| As
always, these are really notes to myself to remember a trip
and also to be a reference with addresses and phone numbers
and URLs in case I want to go back somewhere. But maybe the
notes might also interest you. [AOL and Yahoo people are
probably going to have a hard time seeing the pictures and
hearing the sounds in this letter; they should read the letter
online at http://www.hudsoncity.net/temporary/nyjan82002.htm |
Last week I took the train up to New York. I
parked at Union Station and used the 5:30AM train. The train was
fairly empty, fairly squeaky and rattly, with fairly comfortable
temperatures and arrived less than 10 minutes behind schedule. I got
off at Newark and took the Tubes to Hoboken where my sister and sister
-in-law were coming in from Kearny. Their train was right on time and
at 9:20 we got on the ferry [all seats filled and some standees] which
now docks at the Battery instead of the World Trade Center marina
since the terrorist attacks.
It
was a short, but nippy, walk to the Museum of the American Indian
which is in the refurbished Customs House at Bowling Green; in the
three to four block walk, at the tail end of the rush hour, on a work
day, going to the heart of the financial district, the streets were
close to empty. We reached the museum at 9:54 and went in — but they
threw us out and we had to wait outside for "security
reasons" . At 10 they let us in. During our time in the museum
there may have been 8 - 10 other people there.
I actually wasn’t too interested in the museum
itself, I just wanted to see how the Customs House had been restored.
It was done wonderfully and the main hall is still this immense
elliptical room with a high dome and transportation murals on the side
walls . In the center is still a gigantic elliptical
"counter"; way back when in high school, I was in the
building several times when it was still used as a customs house
upstairs and a post office downstairs and I’m pretty sure I remember
the counter in use, but I’ve now forgotten what they did there.
Today it is an empty space and the exhibit rooms of the museum run off
from it.
My
sister-in-law noticed that the museum was a branch of the
Smithsonian [the main Indian museum is under construction on the Mall
here]. It was an interesting museum but I think they enjoyed it more
than I did. I expected an historical or ethnographic museum but this
was arts and crafts --- most of it contemporary Indian crafts inspired
by the past. After a while there were too many jewelry items and
pretty things and gew gaws to look at for my taste.
When we came out of the building, right into
Bowling Green, there was a trailer with the downtown branch of the
Broadway TKTS booth that used to be downstairs in the World Trade
Center. After buying all day transit passes, we took the Lexington
Avenue IRT up to 59th street [not an empty train but one with seats,
which is unusual at that time of day] and then a bus along 59th and
York to the "Abigail Adams Smith House - Mt Vernon Hotel" on
61st Street.
It’s too long to explain the strange name and
the fact that the building has almost nothing to do with Abigail Adams
Smith. It’s a 19th Century "day hotel"; in the summer time
people would take a boat up the East River to go there for the
day to avoid the heat of the city [i.e. below Chambers Street].
We had an interesting and very long - maybe 1 and a quarter hour tour
and I found out later that my sister and sister-in-law thought the
tour was over-long. I enjoyed it. After spending so much time in the
19th Century it was a real shock when the guide sent us into the
garden at the end of the tour --- and the garden ran out about 25 feet
into a building wall that was 30 or 40 stories tall.
We
took the 2nd Avenue bus back down to East 6th Street - delayed a lot
by the driver having to get off several times to let people in
wheel chairs on and off. The bus was jam packed. We ate at Teresa’s
Polish Restaurant at 103 1st Avenue: beef barley soup, mixed pierogi
[meat, potato, sauerkraut-mushroom, spinach, cheese and one more type
which I now forget], potato pancakes which were light and airy and
full of flavor. One set of pierogi was boiled, the other fried to a
crisp but light golden color. [At home mine always turn out brown
where they’re not black.] Even the applesauce and sour cream
servings were impressive because they were so unusually large for
garnishes. I've always found the quality and value of eating in
restaurants far higher in NY than in DC.
I had intended that after lunch we would go to
some Polish delicatessens so they could bring food home with them; but
partly we were so stuffed with food it was difficult to think of
getting more food and partly the time was running out; it was late
afternoon, we were in the [far] East Village and my sister in law had
to get back to my sister’s house in Kearny [a 9 minute ride from
Hoboken] in time for my niece to pick her up on the way home from
work. So we decided to let the delicatessens and the museum at
the Fashion Institute of Technology go for another day.
