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
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
Actually, most of the hotel suggestions we got were in
the midtown area, around
The Park
The Restaurants
We ate pretty high on the hog, but we ate twice at
only two places:
Saturday, April 27
Flew into LaGuardia about
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
After dinner, since it was only about
Then walked on back to the hotel, passing the site of
what would become part of our most memorable evening in
Sunday, April 28
Cold and raining. We’d not brought our
umbrellas, but when the rain starts in
We had a
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
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
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
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
Sometime after
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
Back to
Then to the
------------------------------
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
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.
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
We got out of there about
Wednesday, May 1
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”
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
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
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
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
Then we went to the booksellers convention. We
haven’t mentioned the convention before now, but it WAS the reason we
were in
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
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
In the late afternoon, we left and visited the
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
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
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
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
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
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
Except it wasn’t quite over. At about
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
And that’s it. Up the next morning,
and back to
If you want to
be “in the know” at all times, you should
subscribe to
our email newsletter. Just click on the “Email” link below,
and tell us to
sign you up!
Need more info? Want to reserve a book? Here are the many ways you can contact us:
Capitol Book & News Company
Monday-Friday 9-5:30 |
Saturday 10-4 | Closed Sunday