Urban Archaeology 101

Joyce Gold taught us to read a neighborhood by the newspapers on the rack out in front of the local news stand. The papers hold clues to the ethnic diversity, social strata and political interests of the people who live nearby.   

Of course, her tour led us to be more observant of the news stand around the corner from our apartment when we picked up our New York Times from the rack out front this morning.  For the record, the papers out front included the NYT, the Daily News, the NY Post, and USA Today--news stand staples all across the city.  Conspicuously absent was the Wall Street Journal.   

Our specialty papers were El Diario de los Hispanos, Nocero de Puerto Rico, Diario de Mexico, and two Polish daily news publications.  The only surprise for us is that there is no Italian or Asian paper represented in the mix, based on our observations of the people strolling around our neighborhood and the businesses that seem to be thriving here.

A Wonderful Walkabout

Our New York Marathon

Day 6

Saturday, June 4, 2011

We enjoyed our Broadway walking tour with Joyce Gold so much that we decided to do another walk with her today—this time in the West Village.  It was only about a mile from our apartment to the spot where the walk began, and it was a lovely day for walking.   

We got an early start, so we could stop for lunch along the way.  There were many options, but we settled on a tiny place in Greenwich Village called the Risotteria.  Only after we looked at the menu a bit more carefully did we realize that it was a restaurant that specialized in gluten-free pastas, pizzas, breads and pastries.  We thought this was an unusual food niche, until the next day, when the front page of the New York Times Styles section was dominated by an article about how gluten-free dining has become a hot trend, not only among the 1.3% of the population that is gluten-intolerant, but among health craze eaters always on the look-out for another reason to alter their diets.  After trying the gluten-free breadsticks provided for us to munch on while perusing our menus, we opted for tasty paninis that contained our friend gluten.  

After our first tour with Joyce had just seven people, we were amazed to find a crowd of 48, plus two videographers, a still photographer and a sound man all waiting for today’s tour—“The Intimate West Village and its Spectacular Hudson River Park.”  (The camera and sound people were filming for a New York information website planned to launch sometime this summer.)  Joyce asked us if we wanted to join the tour, and Dick expressed concern that we might not be able to hear, due to the size of the crowd.  No problem—Joyce had it covered with a wireless auxiliary speaker that would broadcast near the back of the group.  When she asked for a volunteer to carry the speaker, Dick raised his hand--it turned out he hadn’t heard the question and was just trying to get my attention, but he ended up carrying the speaker anyway, so we heard everything said very well and had a good excuse to hang in the back of the crowd, which is where we usually end up anyway, due to lollygagging about taking pictures.  

The tour was terrific, taking us along historic district streets and past slick new glass high rises that are home to the rich and famous.  On the ground floor of one of those fancy glass boxes we observed with some amusement a place called Slate—an “eco-groovy, fashion-aware, skin-friendly, sort-free laundry” for those whose discriminating tastes preclude the use of a mere laundramat.  We walked past 10 Leroy Street, the row house where the Huxtables lived on “The Cosby Show,” and saw the apartment house portrayed as home to the characters in “Friends.”   The tiny real-life home of Edna St. Vincent Millay was only nine and a half feet wide outside (eight feet wide inside). 

We loved people-watching at the Hudson River Park, where the good weather drew thousands of cyclists, walkers, skate boarders, picnickers and sun bathers (we were surprised to see so many bathing suits in such an urban setting, far from pool or beach).  A group of practitioners of what appeared to be some unusual form of yoga lay on their mats shaking their feet and hands in the air while chanting along with a guru on a loud speaker, attracting a lot of attention from curious passers-by, including us.  

An elementary school was holding a carnival day, and a pretty little residential street was closed off for a street fair.  It seemed that everyone in the Village was celebrating in some way today.   

After our walk, we couldn’t resist a stop for refreshments at Rocco’s Pastry Shop and Espresso Café in Greenwich Village.  Rocco Generosa started working at the Café as a dishwasher in 1956, when he came to New York from Italy at age 17.  He worked his way up to head pastry chef, and eventually bought the café in 1974—living out his version of the American dream shared by so many immigrants living in this neighborhood. 

