A Trip to Manhattan, March 2002

I had been trying to arrange another day in Manhattan with my sister and sister-in-law but their schedules were conflicting, we couldn't find a common day and my excursion ticket was getting close to the end of its validity period. So I decided to take a trip by myself.

The train up was fairly empty; the snack car wasn't open until almost 45 minutes after we left Washington, which didn't bother me but the early morning coffee drinkers were getting upset. I got off at Newark and took the Tubes to Pavonia; since it was only a little before 10AM the rooms weren't ready so I left my satchel and went out to photograph the exteriors of some of the stations for my Tubes website.

When I left DC I knew it was going to be cold in NY; my choice was a coat which is always too hot or a down vest which is usually enough, if you walk fast enough, so I took the vest. The weather was cold and clear but with gusts of wind at times of 20 or 25 mph.

I walked down past the old H&M power plant to Exchange Place - still closed from the terrorist attacks so it was hard to get pictures over the fencing. Click on the picture to the right to get the full view.  Then I walked up to Grove Street station whose entrance has been completely rebuilt and which you even enter from a different side. 

When my mother had been in Christ Hospital I would go down to Grove street to pick up pierogi and other Polish food at a small restaurant called Tania's on 348 Grove Street a few doors north of Newark Avenue. Times have changed; it is now a very pretty white tablecloth place - even with a bar.

I got on the Tubes at Grove and rode up to 33^rd Street to get a multiple Tube ticket, the Grove Street machine was being repaired. I then rode the uptown line downtown, getting a few more pictures of the old red and white H&M mosaic signs. I switched back to the subway to go downtown to the WTC stop of the IND which re-opened in late December to photograph the H&M mosaics there but that section of the pedestrian tunnel leading into what had been the WTC is still closed --- and I realized that the section with the mosaic was either destroyed in the attack or else will be destroyed in the re-building.

I went back to West 4th and started walking around the Village side  streets to look at the architectural styles, heading generally eastwards to First Avenue. I didn't intend to have lunch but instead was going  to go to a German Konditorei for tea and cake. When I got there, the Konditorei was gone but around the corner was an Italian pasticceria, Veniero's. I forgot it was just before Palm Sunday. The café section was in the back and not too crowded but the front part you had to pass through to reach the café was the bakery counter selling the Italian Easter baskets with those little pastry eggs. It was a mob scene, crowded, the staff looked frazzled and I was afraid it might take a long time to get served, even though the café part did look quiet. I'm going to try it another time.

So instead for lunch I went to test another Polish restaurant on First Avenue, Christina's, which had also been recommended in some guide books. It's on the on east side of First closer to 14^th. I had a bowl of mushroom barley soup and a half order of mixed pierogi for about $5 + tip. The food was good but not better than in Teresa's about 4 blocks further down First Avenue. Christina's is more a completely local neighborhood place with a counter [where I was] and a few tables in the front and two larger rooms in the back. I found it, however, gloomy, not enough light for my taste. The woman [Christina?] and the younger man helping her were both Polish but different than the Polish girls working as waitresses down the street at Teresa's. Those were young women who were temporarily waitressing while waiting to go on to art school or Hollywood; these were immigrants earning a living for the rest of their lives.

I then walked up to a theater in 14^th Street which is going to be presenting an unknown/little known musical by Harold Rome in a few weeks to see about maybe getting a ticket and then walked around 14^th Street and Union Square for awhile until I took the tube back to Jersey City to check into my room.

Leaving the station there was an acrid smelling of something burning. I took a shower and started back out again. At 33^rd Street I changed to the uptown BMT to Carnegie Hall. Since I haven't seen anything in it since the major refurbishing several years ago, I was going to Carnegie Hall for the 3pm tour and got there at 2:45; the foyer where the ticket windows are was jammed packed, mostly with customers buying tickets for shows but unfortunately also for tour tickets, They were sold out and it was the last  tour of the day and none were being given the next day. Having learned my lesson on not getting tickets in advance, I walked down to the City Center and picked up my ticket for Golden Boy that night.

Then walked further west to a Cyber Café on 49^th near 8^th to check my E-mail. The deal was that for $5 you got 15 minutes of time, anything you wanted to drink and anything [bagel, muffin, scone, cruller] you wanted to eat. It was noteworthy that the [attractive] young woman running it was also Polish. Some times during those 2 days it seemed like the Czechs and Poles and other non-Russian Slavs were flooding the city with new immigrants. Somehow I would up with 20 minutes of computer time and besides checking my mail was also able to write my Tuesday class telling them about their final marks.

At the visitors' and convention bureau I picked up some twofers for Broadway shows. The place is housed in a former theater in the east side of Times Square, near the Palace  and is very attractive; I asked for the name of the theater but unfortunately I've forgotten it now.

