And what about this pseudo-Renaissance edifice, sticking out like a giraffe near the lovely West Village Greek Revival row houses we had just walked past? Julian Schnabel’s Palazzo Chupi, a work of art to some, a monstrosity to others, an act of narcissism, vandalism, or sheer chutzpah depending on whom you’re listening to.
We moved down the Hudson as breezes rose off it. We got glorious views of New Jersey, the Statue of Liberty, and, looming ahead, the as yet unopened World Trade Center. We bypassed the lines for the Memorial site. One of us had a better plan: go to the top floor of the World Center Hotel, sit on the terrace with drink in one hand and camera in the other, and gaze down at the miracles of lower Manhattan.
At 7:30, having peered through the gates of Bowling Green and admired the stately old Custom House, now the National Museum of the American Indian, we reached Battery Park. We stood by the railing for class pictures. A fisherman volunteered to take one of all six of us.
“We just walked here from the Bronx, 19.58 miles according to our iPhone app,” I said.
“You did what?” he replied incredulously. “I live up there. I always take the subway. You should try it.”
By 8:00, we were relaxing at an outdoor table on Stone Street, with tourists from all over the world and next to young ladies who seemed to have leaped straight from the cast of Jersey Shore. The place was raucous, and the beer wonderful. The noisy vulgarity—what on another day might have annoyed me—added the proper populist touch.
I grabbed a No. 2 subway at Wall Street to get home. The evening had turned mild. No matter how you look at it, or where or when, New York is a helluva town. The Bronx is up, the Battery down.
* * *
Having done Manhattan, I set my sights on the outer boroughs. My model of a New Yorker and a writer-about-New-York is the late Joseph Mitchell, whose scrupulous, surprising, and deeply felt sketches and stories about his adopted town graced the pages of The New Yorker for decades. A typical day for him would begin with a ride—subway or bus—to a far-off destination, chosen at random, where he would alight, walk around, talk to people, and from which he would return. The characters, louche, down on their luck, colorful, sinister, pathetic, and exciting, come alive in his pages, a testimony to the superiority of art to life, or at least to the difference between the two. Mitchell makes you realize how much better it is to read about his urban specimens than to encounter them for yourself. But you can make your own discoveries. Life is where you find it. And if you live in Manhattan, you don’t have to go to a foreign country for stimulation. You might consider Brooklyn.
As someone who had just finished an eleven-hour, twenty-mile Manhattan hike from tip to toe, I figured my next touristic step should be off island, or at least on a different island. But Brooklyn has neither top nor bottom. You can’t decide to march down an equivalent of Broadway and call it quits. I needed an expert and also, as it turned out, that most embarrassing of New York luxuries, a car.
My guide was the estimable CUNY sociologist William Helmreich, whose recent book The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City is a lively account of his four years of treks (fifteen hundred miles annually) through all five boroughs. Because I had only one day, the auto was a necessity.
Our visit followed a pattern that anyone can adopt and vary: drive to a neighborhood, get out, walk around, talk to people, take notes, then head to the next spot. One morning in mid-July, the good professor met me at the corner of Montrose and Bushwick, where I had decamped from the L train, far from Manhattan glamour. This is East Williamsburg, an edgy industrial transitional neighborhood, the next DUMBO according to my guide. On one side of Maspeth Avenue, in front of a sweet little park, we saw a new seven-story building (“Condominiums with Resort Style Amenities”) across from the Greenpoint Renaissance Center shelter for the working homeless.
We drove along Bushwick Avenue through the gritty projects on the corner of Flushing Avenue. Danger and beauty existed side by side. Stately 1870s mansions in disrepair were undergoing renovation. Pocket gardens sprouted between industrial buildings. When we reached Troutman Street, we had arrived at Graffiti Central: large murals, organized by the Bushwick Collective, add lustrous color and design—sometimes garish, sometimes whimsical—to building fronts. Think of a combination of Mad magazine, R. Crumb, Paul Klee, Philip Guston, and Keith Haring. Savvy local street artists have turned the neighborhood into an outdoor museum. Admission is free.
And then: Williamsburg’s Hasidim in their standard uniforms pouring along Lee Avenue with its men’s hat stores and Scarfs for Her tucked between bakeries and fruit stands run by Orthodox Jews, not Koreans. This is not hip Williamsburg but an old-world Orthodox shtetl. One fast-food joint (Café au Lee) advertises poutine, the famous, gloppy Canadian dish—French fries topped with cheese curds and mysterious brown gravy—that is probably no more delectable or savory when served kosher. At 125 Heyward Street, the former P.S. 71, a three-story redbrick Victorian building, now the Williamsburg Senior Citizens Participation Center, we looked in on separate classes, Talmud for the men and Torah for the women, and I saw my first (ever!) stand of toilets with mezuzahs over the doors.
With an urbanist’s keen eye, Mr. Helmreich noted that you can often judge the safety of the neighborhood by the fact that older houses retain bars on their windows, whereas new ones have none. He also pointed out the Marcy Houses, across Flushing Avenue from the Hasidic community, where the rapper Jay Z grew up. Surprise and delight awaited everywhere. The rapidly gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant/Expanded Stuyvesant Heights Historic District, rows of brownstones built between 1870 and 1920, is spiffing itself up block by block. Romanesque, Queen Anne, and Moorish houses, some with elegant stenciling on their exteriors and lovingly tended front gardens, turn Hancock Street into a stately procession of dwellings.
