42 Hours in NYC, part 5

Part 5 – "33 Down, 9 To Go" 01/18/04 5:30 p.m. (E.T.)

So much of our Sunday stock had been invested into getting tickets to a Broadway play that Ross and I hadn't planned what we were going to do afterwards. Our feet hurt, our eyeballs hurt, we still had that "adventurous travelers funk" nesting in every thread of our clothing, the sun was going down and ice was starting to form.

I considered myself fortuitous to have experienced the entire scale of NYC's environs while there on holiday. How often are travelers greeted to a spring-like New York City January only to be taunted by spitting rain later that afternoon and black slush the following day? I'll confess that we were perhaps a bit bothered by the ice. But we had good reason – after a while every curb seemed to be a deathtrap of slick ice. You should have seen Ross and me walking down the streets and sidewalks as if we'd spent our childhoods here, but the moment we arrived at one of New York's slippery corners, it was as if we were approaching the end of a pirate plank. In the city, not only are the curbs shallow and curved, but the streets dip downward where it meets the curb. I assume this is for rain drainage purposes. And while each curbsuide puddle seemed shallow enough, the reality was that it sank well past one's calf.
While looking for places to eat, Ross and I chose restaurants solely on their relation to icy curbsides. More often than not, if we had to cross a street to eat there - we didn't eat there.

You won't find information like that in any Fodor's guide, I assure you.

The slipperiness was the worst in Greenwich Village, which was particularly bad because villagers were the people I wanted to embarrass myself in front of the least. Of all the little burrows inside Manhattan, the village was my favorite and so I was happy to have visited it near the end of our journey. This is where Ginsburg and Kerouac and Baez and Dylan hung out when they found themselves on the island. This is the type of area Chicago has perfected in spots: an overtly freethinking population of multi-generational hippies wearing patchwork jackets and tousled mops of hair.
I love how pompous everyone in Greenwich Village was. It's a silent pomposity, which makes it acceptable.

The first place we went to was The Strand. This is the self-proclaimed "largest used bookstore in America" and New York is the only place on Earth where this type of statement would be a power chip for bragging rights. But it did draw quite a crowd; mostly artistic types, the kind of people pretending to know the meaning behind esoteric contemporary photographs and who love purchasing big coffee table books on subversive art movements or ballerinas. The true crime/ mystery/ romance sections were barren wastelands, but the photography area was as crazed as a sale table at Bloomingdales the day after Thanksgiving. I had to elbow an old lady out of the fashion and textiles section.

Please, don't ever ask me what I was doing in the fashion and textiles section.

The Strand was a flea market for those with higher educations; you had to be MENSA-bound just to understand the subject sections of the store. Can anyone tell me what kind of book might be found in the "Dramatic Theories and Interpretations" section? What about "Battles and Historical Climaxes"? Whatever happened to History? Shouldn't that just about cover it? What constitutes a historical climax anyway?

We left The Strand and followed all the plaid-pantsed Indie-rock kids with Buddy Holly specs to the various area cafes, blues joints and record stores. This is the neighborhood of the famous CBGB Theater (the building that made punk music huge in the late 70s) and the Café Wah. Greenwich Village felt both like home and a bizzarro universe where everyone was much cooler than I am*

I also noticed an inordinate amount of hipsters feeling the necessity to dress their dogs in sweaters. We've all seen this before, some of you pet owners might have even done this to your own pets,** but in the village there were a lot of these people – tons - doing this.
At one point, Ross turned to me after seeing a bulldog in a fur-lined hoodie and said, "New Yorkers may be tough, but their dogs are a bunch of Marys. These dogs ain't got squat."

And what the hell does a dog - already ensconced in fur - need with a fur-lined hoodie?

I had to agree. Greenwich pets were sissified. It appeared that if you weren't wearing a ratty Ramones shirt pulled tightly over your Ernest Hemingway tatoos while reading a Virginia Woolf novel and drinking some sort of venti frappuccino, then you were missing something far too important to be mentioned anywhere here.

That's Greenwich Village.

* * * * *

With about 30 minutes left before our connecting "Dragon Coach" took us back to Baltimore, we hoofed it to our (hopeful) bus stop on Broadway and 32nd streets. Neither Ross nor I said very much in the time it took to get there. Our sielence allowed me to retrace my steps from the last 42 hours. From Chinatown, to the Whitney, I recalled everything and wished I could do it all over again. We never ventured off Manhattan island nor did we manage to see Yankee Stadium. We never saw the 9-11 site, the Liberty Statue, the Brooklyn Bridge, Empire State, or Madison Square Garden. I never got a chance to blow Carson Daly a kiss from the street outside the MTV building (Carson still works at MTV, right?) and we didn't have time for the Guggenheim.
They say Rome wasn't built in a day. This adage really has nothing to do with me not riding the Staten Island Ferry, but it felt appropriate to quote here.

The fact is, I never expected to do half the things I did and for that, I am grateful. I am also grateful that Ross didn't force us to go skating in Rockefeller Plaza (way smaller than it looks in the movies), I'm grateful for having seen Radio City (not very busy), Grand Central Station (reminds me of European bus terminals, which is actually a good thing), NYC's ESPN Zone (cute waitress gave me a free milkshake) and everything in-between.

New York has a way of bringing people back. Now that I've got my first time out of the way, I wonder when my next time will be.

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* Not that people being cooler than me would be all that bizarre.
** If that's the case, I will be taking you off my mailing list.