New York Day 6

Sunday was our last day in New York! We spent the day with my friend Tara and her husband and kids. Tara and I lived together in college and hadn’t seen each other since she visited Seattle in 2017. We met at Hudson yards and walked down the High Line, an elevated path along an old railway track surrounded by plants. The High Line didn’t exist when I lived here. I saw it when I visited a decade ago, but the whole northern half is new since then. Tara and Sean, who live in New Jersey and hadn’t been to New York since before Covid, kept commenting on how everything around it used to be just abandoned warehouses and was now filled with hip upscale condos, restaurants, and parks. We went to the Chelsea Market, saw an Afrofuturist art exhibit at a place called Artechouse, and went to a new park called Little Island, which is on top of a bunch of concrete mushrooms over the water. It was warm and sunny, and everywhere we went was crowded. Then we took the subway to Chinatown and had dinner at Uncle Lou, and had gelato in Little Italy, where the kids wanted their picture taken with the grinch.

After saying goodbye to our friends, we watched the sunset from the rooftop balcony at our hotel, then packed and went to bed early so we could catch a Lyft at 7:25am for an early flight home from JFK.

New York Day 5

This morning I got Kossar's Bagels and brought them back to the hotel for breakfast. They were pretty good.

Today we went back to Times Square and went to the Hershey's store and Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. Neither of these were things I would have chosen to do, but the kids were excited about them, so it was fun.

Lucy wanted to have a croissant while we were here, so I asked Amalya for recommendations and she told us to go to Dominique Ansel Bakery in Soho, so we headed there next. There was a line halfway down the block, but the croissants were very good.

Then we walked through Soho, went shopping in the Canal Street Market, and eventually made our way to Chinatown for dinner. We were going to go to a place my friend recommended called Uncle Lou, but there was an hour wait, so instead we went to a vegetarian kosher Chinese restaurant two doors down, where the green beans were everyone's favorite:

Then we headed back up north to see one more play, the Play that Goes Wrong:

Our hotel has a rooftop deck, and tonight we finally made it up there to check out the spectacular view:

New York Day 4

The kids have been taking 2 hours to get out of bed and get ready in the morning, and I've been getting resentful of them, so today I decided to just go get coffee and breakfast without them and bring it back, which made me much happier.

Today we went on the Best of New York Circle Line cruise. It was a rainy windy day, not the best for a cruise, but we still had fun. The cruise is supposed to go all the way around Manhattan, but they couldn't make it to the northern part because of the high tides, so they just went as far as they could.

After the cruise, we had more H&H Bagels in the train station, then went to Sacco Pizza, also recommended by Masha and amazing. Then we took the train back up to Barnard and got garlic twists from Famous Famiglia. These were NOT recommended by Masha, but I had fond memories of them. She was right, however, and they were not as good as I remembered.

We went to Shabbat services at Romemu on 105th Street, and then took the subway home for an early night.

 

New York Day 3

We started today by taking the subway to the upper West Side and getting bagels at H&H Bagels, the first bagel place we've been to that I actually remember, and that some people think has the best bagels in New York. It's in a different place than I remember, and like almost everything else here, has transformed from a dirty hole in the wall where everyone was rude in a refreshing and familiar way, to a fancy upscale place where people are polite, there is a clean bathroom you can use, and the guy behind the counter offered to let my daughter come behind the counter and put cream cheese on her own bagel (she was not interested). But the bagels were delicious, the first I've had that tasted the way I remember them. Even the kids said they were the best they've had.

Then we took the subway up to Barnard, where I went to college. I showed the kids where I lived on 110th Street, the courtyard of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (see picture below), where a wild peacock used to live when I was in college. I'm sure that peacock is long dead, and there do not appear to be any peacocks there anymore. On my way there, I saw the Hungarian Pastry Shop, which I had completely forgotten existed, but where I spent a lot of time in college. When I saw it all the memories came rushing back and I gasped so loud Lucy thought someone had gotten hurt. We went in, and it was exactly the way I remember it, with all the exact same pastries, except they said they had stopped making my favorite, the berliner. I got a chocolate raspberry hazelnut cake instead, which brought me even more joy than the H&H bagel, about on par with the Ollie's dumplings. I briefly showed the kids Tom's diner, and more places I used to live, before heading up to campus.