We walked home by way of Washington Square Park, which was bursting with buskers energetically entertaining the crowds (crowds, crowds, crowds everywhere—how do people who live here stand it?). We spent a long time in the crowd watching these performers, and they collected a big sack full of money before they gave us the grand finale we were waiting for—a running leap over a line-up of women from the audience.  If they hadn’t been so amusing, we might have felt like suckers sitting through a ten minute introduction to a 10 second feature act. 

Brilliant pick-up strategy in Washington Square Park

We enjoyed taking lots of pictures today—here are a few more of our favorites.

Chalk painter in Washington Square Park

Dick just reviewed this post and noted that nine out of the eleven pictures here are mine--possibly a posting record. Hooray for me! (Of course 100% of the post production work is Dick's, so hooray for him, too!)

One Wild Ride

Our New York Marathon

Day 5

Friday, June 3, 2011

We will only do one thing today.  That thing is a 15 mile bicycle ride.  It will take us seven hours to complete it (yes, that averages out to just a little over two miles per hour--half our usual walking pace).  We will be so exhausted by the end of the ride that we will not even have enough energy left to go out to dinner.   

How is this possible?  That is the wonder of riding the streets of New York! 

We met our thirteen fellow riders and the two tour guides for our Bike the Big Apple tour in front of a very tiny (no more than twelve feet wide) bike shop at 10 a.m.  Where they stored the sixty rental bikes parked out front after hours was a mystery we had little time to ponder, as we prepared to embark on our all day tour titled “Back to the Old Country - The Ethnic Apple Tour.”  Our group was multi-ethnic to start with—five friends from France, a mother and daughter from Holland, a couple from England, and four Americans; our guide was a lifelong Brooklynite in his sixties, and his assistant was a college student from China.  

After choosing our bikes, digging around in bins to find helmets that fit, and signing a release indicating that we understood that we were risking our lives by participating in the ride and would not sue Bike the Big Apple if the inevitable harm befell us, we joined our guide for a cursory lesson in rules for safe riding, which we are pretty sure that most of the French people in the group did not understand.  Formalities attended to, our guide led us out onto the bustling streets of the Upper East Side, where we shared the road with crazy dodge ‘em taxi drivers, inhaled the exhaust of buses just inches from our noses, and had other unique new urban biking experiences.  

It was not really very far (it only seemed that way at the time) to the aerial tram to Roosevelt Island.  We loaded our bikes on the tram and soared high over the city and across the East River, touching down on blissfully nearly empty streets.  Home to the city’s rejects back in the 1800s—the diseased, the insane, convicts, and indigents—it was called Welfare Island until its recent incarnation as a trendy place to live, with affordable (and astronomical) new apartments, lovely parks, a big community garden, and tranquility unavailable at any price in the boroughs on either side of the river from it.  

Next we crossed into Queens, where we rode through a run-down district of factories and warehouses to reach a beautiful riverfront park built on the site of an old coal-loading facility.  We rode to the end of a long pier there to enjoy spectacular views of Manhattan, including the United Nations Building across the river, setting the stage for the international experiences we would have for the rest of our ride.

In Brooklyn, we were back on busy streets, riding through a melting pot of ethnic restaurants and shops to a hip neighborhood with full bike racks in front of every bar and lots of young fit people racing around on their road bikes and skate boards.  It was here that I was victim of what turned out to be the only accident of the trip. A speedy skate boarder rounded a corner, swerved to avoid a group of oblivious riders in front of me, and hit me squarely with his shopping bag while flailing his arms in a struggle to regain his balance (fortunately for me, the bag was full of clothing, not cans of soup).  The impact was hard enough to stop, but not topple, both of us.  We paused a moment to regroup, then were once again on our way, none the worse for our close encounter.   

We rode around a Polish neighborhood in Greenpoint, and stopped for lunch at Polonia, a tiny Polish Restaurant.  Our little group almost filled the dining room.  Service was cafeteria style, and portions were massive enough to fill a Polish farm hand.  A main course, two sides and a salad cost just $7.  We knew the food was authentic, because we didn’t recognize any of it, other than the sauerkraut and stuffed cabbage rolls.  

