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.