The Big Apple
Based on a trip taken June 29th-July 3rd.
We had given up on our more-or-less annual trip to the West Coast and so decided to spend a few days in New York before visiting my family in Cleveland. New York used to be a place that we visited regularly, it seems, but now it had been since 2012. This was our first time visiting as a family, too. We arrived late and stayed in Midtown, at the Warwick Hotel, which is as convenient a location as I can imagine. The Beatles stayed here when they visited, so we were in good company.
Oya and I have an obsession with repeating things when we travel. The very first time we came to New York, we were there on a half-day layover, just a bit too early for the Met to open, and we climbed out of the taxi on 78th and Lexington in front of a market selling everything we wanted for a quick picnic in Central Park. Each time we have visited since then, we have made it a point of repeating this same picnic. This time we were meeting our friend Lucy (Julia’s pre-school teacher), who now lives in Connecticut. Our walk from our hotel was humid beyond anything we were ready for. Lucy showed up just as we were putting our breakfast together, and we walked over to the Alice and Wonderland statue at the 74th street entrance. Oya and Julia climbed up on the statue, recreating a photo I had taken of Oya 15 years earlier. I wanted to visit the Museum of Natural History, which I had been to one other time, because I thought Julia would enjoy it. The dinosaurs, the gemstones and the Native American canoes were all a treat, but the part that stuck with me most was the ocean exhibit, which includes a life-size replica of a blue whale dangling over the atrium. In a dark corner was my single favorite case in the museum: a sperm whale battling a giant squid in the depths of the ocean. When we got out of the museum, it was threatening rain, and I wanted to walk up to Café Lalo on W 83rd Street, where I had gone once years ago. When we arrived, it was closed and appeared that no one had been there in a long time: there was a broken mirror inside, and dust on the tables. We walked a couple of blocks, and then, when the rain really began, ducked into a Tiki bar, of all places. We had mai tais and Singapore slings while we waited for the rain, most of the time watching a bare-chested guy in blue jeans doing push-ups in the middle of the street while grooving to whatever was on his headphones, then occasionally wringing the water out of his T-shirt before getting back to work. It was perfect, really, as it gave us a long time to talk with Lucy. When the rain finally let up, she was off to the train, and we walked all the way back to our hotel on W 54th.
In the morning we had a big breakfast at a diner across the street. As much as I like diner breakfasts, I don’t know how anyone could this sort of thing more than once a year. Afterwards, we walked down to Grand Central Station, which I wanted to show to Julia, and somewhere around here I began to have thoughts about the city which I wasn’t able to consolidate until our final day, so more on that later. We stopped by J. Press across the street from the station, where I was planning to get a made-to-measure shirt and maybe a blazer, but the one shirt pattern I really liked wasn’t something they could produce quicky, and I would have left the U.S. by the time it was ready, so I decided to forget about it. We walked another eight blocks to the Empire State Building, which is one of the tourist sights that I had never visited. I was surprised how much there was to it, with an extensive museum inside before you ever come to the observation deck, including a great walk-through scene from King Kong. We looked out in every direction, into New Jersey on one side and out onto Long Island on the other. This was the only time we saw the Statue of Liberty during our stay, like a toy miniature, out in the distance. I had always thought New York didn’t have much landscape to speak of, but this was even more apparent from so high up. Oya had promised me a birthday lunch (even though it was almost a month before), and I had chosen Balthazar, down in SoHo, where I had gone with my dad many years before. As we headed downtown, past Union Square, I thought about how close I was to Grove Atlantic, just a few blocks away, where I had had such big dreams of being published earlier in the year after my trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Balthazar was the same as I remembered it, and I started the meal with a round of raw oysters, which I would otherwise have missed this summer, not going to Seattle. Whatever I ate there, it was great, and just being there, in such an old place, with the constant flow of customers in and out the door, was unbeatable. Before we left SoHo, I ducked into the Ralph Lauren Double RL shop on West Broadway. An amazing store, if you’ve never been inside, in one of the old cast-iron buildings, with Oriental rugs on the floor and leather sofas, and simply the best place on earth to buy a denim waistcoat for $500. My clothes shopping was a bust, but we stopped at our old favorite, Fishs Eddy, and picked up some some blue-striped restaurant-style plates.
The third day, we started off with a lighter breakfast of bagels and then headed up to the Central Park Carousel. Along with the Natural History Museum, this is another place with a Catcher in the Rye connection, and I had always wanted to have Julia ride the carousel there. After another walk in Central Park, we took the subway down to the East Village. After poking around and even finding our friend On-Ke’s old apartment by the Cooper Union, where we had stayed years ago, we found our way into McSorley’s Old Ale House, which is more like time-traveling than simply going to a bar. The place has been in operation for 170 years. Among the varoius things hanging from the ceiling is a pair of handcuffs that apparently belonged to Houdini. The floor is covered in sawdust, which the bartender explained, was a way to absorb all the loogies that missed the spitoon and was swept up at the end of each night. They only sell dark ale and light ale (their own), and for some reason serve you two small tankards instead of one big one. Julia worked on a drawing while she was there, and the bartender decided to display it behind the bar, labeling it “original Julia 2024.” From there we walked to another old institution, Katz’s Deli, which had a long line outside. It was worth the wait, though, and we had massive pastrami sandwiches and pickles and misleadingly named “egg creams” to drink. Our final stop was Chinatown, which Julia had been waiting for. I had told her about Canal Street, where I said she could get any trinket she could imagine for a couple of dollars, and she was ready! She had some money leftover from her lemonade stand the previous summer and the start of the weekly allowance I gave her during our trip. She scoured every inch of the gift shops, picking up pens with Hello Kitty characters, Statue of Liberty key chains, I❤️NY miniature mugs and on and on. We rounded out the day with dinner at Joe’s Shanghai, which had moved to the Bowery since the last time we were there, and is the first place I ever tried xiao long bao — the Shanghai soup dumpling — which I had a whole dish of.
At the end of the three days, I was thinking about two things. The first was the way the city seems almost archetypal. Its main park is the central park. The museum of natural history is the American museum of natural history It’s main train station is the central station. And this park and this museum and this train station inform our ideas of every other park and museum and train station in America. They are archetypal but also, maybe because of their names, almost generic. The second was the smallness of New York. Yes, the smallness. I can’t think of any other city in the United States where I always know exactly where I am and where everything else in the city is in relation to me. Maybe it’s because the geography is so simple and most of Manhattan is only about fourteen streets wide or because the addresses are always just two or three digits. Or because one neighborhood bleeds into the next, without any space in between them, so that you always feel like you are somewhere and never in a space in-between. There is a continuousness to it that I don’t feel in any other American city. (And, of course, I’m excluding Brooklyn and Queens and all the rest of it, which is really a much bigger world.) I left the city happy, the way I am happy when I visit a friend I haven’t seen in a long time.