Then we were on our way to Williamsburg, home to a massive colony of Hassidic Jews.  Because it was Friday, the streets were full of families relaxing and shopping to prepare for the Sabbath.  It was a warm day, but all the men were in long black coats, the women in modest long-sleeved dresses with their heads covered.  Even children had long sleeved shirts and long pants or dresses. 

We stopped for pound cake at a busy Jewish bakery, then went across the street to a playground where women and men gathered separately to chat, while children played together.  We learned about the culture of this interesting group of Eastern European immigrants who, like the Amish, work hard to maintain their culture and traditions in a wider society that is antithetical to their lifestyle. The average Hassidic Jewish family here has nine children.  How they all fit in the average city apartment is a mystery we have yet to fathom.  All the apartments in their neighborhood have bars on the windows—not for security from outside crime, but for the safety of the children inside.  

We biked across the Williamsburg Bridge to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an area of lots of tenement buildings, and vibrant streets lined with little restaurants and shops reflecting the ethnic diversity of the people who live there now.  We noted some places we want to come back to explore, since we were only about half a mile from our apartment at this point. 

We rode along a beautiful East River bike trail for a short sweet way, but then were spit back out into the traffic of Manhattan at rush hour.  After a stop at the United Nations building, our guides decided we were ready for advanced riding.  They told us we could no longer ride single file at the edge of the road, but instead were going to ride in a tight pack that was roughly the size and shape of a car. Conceptually, this way we would hold our lane against all the rush hour traffic that we faced as we fought our way uptown.  In actuality, this was a terrifying prospect, because it added to the danger of being hit by a motorized vehicle the additional peril of being hit or forced into traffic by one of our unpredictable fellow bicyclists.  Somehow we survived this leg of the trip, but it was enough to drain our adrenaline stocks dry. 

We tipped our guide generously for bringing us back alive, then headed for the subway.  Once we sat still for a few minutes, we realized we had reached our full capacity for excitement and adventure for the day.  We used what remaining energy we had to pick up a few things for dinner at Fresh Market, then enjoyed a very quiet night at home.

How Can it Get Better Than This?

Our New York Marathon

Day 4

Thursday, June 2, 2011

How much greatness can we pack into a day?

Today begins in what has become our normal way, as we pick up the New York Times at the newsstand on the corner of our street.  We slide into extraordinary when we order our breakfast at the Mocha Café. Our lattes are exquisitely presented with hearts traced in their froth.  We loll away a leisurely hour at our table on the sidewalk--reading our paper, eating our pastries and sipping our lattes as the world of New York bustles by.

We take the subway uptown, and walk to St. Patrick's Cathedral, where we step into grandeur beyond words. The stained glass windows glow, dimly illuminating the stone tracery of the vaulted ceiling soaring high above us.  Votive candles flicker at alcoves dedicated to saints along the walls.  The vastness of the space swallows the people within, and it is very quiet here—truly a refuge from the world outside the cathedral's massive doors.  We linger, light a candle, and find it hard to pull ourselves away.

Just down the street, the Museum of Modern Art awaits.  There are so many wonderful things there it is hard to pick favorites. It is always wonderful to get up close to the Impressionist paintings and absorb all the colors in the brush strokes, especially Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. 

My favorite discovery is a contemporary artist from Mexico, Francis Alys, whose work is featured in a temporary exhibit now showing at MoMA.  He creates and documents art projects, and the one that tickled me most was Where Faith Moves Mountains, "a project of geological displacement."  The objective was for 500 volunteers with shovels to move a 500 meter wide sand dune in Lima, Peru.  The plan was to start early and shovel one hour to avoid the 90 degree scorching noonday sun.  In actuality, since this was Peru, practically no one showed up by 9:30, and when the volunteers finally showed up it took until three p.m. to get the work done.  The exhibit documents the whole process in photographs, video, Alys' journal entries and his personal commentary.  Putting the best possible spin on the situation, he says "During all that time, not a single cloud passed over our heads. Fatigue can lead to a collective hallucination, a taste of a kind of social sublime."  In summary, "The physical dislocation was infinitesimal, but not its metaphorical implications."  Ah, such is the case in so much of life!