I kept walking westwards to 9^th Avenue where I was going to buy some loose tea from Empire Tea and Coffee but they've moved or closed. It was now around 4pm and Ninth Avenue was already backed up with rush hour traffic heading for the Lincoln Tunnel. I found out the next morning that the congestion  was connected to the smoke and smell I had experienced earlier at Pavonia: a warehouse had gone on fire just outside the Holland Tunnel which was closed down and all traffic was being diverted to the Lincoln Tunnel. 

In any case, 9^th Avenue was in such a mess that no busses could come down it, so I walked over to midtown and then decided to keep walking downtown towards the Village. Since I'm not wild about coffee I wasn't going to one of the Italian coffee houses but was planning on having tea and reading a newspaper in a place I had read about called Tea and Sympathy on Greenwich Avenue.

As I was walking into it, I saw a hand lettered sign on the door with numbers. Number 1 said something like: This is New York not Kansas, you're expected to leave tips. It seemed so silly I thought it was a joke [and it was windy] so I went quickly inside without reading the rest of the sign.

The place was small, MAYBE 20 or 22 seats, closely packed tables elbow to elbow. There were about 5 or 6 customers in it but it still looked crowded. In spite of the size there were four [4] female workers. I put my things at a table and went to the men's room. When I got backed and looked at the menu it was obvious that the selections were very limited. They did have a weekend brunch but the rest of the time it was a [large] variety of teas and small sandwiches, cakes.

I ordered a [$4] pot of Assam tea; the waitress said "And what else?" I answered "Nothing , thank you" She said "We have an $8 minimum". Normally, and especially in a vacation setting, I just roll over and do what I'm told and $4 is no big deal. But her tone was very demanding and, more importantly, I was going to have to have an early supper to get to the play in time and I really didn't want to eat. So I said "No, thank you" and I left. But on the way out I looked more closely at the list on the door. It was entitled "Nicky's Rules", one of which was that there was an $8 minimum at all times. But the other rules, which I didn't want to write down right then because they might come after me, were so petty, like: no smoking -- but expressed in a pushy nasty way, and comments about where to hang your coat. It was so extreme and bureaucratic that the next morning I came back to photograph it but I didn't get close enough [they might have seen me and set the dogs after me] and got only a blurred picture.

So I went to the Vintage Café on Greenwich Ave at Sixth [367-7500], had a cup of tea and read some newspapers --- and the waitress and the barman were particularly nice. They have live jazz at night. Then I went to the restaurant I usually try to patronize. It's situated in the basement of a brownstone and they had just had a pipe burst or a sink back up in the kitchen, so the lady I see and who is the main reason I patronize the restaurant was in the kitchen all the time. The meal was good but if I had known that it wasn't going to be "usual" I would have eaten at Tea and Sympathy and had supper after the show.

I was a little early for Golden Boy so I spent some time walking around the Times Square area; may many many European and farm-fed American tourists. Interestingly, very few Asian tourists, of whom I saw very few throughout the city. Maybe the Japanese ongoing recession/depression is having that result.

Golden Boy was at the City Center on 55^th Street. The last time I had been at that theater was when I was in high school and Gene and I went to a revival of Finian's Rainbow with Howard Morris and Jeanne Crain. All that I remembered about the theater was that it was large. It is. About 3,000 seats and I was in the next to the top balcony. It has a very attractive interior, vaguely Moorish [it had been built as a Shriner or Masonic Temple].

There is a huge auditorium and to be honest, I couldn't clearly see the expressions on the actors' faces from where I was sitting in the rear mezzanine, but maybe because the balconies are thrust out, the place still has a somewhat intimate effect and it was not like being lost in a cavern looking at a show a million miles away. The house was maybe 2/3rds sold and more elderly than not. One big difference from DC audiences was that there were just as many elderly men there as elderly women. Several people got into conversations with me on the long trek up to the rear mezzanine.

The show was Golden Boy which I knew only as a name and connected with Sammy Davis, Jr. and an interracial kiss. I tend to know more Broadway songs than a lot of people but couldn't  think of a single song from the show. After I saw it I realized why.

This was a semi-staged version: costumes and props and dance but no scenery. There were some cuts in the narrative and many of the actors used scripts at times, since this was a short run and they hadn't memorized all the dialogue. The [full] orchestra, the pretty well known Coffee Club Orchestra, was elevated at the back of the stage and the action took place in front of them. The singers were good to very good, the lead was exceptionally good [apparently everybody knew him but I didn't; I found out later from the program that he had been the child lead in a movie called The Tap Dance Kid]. The orchestra was good; the orchestrations were good; the choreography was old fashioned but good and since it was a 1965 show, why not be old fashioned.

The story was clunky and even silly and certainly out of date. It had been a 1930s Clifford Odet agit-prop potboiler about a naive Jewish? Italian? immigrant boxer duped and destroyed by the mob/society. The plot was updated to 1964 to make the boxer African American and to be current with the times. The show was miked but they did it well. 