I had arranged to visit the Barnard physics department where I went to school, so we headed there next. Apparently now you need to scan your student ID card to enter every building on campus, and I obviously don't have one, so we just went in after a student scanned her ID. Lucy was horrified by this, because I was defying their security system, and she was sure I needed to sign in at the front office like at her high school. It was a very small department with only a few faculty and a few majors, so everyone knew everyone, and I spent a lot of time there. My advisor Tim, who I had originally contacted, was on sabbatical and out of town, and had put me in touch with Reshmi, another professor who had started teaching my last semester there (27 years ago). I couldn't tell from their emails if anyone there was actually excited to have a random alum visit on a Thursday afternoon, but when I arrived, it was clear that they were. Tim had a big framed picture filled with signatures of Barnard physics alums, filled with equations that he had commissioned an artist to draw, and he had taken it down and left it for me to sign, with a lot of very detailed handwritten instructions about exactly how to sign it. The admin there was very welcoming and knew all about me, and both Reshmi and Laura, the astronomy professor, remembered me and seemed genuinely excited to have me visit.

Then we went for an official tour of Barnard for prospective students. I signed up for it, not necessarily because I thought either of my kids should go to Barnard, but because I wanted them to see where I went to college, and I thought it would be good for them to go to a college tour somewhere to get a sense of what college can be like. Lucy loved the tour, and thought Barnard sounded great. The tour guide, a Barnard senior, really emphasized that they are a college of nerds, and this made her feel like she would fit in. She also said there was a room where they drank hot chocolate and stress-crocheted, and this sounded like heaven to Lucy. Sonya was bored and her feet hurt.

After that we met up with my friend Masha, who was a physics major with me at Barnard, and who I haven't seen for over a couple decades. We walked around upper Manhattan and caught up, and it was wonderful to see her. The kids and I were hungry, so I suggested getting pizza. Masha didn't approve of our pizza (or bagel) choices, and suggested better ones, so we went with her to Absolute Bagels, which she said were the best in New York, Mama's Pizza, and Sal & Carmine's Pizza. The Absolute bagel was good but too hard. Mama's Pizza was wonderful but not traditional New York pizza, and Sal & Carmine's was exactly the New York pizza I had been longing for.

After Masha left, we walked up Riverside Park back up to Barnard and stopped at the Hungarian Pastry Shop again to get more pastries for breakfast tomorrow. All week there has been so much food I want to eat, but there is only so much room in my stomach, so I am constantly stuffed and have to pass up so much good food. Food is really the main reason I am here.

Then we took the subway downtown and wandered around Greenwich Village, Soho, Little Italy, and Chinatown, until we finally made it back to our hotel. Here we are visiting Stonewall.

One more thing I forgot to mention that is very different about New York from the way I remember it is that now there are bicycles everywhere. When I first saw all the bikes you could rent, I was surprised, because Manhattan streets are so chaotic that the idea of riding a bicycle anywhere in Manhattan was absolutely terrifying. But there are now really nice bike lanes everywhere, and it actually seems like it would be nicer to bike here than in downtown Seattle. Building all these bike lanes must have been a huge infrastructure project, and it is super impressive that they managed to do it.

And Lucy finally saw a rat in the subway tonight. I had told her there were rats in the subway, and she was excited to see one because that sounded cute. The one tonight may have been the largest rat I’ve ever seen in a subway, and she thought it was very cute. 

New York Day 2

Today we managed to get out of the house slightly before noon, and tried another bagel shop called Zucker's in the financial district. The bagels were very good, much better than yesterday, but still not the peak of what I remember great New York bagels to be. We will have to continue our search.

We saw the New York Stock Exchange from the outside; apparently you can't visit the inside because after 9/11 they decided it was too dangerous to let random people in.

Then we went to Trinity Church where Alexander and Eliza Hamilton are buried.

Then we went to the 9/11 memorial where the twin towers used to be. The twin towers still existed when I lived in New York, and I remember them as such an iconic part of the city skyline that it still feels strange to see the skyline without them. I was surprised by how powerful the memorial felt to me. The spots where the towers were are now two square pools, in which you look down on a square of water with a deeper square in the middle, where water is constantly falling down into a bottomless void. All around the edges are the names of the people who died. The water being sucked down into a void felt like a powerful representation of the loss of that day, and I was surprised how moving I found it. Off to the side, towering over the pools but not in the same place, is the new One World Tower, which was built to replace the Twin Towers.

