How to Have Fun in New York City

First, go without your kids.

Don't be misled.  I love traveling with my kids.  I love showing them the world, and having them love it.  I particularly love watching them learn to eat adventurously!  And I am extremely grateful that I have the means to do this.  Most of the stuff we did in New York City, we would have done with our kids.  And they would have liked most of it.  But man is it easy when you only have yourself to get around - no cajoling, no whining, no "there is nothing here for me to eat."  And if your feet hurt, you can just stop and take a rest, and not worry about setting a tone of aching feet that makes everyone else collapse from exhaustion.

Second, go July 4th weekend.  You can get in everywhere (well, assuming you avoid the fireworks) and get reservations wherever you like.  You can even stay for the second set at the Village Vanguard if you want, without buying another ticket.

Third, do the stuff.  It is New York City!  The Big Apple!  The Heart of it all!  The City that Never Sleeps!  (I wouldn't know; I did, fantastically, on the best bed ever at the Park Central Hotel.)  Here is a list of suggestions, sort of in order of what we did.

Arrive via Grand Central Station.  Is there any more classically New York approach to this city than the splendid central hall here?  Maybe arriving by boat past the Statue of Liberty.  But the train is probably cheaper.

Walk through Central Park.  This is free, of course, and even if every other person in New York City is walking through this park, because it is a holiday and sunny, who cares as the Gershwins say (more on them in a minute) because it is beautiful and you are here!  You can take a horse and buggy or rent a bicycle but of course walking makes you feel virtuous.  There is what is probably a standard assortment of entertainers sketching and blowing bubbles and performing feats of strength.  And there is an abominably long line of people waiting to row little boats around the Lake.  It's not that much fun, people.

Visit the Neue Gallerie.  This small but lovely collection of mostly 20th c. German and Austrian art is famous as the home of the Woman in Gold.  Also known as Adele Bloch-Bauer, and painted by Gustav Klimt in 1907, the WIG recently starred in the film of the same name.  Ronald Lauder has collected some fine and decorative arts from the same period, and set it all in this gorgeous Upper East Side mansion.  There was a special show of material about Klimt and his circle and his patrons, which was marvelous.  There was also a show that tried to compare early 20th c. German and Russian modernists, which was all bright colors and angles, and way too much broadly set - look how they compare!  look how they contrast! - to make much of an impact.  But the WIG is worth the price of admission.

Walk and walk.  But you know this.  There really isn't anyone around, it is fantastic for wandering and looking up.  This is very important to do in New York City.  You might trip, of course, or step in something yucky, but you will also be rewarded with views of remarkable hidden architectural treasures.

Eat at Betony.  Be sure to order a Zucca Brasi which involves bourbon, Amaro Zucca (which is like a rhubarb Campari ohmygod), and strawberry shrubb.  And a giant ice cube.  It is a tasting restaurant so while you order four or ten courses, you get all kinds of bites and flavors which involved things like crisp skate-wing spoons with avocado and some kind of pepper and foie gras bon bons.  It is also the kind of restaurant where the menu will say "Roast Chicken.  Chantarelles.  Cherries."  and you are supposed to know that you want to order it based on that.  Here are the ingredients we ordered:  pig's head terrine, fluke, foie gras, shellfish ragout, stinging nettles, that chicken business, steelhead roe, peas, more skate wing, pandan, milk, pistachio, rhubarb, creme fraiche, marjoram.  And some wine.   It all sounds terribly pretentious but in fact is absolutely lovely.

Eat at Russ and Daughters Cafe.  'S Paradise.  (More on that Gershwin thing in a minute.)  If it is July 4th, there won't be a line and you can settle right in to your appetizing breakfast of a Super Heebster (baked salmon and whitefish salad on a bagel with horseradish cream cheese and wasabi tobiko piled on top) and some herring and some bites of Bill's sable.  Repeat as often as possible.

Walk some, and you might find a funny park filled with Chinese people tending to their caged birds.

Go to the Museum of Modern Art.  Defying the New-York-is-so-empty! rule of the weekend, it turns out that this is where the people are.  If you buy your tix ahead of time you can avoid lines and then just join the crowds in the galleries.  Which are admittedly stunning, a greatest hits of late 19th-early and on 20th c. masterpieces.  But we are here to see Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series, a vast collection of small panels depicting scenes from the Great Migration of African-Americans south to north in the early 20th c.  The art is folk-y in execution but brilliant in capturing the spectrum of experience and emotion for black people during this movement.  The works have been at MoMa since he finished them in the mid-1940s, a pretty major achievement for a black artist.

We also saw a Yoko Ono show and it is cool to say you did but that's about enough for me.  Although the people in the bags were kind of mesmerizing.

