We’re continuing our immigrant trail journey the next morning, but
much discussion ensues about breakfast.
(After dinner, of course, because per the Rule of Bill, you can’t talk
about the next meal until you are finished with the last one.) Slightly shamefaced, we slink back to R&D
since we have to be down the street at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum
later that morning. “I thought you
looked familiar!” says the same hostess who seated us yesterday. Izzy has something fantastical called chocolate
babka French toast, and Peter murmurs “perfect” as his plate of eggs, Scottish smoked
salmon, and latkes is set down in front of him.
Interestingly, if you are in Russ and Daughter’s Café, you can get on
Ryan Gosling’s wifi network. Swear to
god, there it is, ryangoslingswifi right there as a non-password-protected
option on my phone.
Who is Ryan Gosling, asks Bill.
And so it goes.
We wander the LES for a while since our tour doesn’t start until 11
and I can tell that things may be going downhill morale-wise since it is a
little bit cold and rainy, so this tour better be good.
Of COURSE it is. If you haven’t
been to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, you should get yourself there toot
sweet. It is way more than just a
building; during the thirty years or so of its existence, the staff have
researched many of the 7000 individuals who lived in the building at 97 Orchard
Street. They used artifacts, municipal
records, census, church – all the usual stuff, but mapped on to the building
itself to give a really incredible sense of place. A few families and businesses left
particularly strong records, and theirs are the stories that are told in guided
visits to various parts of the building.
What is extraordinary is that the building itself, built in 1863, really
offers a microcosm of the US immigration story – Germans, Irish, Jews,
Italians, shopkeepers, sweatshop workers, pushcarts, political organization,
saloons, food, religion – you can learn about it all RIGHT HERE.
We took a tour called Shop Life, during which we learned about a
German family that kept a saloon, a kosher butcher shop, an auction house, and
a discount garment seller who really specialized in undies. If you wanted Pucci panties cheap in the
1960s, 97 Orchard was the place. I was
blown away with the broad knowledge of our “educator” (the slightly pretentious
term for tour guide but he did indeed do a lot more than just show us the rooms
so OK), and by the fascinating touch technology piece with building
artifacts. Cooked up by those crazy kids
at MIT, this involved a table onto which you put a brick or an apron or a wallet,
and then with touch and infrared lights, bubbles appeared that told you more
about it, and offered additional anecdotes and facts. Each object was keyed to one of the shop
stories we’d been learning about. You
know how you do the push button thing at a museum and half the time it doesn’t work,
or some little kid is sitting there whaling away on it so you can never get a
turn? Not here. The system worked flawlessly and we all were
engrossed with our stories. I had Max
Markus, the auction king, which was great because they had some oral history where
you could listen to him actually talk about his great success, the end of
pushcarts, the building of the Essex Street Market and so on.
Now we could have gone anywhere for lunch after this, especially
considering we were still pretty sated from breakfast. But when on the LES, and with the human
hoover Peter, where else but Katz’s Deli?
You approach Katz’s with some trepidation. The line outside is long, and there are big
bouncer-like men at the door controlling access. Then when you get inside, it is all
chaos. People shout at you to say go
this way if you want table service (ie. to sit and be served by a waiter, at
additional expense), go that way to order.
If you want the full Katz’s, you find
a short-ish line at one of the sandwich makers behind the counter and wait your
turn. You can send your family to scout
a table because who is going to get out of that sandwich line, and dame fortune
smiled on us today, with one opening up right in front of us. (Line?
There’s no line for tables. It is
every man for himself.)
Once your turn comes, you tell the man slicing your meat what you
want, and he starts your sandwiches by forking a ginormous steamy hunk of fatty
meat out of a warmer, slicing off the extra fat and giving you a little slice
of pastrami or corned beef or whatever on a plate. Which you try to savor because it is small
but you can’t really help yourself and you inhale it. Then you place a little slice of money back
in his tip jar and everyone is happy.
You are mostly happy because now you know what warm, spicy, juicy deliciousness
is coming your way. Rye is the bread of
choice, as is mustard for your condiment.
You can get a Rueben, or melted cheese.