Dick's favorite new discovery is the art of Umberto Boccioni. This is Dynamism of a Soccer Player, which he painted in 1913. 

Our other favorite experience is an elegant lunch on MoMA's fifth floor terrace, overlooking the museum's courtyard far below, with row houses and apartments across the street that remind us of a neighborhood in Paris.

Mid-afternoon we leave the museum and head to Times Square to get half price tickets at the TKTS booth.  We wait a little over an hour, and are rewarded with eighth row seats for our first choice show, Billy Elliott.  Then it's a quick subway ride home to feed Willis and warm up some left-overs for ourselves, before heading back to Broadway for the show.

Billy Elliott, the son of a striking coal miner, discovers he has a talent and a passion for ballet dancing, and secretly takes ballet lessons instead of going to his boxing class.  The dual plots of his father's coal strike and Billy's dancing progress unfold in a dark and gritty fashion, peppered with a bit of humor from the kids in the cast, and there are many.  We are awed by the singing and dancing talents of the actor who plays 11 year old Billy, as well as the many other kids.  Billy Elliott has  plenty of outstanding music and impressive dance numbers (many creatively using chairs as a dance prop—not sure why), but the conflation of the plot lines is just a bit too much for us sometimes (little ballerinas in white tutus and miners in their dirty work clothes weaving around the stage together—what's that about?). 

Our bottom line on the play:  It is top notch entertainment, but we both like Sister Act better.

Our bottom line on the day:  We are exhausted, but we wouldn't change a minute of it.

Observation: Savannah Tops New York in Tourism

We learned on our tour with Joyce Gold that New York welcomes 47 million tourists yearly. Wow, that sounds like a lot of tourists, compared to little Savannah, which shows its fine Southern hospitality to just 6.85 million tourists every year.  It is not surprising that Savannah hosts fewer tourists—it has a population of just 136, 000, compared to New York's whopping 8.2 million.  The key to comparing the relative impact of tourism is to look at tourists per capita.  And that's where Savannah wins hands down, with 50.4 tourists per capita, to New York's measly 5.8.

Give Our Regards to Broadway

Our New York Marathon

Day 3

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

We have been on Broadway every day since we got here, and we know we will be back again.

We begin with a picture from Times Square at night, when it sparkles with millions upon millions of LED lights promoting an endless array of products in constantly changing displays that don't merely compete for attention—they demand it. We joined the light-watching crowd in Times Square last night, after we saw "Sister Act," our first, and surely not our only, Broadway show of this trip. We absolutely loved everything about the show—wonderful music, an outstanding cast, and a good plot with an uplifting message. It will be hard to top this one.

Today's Broadway attraction was a two hour walking tour led by Joyce Gold, a New York University History Instructor. We knew she would bring her 25 years of teaching experience to our walk the minute she pulled a stack of index cards four inches thick out of her tote bag. What a wonderful romp up and down the streets of Broadway, punctuated by Joyce's analysis of the history of the area as viewed through the lyrics of popular show tunes and the subject matter of award-winning musicals. Who but an enthusiastic academic would point out the symbolic importance of opening a Children's Theatre in what used to be a sleazy adult entertainment district—the strongest possible message that Broadway was a family venue now (a message families can't miss these days, with a three story M&Ms store on Times Square across the street from the huge Hershey's store, we might add). We also picked up some surprising popular culture tidbits, like the fact that the Seminole Indians of Florida now own the entire Hard Rock Café chain, and my favorite show, "The Good Wife," is filmed in Brooklyn. We just eat this stuff up, but we recognize we are out of the mainstream, because there were only seven people on the tour, and we were the only tourists—the others were all native New Yorker life-long learners.

Along our tour route we walked through the Café Edison in the Edison Hotel, a pre-show dining institution for Jewish folk through the ages. It clearly hasn't had a face lift or a menu change (other than price increases) since the 1950s. We only recognized one kind of soup--matzo ball--and chopped liver was presented in every conceivable format from salad to sandwich to entree. The white-haired ladies on our tour recommended it highly, so we stopped in for lunch after the tour. With 25,000 restaurants in Manhattan, it is a mystery how a place like this thrives seemingly without even trying. The power of location plus inertia, perhaps?