Go to a show!  But not just any show.  Go to a brilliant, dance-y, Broadway musical that is so flawlessly performed it left me in tears just for having been able to see it.  Among the many great things about An American in Paris is that while it hews to the main story line - Jerry loves Lise, Lise feels beholden to Henri, Adam writes songs and everyone dances - the show doesn't try to recreate the iconic moments of the film.  It deepens the story, darkens it a bit by making it immediate post-war, and offers up its own very lovely interpretations of such Gershwin classics as "I Got Rhythm" and "'S Marvelous" and "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise."  It's a bit of a songbook show, adding in some other lovely tunes like "But Not For Me."  And the dancing, oh the dancing.  The leads are played by ballet dancers who just happen to be able to sing and act, too.  The big ballet is completely re-imagined, and brilliant.

Go to a jazz club, preferably one dripping with atmosphere like the Village Vanguard.  The Fred Hersch Trio was pretty much the antithesis of Fourth of July fireworks - quiet, introspective, a lot of Monk - and the dark, half-empty subterranean room, lined with photos of jazz legends who've played there just added to the sense that everyone else was missing out on this very private and intimate treat.

If you can't make it to R&D, or even if you can, you can also go the opposite direction to Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side.  It is the same kind of place, and here you can get really good OJ and scrambled eggs with nova and sturgeon and onions.  To my way of thinking, R&D has the appetizing edge, but I would not kick BG out of bed.


Walk the High Line, preferably in a visit with family.  This narrow strip of nicely-landscaped parkland travels from Chelsea to the Meatpacking District, and is a quite pleasant stroll probably any time of year but particularly in the summer when the plants are in full bloom.  There is art and treats for sale and if you are really lucky your brother will have planned to take you to the Fatty Crab afterwards, where you can have pork belly with pickled watermelon, and Thai iced tea.

Visit the 9/11 Memorial.  You have to buy tickets ahead of time for the museum, and there was a huge line anyway.  It is a bit jarring to see how many people treat this as basically a tourist attraction, and I felt uncomfortable with the whole idea of the museum.  But the memorial is striking and if you can tune out the people, worth visiting.  There is a tree there called the Survivor Tree, which was found as a stump as the rubble was cleared.  The stump was nursed back to health, and now is a lovely tree.  That is something.

Keep walking!

Battery Park is a fun place to wander around.  There are lots of sculptures, and views of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.  (This is where you go to take a boat trip out to the Lady.)  Someday there will be the most fabulous carousel ever.  But not this summer.  Then you can walk up Broadway and Wall Street, and see the Trinity Church, under which, as everyone knows, lies the biggest treasure ever.  I forgot to mention that if you get down to the Wall Street area you can visit the African Burial Ground National Monument.  It was closed when we went - what up with that, on a Sunday? - but you should see it.  When excavating for a new Federal building, workers found themselves digging up a massive 17th and 18th c. burial site for African-Americans slave and free.  There is the obligatory monument movingly documenting the Middle Passage and African homelands.  But I found the six well-tended grassy mounds in which the bodies were re-interred more moving, tucked as they were into the lee of the anonymous building.

Keep walking because you might get on the subway going the wrong way, as we did, more than once.

And if your feet are killing you just remember that there is that lovely enormous bed back in your freezing cold hotel room which will cool you right down.

Eat at Momofuku Ma Peche and follow your brother's advice and get two orders of pork buns.  They are that good.  Save some room for cereal milk ice cream because that is fun, but Bill feels that crack pie may be a tad overrated.  Caution:  if you order the 1/2 chicken fried you won't have room.  Forewarned is forearmed.

Gaze down 7th Ave at the never-ending glow that is Times Square.  That is also where all the people are, by the way.

Finally, return home with an emptier wallet but a lovely glow.

We Took to the Woods

Fans of the Maine backwoods, down-east humor, and New England-ania more generally will want to read Louise Dickinson Rich's We Took to the Woods (Down East Books, 2007, or if you are really lucky, Grosset & Dunlap 1942, like Bill gave me for my birthday).  Rich has a marvelous eye for the funny detail and a dry sense of humor that combine to pretty brilliantly describe her experience in a very remote region of Maine.  No hothouse flower she, Rich describes her life with a certain amount of relish, organizing her chapters as responses to an omniscient third-party interrogator who poses questions like:

Isn't housekeeping difficult?
Don't you ever get bored?
Aren't the children a problem?

And the like.  (Many of these chapters appeared as stand-alone articles in publications like the Atlantic.)  You could say there is a certain defensiveness about it all, and there is definitely a sameness in that pretty much all of the anecdotes are light and the woods are omnipresent.  But there is a wry-ness to her humor and I do like a writer who uses the word swell occasionally.