And you can even get a grilled cheese, but in the She’s-Growing-Up
category, Izzy opts not for safety but digs into pastrami with me. Clever girl.
Peter is a great vacation companion these days. He may look
bored and long-suffering (stuck with us fossils and Miss Annoying, what teenage
boy would not?), but he is actually a font of arcane facts that enliven any
activity, and his rapidly developing extra-dry sense of humor is enlivened with
a touch of the ridiculous that makes me wish he wrote more. Particularly delightful, he’s a great eater,
always up for a good nosh of the local specialty – until he hits his wall, that
is, which is usually about three-quarters of the way through any trip. This happened at Katz’s, and Peter sat there
looking sadly at the second half of his Rueben, wishing desperately that he
could finish it, but knowing it would be folly to eat more. Fortunately he usually recovers from this
temporary state of inexplicable satiatedness, and finishes a trip well.
How could I not check out Il Laboratorio del Gelato, right across the
street from Katz’s? That’s America,
right there, on the Lower East Side.
Some basil lime sorbetto sets you right up after a pastrami on rye, but
my family opts for black-and-whites from the Russ and Daughters’
mothership.
Bill, as you know, is a museum hound, especially for contemporary art,
so he’s been hankering to visit the not-so-new-anymore Whitney for a
while. The rest of us are a bit grumpy
about it, despite his springing for a cab to rest our weary feet. It’s not that we don’t like art but when you
go to a museum with Bill, you need to just be prepared to take a while. He looks at everything, and he reads
everything, and if you have a short attention span, you might find this
excruciating. Then you feel bad that
you’re not paying closer attention, so you put on your big girl knickers and
try to learn something. Which of course
you do, so then you are glad you went.
The interior of the Whitney isn’t that interesting – just big boxy
white space – but it has lots of balcony and outdoor space climbing up all six
stories, so you can get some swell views of busy New York City roofscapes. And the exhibits range from thought-provoking
to unexpectedly relaxing. We check out a
sober investigation of post-9/11 America from Laura Poitras, called Astro-Noise,
which makes everyone think about the involvement of the state in personal
lives, as well as an exhibit of portraiture and portraiture-related art from
the permanent collection. In the latter, I’m excited to see a work by Annette
Lemieux, who teaches at Harvard and I got to know at the Summer School. That is pretty awesome. There’s also a big exhibit on the music of
so-famous-you’ve-probably-never-heard-of-him avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil
Taylor. There are notes from concerts,
and recordings, and photos and detailed music notes and there are apparently
concerts from the man himself in that very room. It is all a bit overwhelming until you get to
the end of the gallery, which is just enormous windows looking out on the
balcony, and the High Line park, and the roofscape. There you find comfy couches and listening
stations with very high-quality headphones so you sit down and put them on to
listen to some fine music and really kind of bliss out.
You’ll need all that zen and more if you take a walk on the High Line
afterwards on a warm Saturday afternoon because apparently everyone else in New
York City is taking a walk too and it is absolutely jammed with people. Where the path narrows you trudge along in a
mass feeling like you are at the Vatican going to see the Sistine Chapel.[1]
Following another excellent Lauterbach lead we dine at Eataly, the
Mario Batali multi-restaurant Italian food emporium in the Flatiron District. (True to form, Peter recovers for a fritto
misto.) It is similarly crowded to the High Line but we get a table pretty
easily. We also realize that it is an
Even Smaller World than two nights earlier because we also run into Ingrid
Wright and family AGAIN[2]
– are they stalking us? – and compare vacation plans to see where we will
jointly be going next.
[1] See “Quo Vadis Laskins? Roma,
April, 2011” for this ghastly experience.
[2] Ingrid’s daughter Sophie is in Peter’s class, and her other daughters
dance at DMSD so we are on friendly terms.
But not so friendly that we knew they’d be in Paris last summer when we
were, so we were amazed to just come run into them in the metro one night. (I can’t believe I left this out of “Over The
Top with the LEF in France: August,
2015.”) They say they’re off to Iceland
this summer but we will not be surprised if they show up on the Vineyard.
