Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Touring MEPA

Hudson Street in the Meat Packing District

On Sunday afternoon, I took a great walking tour with Bernie Cohen of Bernie's New York walking tours. Bernie does tours all over the city but this one was of the Meat Packing district or what the really cool kids call MEPA. A neglected neighborhood wedged between Greenwich Village and Chelsea, once filled with hundreds of meat processing plants (and the Nabisco factory where they made Milk Bone dog biscuits!), it is now one of the most posh neighborhoods in the city. It is filled with designer showrooms, fancy restaurants and boutique hotels.

View of the Highline Park from the Street

The tour included a history of the historic district and visits to some of the existing businesses in the area. The highlight was a tour of the Standard Hotel which straddles the new Highline Park and features floor to ceiling windows in all the rooms. (It has stirred up some controversy lately because of exhibitionism by hotel guests.) We saw three different rooms and the views were incredible.

View from Standard Hotel Looking Out Over the HighLine

The streets were also filled with trailers and equipment because they were filming Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2.

I can't really afford to shop or eat in MEPA, but walking around was cool. Oh yeah, and did I mention that there are still meatpackers in MEPA?




Monday, September 21, 2009

Little Hidden Gems

I probably don't have to tell you that one of the biggest adjustments to living here has been the sky high cost of living. You know that feeling when you go on vacation and it feels like you're eating out at every meal and spending a fortune on your accommodations? Imagine feeling that way all the time .... I am fortunate to have a good grocery store just a half a block away, but it is a tad upscale and way expensive for me. I feel like there should be a guy standing behind a glass counter saying, "may I show you something in a box of cereal?"

One of the reasons I look forward to the weekends living in Manhattan is that I can just go walking and explore. It is interesting what you will stumble upon. Imagine my delight when I discovered Stile's Farmers Market just a few blocks from my house. Covered by a tent in the corner of a parking lot, you could easily walk by it and never give it a second thought. I wandered in one day and found amazingly cheap produce, eggs, bagels, fresh bread and even some interesting packaged foods. I now go there every Saturday morning and stock up for the week. If you're in the neighborhood you should stop by. The cashiers moisten the tips of their fingers (so they can count out the cash more easily) by dabbing their fingers on a freshly cut cucumber. I've never seen that before!

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Mystery Bottle

So I walked by the World Wide Plaza giant office building at 50th and Eighth Avenue while I was walking the dog and on the sidewalk sitting by itself was a half-full bottle of Chivas Regal with a piece of paper stuck in it. I was tempted to stoop down and pull the paper out but I was afraid it was a set up for some candid camera show or a boobytrap of some kind. But still, if that actually is Chivas in that bottle it seems like an awful waste of good liquor. I see this as a sign of the beginning of the downfall of our civilization.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Update on yesterday's posting

I guess Barack and Bill were having lunch down the block from my office. And they didn't invite me. Strange.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/obama-and-clinton-have-lunch-in-the-village/

Monday, September 14, 2009

Change I Could Have Done Without ...

This morning on the radio they were talking about President Obama coming to town and warning people that there would be traffic tie-ups downtown as a result. I wondered what it must be like for people in D.C. who have to deal with presidential motorcades all the time. I dismissed the report though; he was giving a speech down in the financial district and I am strictly a pedestrian.

When I got to work, there were cops all over the neighborhood surrounding school and the streets were being cordoned off as if there was going to be a parade or something. The guy walking in front of me asked what it was all about and a cop muttered something about the president. It struck me that it was sort of weird that they'd care about him way up here when he was speaking further downtown, but I shrugged it off.

I pretty much forgot all about it and went out to lunch around noon. In the deli I saw the president on the TV and thought about the radio guys this morning talking about his overexposure. (Did you know that at this point in their respective presidencies that George W. Bush had had 3 press conferences and Bill Clinton 8? Our current president has had 22! But talking is his thing.) When I got back to my building, I realized what all the hub bub was about: the motorcade wasn't just passing near our neighborhood, it was passing in front of my office.

All of my fellow pedestrians found there was no way to get across West 3rd Street, and the cops were making no exceptions. I always love the people who think they have the one excuse that is going to convince the cops to let them through the barricade. There was one lady in her 60s with a jet black wig and a cigarette who pleaded with the cops, but they were having none of it. So I stood for 10 minutes and looked 25 feet across the street at the door to my office where they weren't letting anyone out of the building.

Finally, the motorcade sped by, a blur of black SUVs and at least one limo with the presidential seal on it. I know he was with Hillary Clinton, but it's anyone's guess which car he was in. In the picture below you can see the back end of the parade of cars just beyond my office. The administrative assistant from across the street called me to say he got out of his car and waved at some people. I hope no one told that to the lady with the wig and the cigarette. She had somewhere important to be.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

And I Would Walk 500 Miles ...