Then we headed uptown, where we stopped at Ray's Pizza, a place I actually remembered. The pizza was closer to what I remember as really good New York Pizza. The garlic knots were better than yesterday, but not oily enough to match my memory of New York perfection.

We met our friend Amalya at Central Park in the afternoon, and spent the rest of the day walking around with her and catching up. We had a lot of catching up to do, and had a wonderful time together.

At the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, Amalya noticed a guy there with his kids, and said she was pretty sure he was a famous actor. She looked him up, and determined that he was Kieran Culkin. Lucy looked him up too, and the name on the back of his kid's sweatshirt was the same as the name that the internet said was his kid's name, which convinced us that we were right. (His kids are not in the picture below... we are not creepy stalkers.)

Since we were in the neighborhood, we decided to check out Trump Tower. In front of it there was a guy in a Trump mask dancing around in the street outside directing traffic. I don't know who he was or why he was there, but he was very entertaining and the two cops out front didn't seem to mind that he was dancing in the middle of the street.

We went inside the Trump Tower out of curiosity, and everything was garish and gold and every single store was named after Trump, including a gift shop full of tacky Trump merchandise and a whiskey bar called 45. It was all so tacky that the kids couldn't believe the whole thing wasn't a parody. Obviously we did not buy anything.

Then we walked down fifth avenue past all the expensive designer stores and tried to explain the concept of designer stores to the kids.

Then we went to Grand Central Station.

There is a Chinese restaurant called Ollie's right next to my college, and I remember it being the most divine thing ever. Chinese food in Seattle is pretty terrible, and the vegetables are always overcooked and bland. I didn't even know that Chinese food could taste good until I lived in New York. In New York, every Chinese restaurant was the most amazing food I'd ever eaten, with perfectly cooked vegetables and perfect flavor. But Ollie's always held a special place in my heart, and I ate their steamed vegetable dumplings almost every day. There are too many places near my college where I want to eat to go in the one day we'll be there, and there's another Ollie's near Times Square, so we decided to go there for dinner tonight. The pizza and bagels so far haven't lived up to my expectations, but Ollie's did. Amalya caught a picture of me enjoying an Ollie's dumpling for the first time in many years. I think they were even better than I remember.

At Ollie's Amalya overhead the people at the table next to us and realized they were Broadway producers, and was trying to work up the nerve to talk to them, when they overheard Lucy talking about D&D and told us about a new show about D&D, opening up the opportunity for conversation, and Amalya got their contact info. I never saw a single famous person when I lived in New York, but today was a big day for that.

Then we went to see another Broadway musical called “& Juliet” featuring a lot of pop songs about what would have happened if Juliet decided not to kill herself. That was also super fun. Here we are after.

The kids have been asking me what's different and what's the same about New York since I lived here. Many things feel exactly the same, but a few things feel different. There are obvious things like the Twin Towers being gone, along with a lot of restaurants and other things I remember. There are little things like how you used to have to use physical tokens to pay for the subway and now you can use your phone. But the most surprising thing to me is that it seems like there are fewer homeless people than I remember, it is less dirty, and everything feels fancier. There are fewer holes in the wall and more upscale fancy restaurants. I remember the bathrooms in Grand Central being super sketchy and you never knew if you would find someone shooting up drugs in there, and now they don't seem like that at all. This is surprising to me because there are a lot more homeless people in Seattle than there used to be, and I know covid hit New York's economy hard, so it seems like it should be worse here. Unfortunately I suspect that this happened when Giuliani was mayor and "cleaned up" New York with a lot of laws basically making homelessness illegal, and that poor people have just been pushed out of New York to somewhere else. Another possibility is that there are not actually fewer homeless people here than there used to be, but it seems that way to me because homelessness has gotten so bad in Seattle that what used to seem like a big homelessness problem to me doesn't anymore.

So far we have walked many miles each day, which we will continue to do, and the kids are having a blast. They are amazed by how many things they have heard of are all here. It really does feel like the center of the world.