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PrintA Trip To New York
The first thing I’m going to tell you about New York City is: Take the subways. Buy a week-long MetroCard right at the airport, and you can go everywhere.
Whether you arrive at JFK or LaGuardia, a handy shuttle bus to the start of the subway lines boards near the baggage claim. If you ask airport staff where to catch it, they’ll tell you. The questioning breaks the “Minnesota ice” we tend to carry with us, and puts you in a speaking relationship with New York. This is important. New York is made out of talk: questions, answers, discussions and disputes, jokes and stories. Best start immediately, and get used to speaking to strangers. It’ll make things a lot more interesting.
Places to Stay
Now you’re in Manhattan. You’ll need to get to your hotel. Thousands of choices!
Will it be the century-old Park Plaza at the foot of Central Park, the fictional home of Eloise and real site of the Palm Court? If you have the green ($900 or so a night), it can be your New York home. Or there’s one of the newest of the luxury boutique hotels, the Dream Downtown (about $250 to 300 per night), south of Chelsea in the hip Meatpacking District (355 W. 16th St), with its Vedic spa, heated rooftop pool, and, due to open this fall, the restaurant Romera New York… where you can get a $250, 12-course tasting menu paired with select waters which supposedly hyperstimulates the brain’s hypothalamus, giving rise to sensation and satisfaction far beyond the usual. Only in New York, folks.
If your budget is less roomy, here are two hotels that are interesting, and in good neighborhoods.
The Larchmont is at 27 West 11th Street (212)989-9333; www.larchmonthotel.com. This Greenwich Village/Washington Square area has quiet streets lined with old townhouses and full of hurrying students. The hotel is in a couple of those townhouses; it’s discreet, inexpensive, and clean though a little worn. Euro-style, it has a sinks in rooms and shared showers and toilets in the hall. Patrons are diverse and often interesting. A night here will run you about $125.
The Chelsea Lodge (212)243-4499, www.chelsealodge.com is in the southern reaches of Chelsea on the West Side, just south of the main Chelsea gallery district. It is also a Euro-style hotel, though the Chelsea has showers in its rooms (toilet is down the hall). It’s in one of the old rose-colored brick townhouses on quiet W. 20th Street (at 318) off of 8th Ave, which is peppered with good little eateries, bagel shops, drugstores—the kind of residential neighborhood that provides well for quotidian needs (unlike, say, Times Square). Rooms are around $145 a night single occupancy.
Museums and galleries
If you’re like me, a big reason to go to New York is to view the loot. The American Century may be pretty well over, but the stuff that those American strivers built is pretty impressive. Arts and culture? Yes, that’s what they call it, but it’s also a picture of the dreams and nightmares that rode the crest of waves of power. The Morgan Library you likely already know—and it has a Duluth Connection: Morgan Park is our outpost of the Morgan family’s wealth and power.
The Cloisters you may know of as well: the Metropolitan Museum’s splendid museum of medieval art, endowed and built out of five different disassembled European medieval monasteries by John D. Rockefeller Jr. Take the A train north to 190th St., to Fort Tryon Park. The Cloisters sits on a hill overlooking the Hudson. It’s the home of a lost Tolkien world that people really lived in—teenage kings and queens, artisans of miraculous skill, unicorn tapestries and fine lindenwood carvings of saints whose faces address you across 700 years.
Neue Gallerie and the Viennese Café Sabarsky, sits at 1048 Fifth Avenue (212)628-6200. Serge Sabarsky and Ronald Lauder were two friends who loved Austrian and German art from the early twentieth century. After Sabarsky, a curator, died in 1996, Lauder created this beautiful small museum as a tribute to his friend. The museum is in one of the gorgeous small mansions on Fifth Avenue opposite Central Park, and retains the luxurious appointments of a private home, so the Vienna Secession and German Blaue Reiter works are seen as they were originally intended—as parts of a domestic interior. The museum is just the right size to see in a couple of hours—no “museum legs!”
Eating and drinking
Mainly food and drink is found in Manhattan by stumbling upon it: Soup dumplings on Mott Street, great delis like Katz’s on the Lower East Side (oldest in the city—founded in 1888), these are well known. McSorleys Old Ale House in the East Village was a haunt of the great essayist Joseph Mitchell, who wrote about it in the New Yorker. McSorley’s is like the Anchor Bar of lower Manhattan. The Chelsea location of Murray’s Bagels (242 8th Ave) is just around the corner from the Chelsea Lodge, and makes a great breakfast stop—supremely good bagels and schmears, fresh orange juice, and lousy coffee—old New York!
But many places in New York are somewhat hidden, like the Japanese restaurant Omen, in Soho at 113 Thomson St., near Prince (212-925-8923). The menu is based on a Kyoto style of vegetarian food. It’s like nothing I’ve ever eaten. Wonderful sakes are served, and, particularly when the weather is warm, served cold in the traditional pine box, set on a black saucer, and the box overfilled, spilling into the black circle—a garden, suddenly, for a few seconds, at your table.
Outings and fun
You know about Central Park, of course. The lovely pool where people (usually children and men of a certain age) sail beautiful model boats—some of them heirlooms, some new; the little old zoo that now sports superstar Chinese artist and activist Ai Wei Wei’s new bronzes of Chinese mythological animals.
But you may not know about nearby Bryant Park, behind the wonderful New York Public Library, celebrating its centennial this year: Summer movies, winter skating, and more. It’s a peoples’ backyard.
A fresh destination is Manhattan’s newest park: The High Line, on the West Side. It runs from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to West 34th Street, between 10th & 11th Avenues. A long parkway built on an abandoned elevated railway, it incorporates outdoor eateries, wildflower gardens, thickets, plazas, and impromptu performances and art events—some put on by apartment dwellers whose homes can be viewed from the park’s walkways. Call 212-500-6035 for more information on it.
But my favorite outing, especially in the fog, is still the Staten Island Ferry, maybe because of Greenwich Village bohemian Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1920 poem, which begins: We were very tired, we were very merry — We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. (And yes, you can still ride it all night, should you be similarly inspired).
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