Take a look at Times Square, the heart of Broadway, day and night. Isn't it grand?

After lunch we headed to the American Folk Art Museum, which is celebrating the Year of the Quilt with a series of quilt exhibits. We were disappointed in the exhibit on display now. Although it had some old quilts with fine workmanship, most of the quilts were unremarkable, and there was only one contemporary quilt that we would consider an art quilt. The curation of the show was meager, we didn't even leave with any memorable stories behind the quilts we saw. We were glad that we got in free, because our Telfair Museum membership shares reciprocal visitation privileges with the Folk Art Museum. This is a picture of our favorite quilt from the show.

Tomorrow, we will be back to Broadway. We are eager to see another show.

Surprising New York Lighthouses

Our New York Marathon

Day 2

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Today dawned sunny and hot—perfect for a three hour Circle Line Cruise circumnavigating Manhattan Island.

An avid lighthouse lover, I saw four of them along our route. Although our guide John was exceptional, he only told us the story of the city's most famous light, the Little Red Lighthouse that stands forlornly dwarfed at the foot of the George Washington Bridge. He failed to point out the lighthouse history of New York's most famous landmark, and he overlooked an intriguing lighthouse high atop a building in the Bronx. Thanks to the Internet, I have the rest of the story.

Let's start with Lady Liberty, whom we last passed aboard Starsong on a windy choppy overcast day almost exactly six years ago (June 2, 2005). The words from the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the statue's base, "send these, your homeless tempest-tossed to me," had special significance for us that day. But, I digress. Let's go to the next line of the poem—"I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

The Statue of Liberty's lamp has always held symbolic meaning as a beacon of hope and liberty. It was once, for a short time early in its life, a beacon with a practical purpose as well. The torch was lit to guide ships into New York's inner harbor from 1886 until 1902. Befitting its majesty, it was the first lighthouse in the country to use electricity, and the arc lamps in the 305 foot tall torch could be seen up to 24 miles away. It was a very expensive proposition, though, which is why the lighthouse was decommissioned by the Coast Guard as an aid to navigation in 1902.

Our next light was the Roosevelt Island Light, a beautiful fifty foot tall octagonal gothic spire designed by the famous architect James Renwick and built in 1872. Although it stands at the island's shore on the East River, it was commissioned by the city to light the island's insane asylum, rather than to guide wary sailors on their way. Inmates from the nearby penitentiary hauled the rocks and built the tower.

The most intriguing lighthouse was a standout in the Brooklyn skyline, sitting regally atop a big brick building in a cluster of brick factories and warehouses. A little research revealed that this little light on a pedestal shaped like a big book is the trademark of the H.W. Wilson Publishing Company, and it has been on the roof of the company's headquarters since 1929. H. W. Wilson is the publisher of numerous bibliographies and reference books—most famously The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. The lighthouse atop the book symbolizes the company's mission: "To give guidance to those seeking their way through the maze of books and periodicals, without which they would be lost."

The Little Red Lighthouse, more formally known as Jeffrey's Hook Light, was immortalized in the book The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Grey Bridge, written by Hildegard H. Swift and illustrated by Lynd Ward. Built in 1921, the light was no longer needed after the George Washington Bridge was constructed in the 1930s, and its much higher bright lights could be seen by river traffic from much further away.

Hildegard Swift's book, published in 1942, captured the tension of this time, telling the story of a very foggy night when the lights of the bridge high above the water could not be seen by boats below, and a big tugboat crashed against the rocky shore. The little red lighthouse was lit to save other boats from the same sorry fate (a plot line mixing the best of David and Goliath and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). Alas, in the real world, the light was decommissioned in 1947 and slated to be sold for scrap. Schoolchildren across the country were heartbroken, and their letters, numbering in the thousands, saved the light.

One more sight from the boat—because we can't resist collecting examples of the world's biggest, smallest and best. Here is a picture of the Colgate Clock, which at fifty feet in diameter is reputed to be the world's largest clock. The minute hand advances three feet every minute.