Unfortunately the crosstown
Greenwich Village bus had a long wait [the only transportation problem
of the day] and by 30 - 35 seconds they missed the Hoboken tube train
that would have gotten them to the commuter train I went with
them on the Tubes as far as Pavonia and they stayed on to Newark
and then took a bus to Kearny [probably 35 - 40 minutes instead of the
9 minutes by commuter train].
I took the PATH back to Manhattan to check into
a hotel a friend of mine had recommended, the Holiday Inn Chinatown
[which had changed its name to Holiday Inn Downtown, which is
misleading]. It’s on Lafayette Street [which I suspect most of you
aren’t familiar with; it’s parallel to and a few blocks off of
Broadway] just above Canal Street. The room was fine but small [and I
had some special upgrade] and I think in the future I’d do better
staying in a Jersey City hotel at the Pavonia Tube station. After
getting washed I set out for midtown.
The East Side IRT Local and the BMT Broadway
Express both have stops within a block of the hotel. I took the BMT to
47th Street and went to the TKTS ½ price booth and got a ticket for a
show later that evening. I had time to kill, wasn’t hungry after the
big lunch, and was getting sore leg muscles from all the walking we
had done during the day, so I decided to take the train down to a Tube
station and take some pictures for my website. Walking through Times
Square [this was around 6PM] was crowded but not unpleasantly so but
when I got to the Times Square subway station I hit the rush hour
crowds. The complex has been recently refurbished [I think connected
to Disney] and is brighter and cleaner but it is still a rabbit warren
of tunnels and escalators and ramps and multi levels. At one instant
the view was like a scene from Lang's Metropolis: I was at the
top of a ramp and looking forward I could see illuminated ramps and
walkways running at different angles crossing each other and filled
with people.
After getting a few pictures of the 33rd Street
station, and still with some time until the play, I took the BMT up to
Bloomingdale's. I’ve always wanted to eat in their Train Bleu
Restaurant but I still was full; so instead I had an iced tea at one
of their cafes. Two things always strike me about Bloomingdale's: [1]
how did they transform it from a normal department store selling pots
and pans and get people to believe it was a trendy worldwide
attraction; and [2] how would I get out of this maze in the event of a
fire.
I
went to see the British farce "Noises Off" at the Brooks
Atkinson. The blurb put it: "This backstage comedy
tells the story of a theatre company, touring in a dreadful bedroom
farce, and what happens as things go from bad to worse. "
Walking over I passed by other theaters and noted that several of them
were using television and celebrity actors in light plays; I thought
of the Boulevardentheater on the Kurfürstendamm that the people
running my Berlin seminars always turn their noses up at [at which
they turn their noses up? at which they up turn their noses?] --- and
instead had us go to important, meaningful, dreary productions of
Lessing or unknown contemporary plays dealing with despair and death
and depression. [On my own, I go to the Boulevardentheater.]
On the other hand, when I sat down in the
theater I realized: these actors are also mostly television and
celebrity actors: Faith Prince [who is a very good comedienne and
singer] but whom most people know from Spin City; Patti Lupone [who I
think is a stylized mannered parody but whom every one else adores];
the actor who plays the food critic on the Frasier series; Peter
Gallagher whom I know as a musical performer and serious actor but I
could hear from the women talking around me that he must have had some
television drama or soap opera roles.
The
theater is small and comfortable; according to the playbill it has
just over a thousand seats, and although I was in the balcony
[called, of course, the front mezzanine], everything was
fine: sight lines and good acoustics - as far as I could tell,
un-amplified. A surprise: they were hawking, not selling but hawking,
sodas in the lobby and making announcements that you could bring the
drinks to your seats. I had to fight against all my Opera House
training to not throw myself in the doorway to keep their sodas out.