Richardson meets her future husband, Ralph, on a canoeing trip in the area in 1933 and moves up to Maine pretty quickly to live with him year round.  (Tragically, Ralph dies in 1945 and that is the end of that.)  They support themselves by writing, and by providing a transport and portage service between Pond-In-The-River dam and Lower Richardson Lake, where is the so-called hotel as she calls Coburn's Lakewood Camps, precursor to our happy place Lakewood Camps.  While they are several bumpy hours by car and maybe boat or ice-sledge from any town, this is no solitary Thoreau-ian existence.  The woods, as it turns out, are filled with characters ranging from their straight-from-Maine-Central-Casting handyman Gerrish, to loggers who may or may not be felons but are gentle giants with kids, to the damkeeper's jolly extended family, to the occasional FBI agent.

You can learn a lot from We Took to the Woods, like how to drive on thin ice - "keep the doors open, go like hell, and be ready to jump" (80) - or how to make a very tasty-sounding upside down raspberry shortcake (162).  Or how to be an authentic Maine guide.  I'm going to quote a long piece here about this specimen - a type both completely serious and hilariously invented - because I think it nicely represents Rich's style and subject.

  "Of course a guide has to be a good woodsman and canoeman and camp cook and emergency doctor, and the State of Maine ascertains that he is, before issuing him a license to guide.  But he could never earn a living if he didn't also make the grade with the sports - same as dudes of the West - as 'quite a character.'  He has to be laconic.  He has to be picturesque.  Maine guides have a legend of quaintness to uphold, and, boy! do they uphold it.  They're so quaint they creak.  They ought to be.  They work hard enough at it.
  Here's the Maine guide.  He wears what amounts to a uniform.  It consists of a wool shirt, preferably plain, nicely faded to soft, warm tones; dark pants, either plus-fours, for some unknown reason, or riding breeches; wool socks and the soleless, Indian-type moccasin, or high laced boots.  He carries a bandana in his hip pocket and may or may not wear another knotted around his neck.  But he must wear a battered felt hat, with a collection of salmon flies stuck in the band, and he must wear it with an air; and he must wear a hunting knife day and night; and he must look tough and efficient.  If he has high cheek bones and tans easily, that is his good luck,  He can then admit to part-Indian ancestry, accurately or not.  Indian blood is highly esteemed by sports.  Naturally he could do his work as well in mail-order slacks, or in a tuxedo, for that matter; but the sports wouldn't think so.  Sports are funny.
  'That fellow there,' the sport is supposed to say, showing his vacation movies in his Westchester rumpus room, 'was my quarter-breed guide.  He's quite a character.  Never had any education beyond the seventh grade, but I don't know anyone I'd rather spend a week alone with.  That's the real test.  He's a genuine natural philosopher.  For instance, we were talking about the War, and he said - and I'd never thought of it this way before - .'  What the guide said he probably lifted from Shirer's book, but translated into Down East, it wouldn't be recognizable.
  A few livid scars are a great asset to a guide.  It doesn't matter how he got them.  Maybe as a barefoot boy he stepped on a rake.  The holes make swell bear-trap scars, acquired one night up in the Allagash when the thermometer was at thirty below and the nearest settlement was fifty miles away."  (53-54)

The whole book is like that.

Rich particularly loves the events of the woods:  when the logging camps are in session, or a log drive down the river (one of the last of its kind) or the National Championship Whitewater Races which used to be held on the Rapid River because the flow down its rapids could be regulated by the dam.  She also likes the solitude of the woods:  fishing in remote ponds, berry picking, tramping through the snow.  The Richs have plenty of access to modern comforts:  a telephone trunk line, electricity, mail order to supply every want and need.  Just no indoor privy, which even Louise admits is a tad chilly in the winter.

But you know, it is a small price to pay.  Good company, baked beans, beautiful scenery:  really, who needs anything else?  The final chapter is about her need, as perceived by others, to go to the Outside.   Locals feel that you need to go Out every once in a while, or else you get a bit squirrely.  Rich does finally, after about three years, and appreciates the experience, but doesn't feel the need to go again anytime soon.
  "So after all, why should we bother to go Outside?  there would be only one reason, to see our friends; and our friends come here instead.  We have swell friends, as I suppose everyone has, and we'd much rather see them here, undiluted by people we don't like, than Outside.  So if they are willing to put up with off-hand meals for the sake of lounging around in their oldest clothes and being free to do and say what they please; if they are willing to swap their own good beds for our not-so-good ones plus a lot of excellent scenery and fishing; if they want to take the long, involved trip in with nothing much at the end except us and the assurance that they are very much more than welcome, why, that's the way we want it, too.  And that's the way we have it."  (315)