The songs were good in the production numbers because of the talent of the performers, the musical arrangements and the dancing but the songs were nothing in themselves, since they had mediocre lyrics and less than mediocre melodies. The orchestration really helped the weak music but there was something odd in the orchestration: bongos played a very prominent role. That worked in the choreographed boxing scenes but seemed out of place most of the rest of the time. Maybe bongos were still in during the 60s. The choreography moved the show along, covered up some of the weakness of the songs but was [maybe on purpose] very very old fashioned, like choreography from Promises Promises and other shows of the 60s and 70s. 

Later that night it struck me that I did remember a little from when the show was new in the 60s: the comment that after all or many performances Davis would come back on stage [his character was killed offstage in a car wreck] and do his night club act.

After the show I headed downtown to go to the Cornelia Street Café for a special program they were doing on jazz versions of standard songs. I turned left when I should have turned right, had the choice of backtracking 5 blocks back to the café or walking 1 block to the Tube station: the temperature had dropped to the 20s and it was windy, I was wearing only a down vest, it was 11:15pm, I had been walking or standing since 10 am that morning except for the time in the theater, so I took the Tube back to Pavonia - train and station very very crowded at 11:15PM as they were every time I used them on Friday and Saturday.

When I got up to the street level at Pavonia there was a good night time view of the NY skyline. The 2 memorial lights at the WTC were somewhat disappointing. From what I had read, I expected them to be deep bright blue, but that are, at least that night, very pale blue ... although higher than the WTC towers had been. I bought a snapple in one of the delis and went to the hotel.

I was staying at the Double Tree Suites instead of at the Marriott. Partly because it was slightly cheaper but mostly because I wanted to compare one against the other for a possible return trip. Both hotels are fine and convenient. The Marriott has the edge in location: when you leave the Tube station you are at the hotel; if you jumped over a fence you'd be in the lobby in about 40 feet. As it is, it is about a 45 second walk to the lobby. The Double Tree is two very long blocks away from the station through an open area with construction, maybe a 5 or 6 minute walk from the station. But the rooms are almost twice as big as at the Marriott, with a separate sitting/office area with refrigerator and coffee maker. Because I had seen a group of college busses when I was checking in, I asked for a quiet room. I wound up in an end room with views one way westwards towards the Palisades and Journal Square and the Medical Center and the other way south and eastwards to the NY skyline, the Exchange Place skyline, the Powerhouse and the new trolley line making a big S turn as it approaches and stops at the hotel. Click the picture for a better view. Unfortunately, if you moved your head, the parking lot of BJ's Warehouse and the Newport Shopping Mall intruded on the view of the skylines. The third hotel possibility, Candlewood Suites, is about 2 blocks further towards Grove Street; I may try it, if I go up another time.

Saturday morning I set out around 8am after taking pictures of the exterior of the Pavonia station [side note : on weekends you can park 12 hours for $10 and the lot is right on top of the station as you can see from this picture ---- and click on the picture so you can read the historical marker.]. It was still sunny and cold and windy but less cold and less windy than on Friday and got warmer and calmer as the day went on. [BTW, if you're wondering why so many pictures look off-color, when I had them developed I found out it had been out of date film.]

Walking from the Tubes to the subway in Manhattan I stopped for a bagel [and I also tried to take a picture of "Nicky's Rules"]. The bagel shop was pleasant and had mediocre bagels and was run by two young Poles [or Czechs or Slovenians]. I can't explain why, except it had something to do with the lighting and the colors, the place  looked like it could be in Berlin or Vienna or Hamburg. Up at 42^nd Street between 7^th and 8^th I found another cyber café that charges $1 for 80 minutes time. A revival of Oklahoma has just opened but there was no standing room tickets left and the line at the TKTS booth was too long to wait on to get  half priced ticket for something else. I really wanted to go to the Wall to Wall Rodgers but was concerned that it would be sold out and then when I got back downtown to TKTS, that would be sold out of what I wanted and I'd be caught between two stools. But I gambled and went far uptown to Wall to wall Rodgers.

Once a year Symphony Space on Broadway in the 90s does a "Wall to Wall" show: 12 hours non stop of one composer Bach and Beethoven but also Porter and Kern. This year it was Wall to Wall Richard Rodgers from 11am to 11 pm. Unfortunately, something happened to the West Side IRT local and I got up to 96^th street about 1 minute before 11. By the way, the music on the subway has changed a lot over the years. There's a lot of quality jazz and classical being played in the stations by vagrant musicians.  Since I had to use the 8th Avenue IND, I saw a lot of local families making outings to the Natural History on the way up.

