t quite over. At about 4 PM we decided to subway down to the TKTS
office, and see what plays we might be able to get in to see that night. We
decided on the Elaine Stritch one-woman show at the Neil Simon Theatre, but Cheryl
was horrified to learn that the curtain time was 5 PM, and here it was 4:30,
and there was no way we could get to the hotel to get cleaned up, and we
weren’t exactly dressed for the theater, either, being dressed for the
park instead, and we were also carrying two shopping bags full of stuff from
the flea market, and, well, we sort of looked like two goobers from Alabama.
But we went, and it was great. Elaine Stritch is 77 years old, and she sang and danced and talked
about her life in the theater for a full three hours. She was amazing, and it
was Thomas’s favorite – by far – of all the theatrical things
we did. Sorry to inform you that the play is about to end its run, but we did
hear they’d filmed it, so if you get the chance to see it on TV, do.
Now the New
York trip is really about over, but we do still have to
eat dinner, right? We opted for another trip to John’s Pizzeria, where
against all odds we actually ran into Thomas’s cousin, who we did not
even know was living in New York!
And that’s it. Up the next morning,
and back to Montgomery, and back
at the store on Tuesday morning, just as if nothing had happened.
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