It’s
a farce showing the regional English theater troupe rehearsing a farce
[Act 1]; playing the farce on the road [Act 2] and playing the farce
the last night of the run [Act 3]. Between Act 1 and Act 2 sexual
liaisons pop up that cause friction among the actors; between Act 2
and Act 3 more is revealed that causes war among them. Act 1 is played
in front of the [make believe] audience; Act 2 - which is the same act
of the play-within-the-play - is performed from the backstage and Act
3 [again the same act of the play-within-the-play] is performed in
both directions. I didn’t like Lupone's performance which was
screechy and I thought her accent was hard to understand, but then I
went with a chip on my shoulder against her. Faith Prince did well but
she had a fairly boring role; the blonde bomb shell sex object had a
limited role but did it very well. The Frasier actor was too much like
the Frasier actor.
About 1/4 of the way through the show I
realized: I’ve seen this before. It came to me . I saw the
play in London when it first opened in the mid 1980s; i also
remembered why I hadn’t remembered the show at first. I went to the
play the evening of the day I arrived on a transatlantic night flight
and must have been in a daze the rest of the day. This is more
evidence that one must write down what one sees / does on a trip, if
you’re to remember it. The house seemed to be about 90+%
filled and the audience was somewhat younger and more varied
than what you usually see in a Washington theater.
The play was over around 10:30 and I was getting
hungry. I figured I’d wait until I got back to the hotel and eat in
the neighborhood. But rain started and the hotel is in an odd
location. It is at the meeting point of the edges of
Chinatown, Little Italy and SoHo. But since it’s at the edge of each
you have to walk 4 or 5 blocks [now through the rain] to get to the
lively part of each of the 3; so I bought something in a delicatessen
and went to the hotel.
Wednesday morning it was still rainy but it
slackened off as the day went on, although it got warmer and warmer
and more and more humid. After breakfast - the hotel had also upgraded
me to a free one - I took the train uptown with my To-Do list in my
hand. I intended to do sights in the morning and photograph the PATH
Tubes in the afternoon. On the train uptown a little boy [maybe 6 or
7??] was looking out the window while the train was stopped at a
station and talking out loud telling his mother [who wasn’t paying
attention ] what he was seeing and experiencing. Among the things was
the one rat that had made it across the tracks before the express
train went through on the middle track and the other rat that hadn’t.
He was very excited.
I went to the midtown Hagstrom Map & Travel
Center but then realized, I didn’t want to follow my list I wanted
to do what I always like the most in Manhattan: walking aimlessly but
paying attention. And that’s what I did pretty much. So a few
snapshots of the day [I was also going from Tube station to Tube
station to photograph for the website]
Collected
book titles from the Grand Central branch of the NY Subway museum to
order when I got home; did the same at Rizzoli’s book store on 5th;
went to a wonderful bakery Spring Street Bakery [30 Spring Street at
Mott] where I got the cupcakes since it wasn’t practical to carry
back on the train the layer cakes they’re famous for. It’s mostly
a bakery but also a cafe. Delicious tiramisu [they gave me a sample]
there were two young waitresses, one Russian, one Mediterranean.
After photographing the entrance to the
Christopher Street station and noticing for the first time in my life
that it’s a separate building. I walked up to Li-Lac Chocolates to
get some candy to bring back.
A camera crew from Channel 9 came in and wanted
to interview me on why I was there. They were so obvious with their
leading questions on chocoholism that after I said the truth [ I’ve
been going there since I was teenager, it’s good quality, I go there
out of tradition and if they sold non-chocolates I’d still go
there], I’m sure I got scratched form the broadcast. The store
manager / owner gave me a flyer on a food
walking tour that includes Li-Lac and about 30 other
locations. When I was talking to Henry I said the chocolates cost $5
or $6 @ pound; when I looked at my receipt, however, it was $22
@ pound ..... and worth it.
I criss-crossed the Village from East to West
and then Little Italy up and down, stopping in stores, especially book
stores.
The weather was getting warmer and more humid ;
I picked up a lot of newspapers, several cans of Dr Brown's Cream soda
and went to Penn Station for the train back to DC. The train was
crowded ["We only have 6 cars tonight" ], filled with
standees, hot until Newark, hotter until Philadelphia, bearable by
Wilmington. 15 minutes late arriving in DC.
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