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:

1. Becco. On West 46^th 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.
2. John’s Pizzeria. On West 65^th 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 46^th 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 300^th 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 300^th 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 75^th 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.

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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 45^th 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 ½ 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 20^th 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 4^th 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 9^th 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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