For those blog readers who are a little younger, once upon a time there was a late night talk show called The Arsenio Hall Show. It was a significant milestone in the sense that it was a regular mainstream talk show on every night hosted by an African American. The problem was that when David Letterman switched from NBC to the 11:30 pm timeslot on CBS, all hell broke loose in late night world, and Arsenio was put out of business overnight.

But before that happened, I was watching Arsenio one night and saw a pair of singing Scottish Brothers perform on his show who had a unique sound and harmonies like you'd never heard before -- or because they're Scottish: like you've never "hairrrrd b-far." The group was The Proclaimers and I immediately bought their album. Before law school was over I had two of their albums. They largely receded into my memory in recent years, however; I remember looking on Amazon for a new album a few years ago and not seeing anything -- until today.

This afternoon at work I saw on the nyc.com events calendar that The Proclaimers were in town today. I dismissed the notion of going. I didn't have tickets. I never do anything spontaneous. I had no one to go with. Oh heck, I could go by the theater on 23rd Street and at least see if there were any tickets. Well, I went to the box office and there were plenty of tickets, I went to the show and it was awesome. They had the Gramercy Theater rocking. I was even able to get a I-love-everything-Scottish friend to join me for the last 2/3 of the show. People were dancing in the aisles, waving the Scottish flag and having a grand old time. And I got to do it all on a whim. In New York, groups like The Proclaimers will occasionally pass by. I'm grateful for the opportunity to live here and to have a chance to stumble onto an incredibly fun night like tonight. Arsenio would have loved it.

Here are a few (low quality) cell phone images of the boys from tonight. Interestingly, they didn't look as boyish as they did when they performed on Arsenio ... I guess I don't look as boyish as when I first watched them either ....


Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Last week my Eskimo Dog injured himself while we were out walking. I picked him up in my arms to quickly cross 49th Street and when I put him down on the sidewalk he began howling in pain. I couldn't imagine what had happened. I checked his pads to see if he had cut or pinched himself but he seemed fine. He was clearly in excruciating pain and his 2 minutes of howling drew a crowd. A few people at the bus stop came over to see if they could help. We all looked around the sidewalk to see if he had stepped on something but couldn't find anything. (One lady said to me, "isn't it funny how if an animal is in trouble people come running. Do you think they'd do the same for us?") I suspected that he had strained himself because his hips seem a little stiff these days when he gets up after lying down for a long time. I decided I would see if he could walk it off. He wouldn't put any weight on his back right leg and I had to carry him up the stairs to the 4th floor to our apartment.

That night, I decided I would let him walk it off and took him for his 11pm walk as always. BuddE was getting along ok with a pronounced limp. It was garbage night on my street and there was practically no room to walk on the sidewalk.

A guy in a Fed Ex shirt said "excuse me" and I tried to get out of his way.
He said, "No, I'm not trying to get by. I just wanted to know, is this the dog from the bus stop earlier?"
I nodded yes, sort of surprised by his recognition.
"How's he doing?"
"He seems to be doing a little better," I said.
"Glad to hear it, glad to hear it," he said and he slid by us up the alley of garbage and went on his way.

Sometimes Hell's Kitchen feels like a small town. That's nice.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Apparently, I Should Be Ashamed of Myself

My sister and my nephew came to town yesterday and we decided to go uptown to see the new space show at the Planetarium. My nephew had his Celtics jersey on and for all anyone knew we were a group of out-of-towners. While we stood on the subway platform at 50th Street a slightly disheveled man came and stuck a copy of The Onion newspaper under our nose and said he was selling it to help the homeless. (There are publications that are distributed and sold on the street to raise funds for the homeless. As far as I know, The Onion is not one of them.) He said he had a wife and either 4 or 6 children to support -- I think he lost track somewhere. I shrugged him off and then he turned his attention to my nephew and he started calling him a "Redsox hater" (meaning a Yankees hater because he was wearing Boston garb). I came to my nephew's defense and told the guy I lived in the neighborhood, that we were not tourists and that we weren't buying what he was selling. I tried to defuse the situation and explain that my nephew was just a misguided New Yorker whose father had not quite raised him right because he rooted for all the Boston teams.

"Where do you live?" he asked.
"50th Street," I said.
"50th and what?"
"50th and Eighth," I replied.
"You've gotta be loaded to live there. You must be paying $3,000 a month," he said to me as he became increasingly agitated.
"No, that's not my rent," I said turning away from him.
"You live there and you're not willing to help the homeless? You said he wasn't brought up right? You weren't brought up right!"
"I'm not going to have this conversation with you, man," I said, as he became more and more menacing.
"You're damn right you don't want to have this conversation. You should be ashamed of yourself not wanting to help the homeless."

As someone who spent a year of my life working with the homeless in inner-city Atlanta in the early 1990s, he picked the wrong guy to try to guilt into giving him money. He walked away disgusted and a minute later I saw him down the platform with his arm around some tourist with a big grin on his face. I respect his right to ask for money. I just wish he'd respect my right to tell him to buzz off.