I did get into Symphony Space but because of the crowd I had to wait about 15 minutes for a seat. During a pause for a scene change I got into a conversation with two women. One was a West Side local who had dropped in for the show -- carrying her lunch and supper. The other had come in from somewhere on Long Island and mentioned she had seen Golden Boy last night. I fished for her opinion by saying ".... and what did you think of the music". Her answer was: she liked everything in the show; she always likes everything; it must have been good because she hadn't fallen asleep during it. [She also had bought a seat higher up and cheaper than mine the night before but still sat down in the orchestra "I'm certainly not going to walk upstairs".]

The theater, I'm guessing, holds about 600 people and was filled. Because it was a pay-what-you-wish event that had so many big names, I was worried it might be a madhouse of a crowd. It was, in fact, crowded but people weren't pushing or unpleasant. The biggest part of the crowd was in their 20s and 30s but there were large numbers of elderly and even a few children. 

The Wall to Wall Rodgers was featuring  famous performers like Maureen McGovern, John Collum, Jo Loesser, Celeste Holm and Comden & Green, not so famous jazz performers, scenes put on by Juillard and NYU theater students, an excerpt from an upcoming Rodgers and Hart musical performed by a professional theater group, interviews on Rodgers with his daughters, etc. All were interesting;  click here and also here for extracts of part of the program.

The interview with Rodgers' daughters, both composers, both in their 70s, showed  striking differences in their personalities. Mary [who wrote the musicals Goldilocks and Once Upon A Mattress] is outgoing,  brash and very New York; the other one [whose name I forget and whose works I don't know] was quiet, demure and as if she were from Iowa. The moderator kept trying to get them to reveal background information on Rodgers' composing style and on the famous people he was connected with; basically, they said, they only had one childhood, couldn't compare it with a "normal" childhood and so thought their childhood was totally ordinary. The closest to an anecdote of the type the moderator wanted was that one of them went to school with a daughter of Irving Berlin and asked her mother who was more famous, Irving Berlin or Richard Rodgers. Mrs. Rodgers apparently said "Irving Berlin".

Tove Feldschuh got off on the wrong foot - no pun intended - with me by beginning her set with a lot of corny and embarrassing Upper West Side schtick - aren't we local supporters of the arts on the West Side proud to be here and lets give ourselves a big hand  - but when she went into her performances of It Never Entered My Mind and I Wish I Were In Love Again she was creative and electric. The excerpts from Rodgers and Hart's 1925 Dearest Enemy that were performed by the Village Light Opera were so good that I'm trying to get my sister and cousins to go see the full show when it opens next month.

[The performance was being broadcast live over WNYC - we had to applaud at certain times as lead ins and lead outs - and I suspect there's a good chance it may be replayed on PBS or NPR stations. If you see it listed, listen to it.]

Unfortunately I had to leave Symphony Space at 2pm in time to get back to pick up my satchel at the hotel on Pavonia Avenue.

When I was then heading back to Manhattan at the Tube station with the satchel, about 50 college students, apparently the ones who were staying at the hotel I was at, were assembled around a leader and were being given instructions on what to see in NY and how to do it. It struck me that if they had asked me what they should do, I wouldn't have had a good answer. The obvious answer like Statue of Liberty and Rockefeller Center and Times Square would be things I've done so many times that I wouldn't think of recommending; and the things I would recommend: walk through the Village and look at the domestic architecture, walk across the Brooklyn bridge, go to Little Odessa, go to the Surma Ukrainian Museum they wouldn't want to do.

Although getting the satchel was relatively fast and I was back in Manhattan by 3:30 the satchel suddenly felt heavy and I didn't feel like carrying it back uptown in vain in case I couldn't get back into Symphony Space [how do woman carry those heavy pocket books with them all the time???]. When I had left Symphony Space, it was filled but people were dribbling in and dribbling out; I was afraid I'd get back find a long line to get in, wait a long while to enter and then have to leave almost immediately to get back to the train station.

So instead I walked to Li-Lac chocolates for some candy, went to a café for a tea and newspaper and then headed to Penn Station - crowded and hot. While on line to get my ticket re-validated [I originally was travelling the previous week], I was behind a foreign couple speaking English. They were trying to buy a USARail pass and were being sent from pillar to post because, as the woman was relaying to the man,  you can't get a seat unless you have a reservation which you get at the station but you can't get a reservation unless you have the pass and you can't buy the pass at the station - you have to order it through an 800 number and then pick it up at the station and then go to another counter to get the reservation. If she was right, it sounds like Minsk or Havana.

After I got the ticket re-issued, I thought of eating in a nice restaurant before I left the city or maybe in the Italian pasticceria at First Avenue [I had been busy and except for the bagel I had forgotten about breakfast and lunch] but since the station looked so crowded, I began thinking the later trains might be really packed; so I left on the 4:10PM train and got back to DC around 7:45 and home around 8:15.