Thirty years ago, you would not have seen a shopwindow poster declaring: “Poop/Pee Free Zone” and saying “Please Respect Your Neighbors and Your Community.”
Brooklyn has charms and surprises, but much of it is not exactly pretty. This is not the New York of a nostalgic Woody Allen film. Driving along Kings Highway past Kings Plaza, the borough’s largest shopping center, you might be anywhere in modern America. And then you get to Mill Basin, an enclave of single-family houses in a hodgepodge of styles, ranging from modest 1950s split-levels to garish Miami Beach fantasies, the residences of upwardly mobile Russians from Brighton Beach. I imagined an intense reality television show—The Real Russian Housewives of Brooklyn—taking place within the ornate marble halls.
From Mill Basin, we drove through Gerritsen Beach, barely visible from the main street, a district of tiny working-class houses surrounded by chain-link fences, a community with American flags, not mezuzahs, everywhere. It’s still largely Irish-Catholic, with a modest German and Italian presence in its population. The two neighborhoods are yin and yang. Then off to Bensonhurst, a genuinely exciting cultural stew. The linguistic and mercantile bustle of Eighty-Sixth Street beneath the elevated D train has a mostly Russian and Chinese flavor, with a touch of Spanish, including a Mexican restaurant, Tortillas King. Under a sign in English and Chinese characters, we saw the words “Yummy” in a fortune cookie script and “Teriyaki Grill” in italics, a typographic symbol of the neighborhood’s multilingualism and the melting pot of its cuisine.
The Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education and Research Institute on Eighty-Fifth Street lies a stone’s throw from Vstrecha, a fancy Russian restaurant, and down the block from Steve’s Playland, one of Mr. Helmreich’s earlier serendipitous finds. (You will make your own.) The Playland is a shrine to American popular culture, a monument of kitsch assembled by Steve Campanella. Marilyn Monroe, Superman, Bogie, Elvis, Lucy Ricardo, Betty Boop, Al Capone, and others, in full-size plastic reproduction, surround all sides of the unassuming house at 2056 Eighty-Fifth Street. A tasteful brass plaque in front announces the maker’s purpose: “Preserving the Past, Enriching the Present, and Inspiring Hope for the Future
.” You won’t find stuff like this in your standard Michelin guide.
Dyker Heights’ mansions between Eleventh and Thirteenth Avenues, the so-called Park Avenue of Bensonhurst, with their pristine landscaping, clipped topiary, and mismatched statuary (and, at Christmas, traffic-stopping light displays), offered a change of taste. Then we drove down Fourth Avenue into Gowanus, where we stopped on Eighth Street for a visit to one of Mr. Helmreich’s other urban discoveries.
A plate glass window at No. 180½ announced—with beautiful lettering on a building devoid of other signs of commerce—“P. de Rosa Grocery,” with Schaefer and Rheingold beer signs beneath. The main entrance to the house is next door, at No. 180. What was this?
If you see something, ask something: that’s the key to becoming an urban sociologist. On an earlier trek, Mr. Helmreich had met Mr. de Rosa’s grandson, who gave him the skinny. Paolo de Rosa came to Brooklyn at the turn of the last century and opened his little market, which closed in 1972. His son and now his grandson have kept the original plate glass intact as a gesture of respect to the Sicilian nonno.
Paul de Rosa and his wife, Doris, came outside. I asked about an appealing nineteenth-century frame house across the street, nestled between two brownstones. “That was the original farmhouse here,” Mr. de Rosa said. It’s now the residence of Steve Hindy, the owner of Brooklyn Brewery. Who knew? The moral: Ask and you shall learn.
The day was ending. By the time I returned to the Upper West Side, I had walked only nine miles but traveled much farther. The drive out of Gowanus took me through the more fabled parts of a cool person’s Brooklyn: Carroll Gardens (you know gentrification has occurred when you see restaurants with umbrellas over outdoor tables), Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, and Park Slope. Mr. Helmreich deposited me at Pratt Institute’s quiet, leafy campus. Walking back to the subway, I saw that I was surrounded by young white people, all of them wearing black.
I knew that Manhattan was right around the corner. And having ventured off island, I also decided that I had to do the other three boroughs, the ones less visited. And I did.
* * *
Everyone knows the real reason to exercise is to give you license to eat more. If you like food but are not blessed with a high metabolism, there is an easy formula for happiness: Burn calories in order to consume more calories. With this formula in mind, I took it upon myself to walk and eat my way for the better part of a summer day through Queens, New York’s most ethnically, linguistically, and culinarily diverse borough. You cannot do it all. My eight-hour, twelve-mile multicultural eating binge omitted a lot of cuisines (Greek, Afghani, Indian, Bosnian, and Malaysian, as well as the more obscure ones) and territory, especially glamorous enclaves like Kew Gardens and Douglaston.
With two foodie companions, the first a distinguished journalist and food writer, the second a young editor living in this outer borough, I crossed the Queensboro Bridge (The Great Gatsby in reverse!)—with its beautiful views, deafening car noise, and dangerous bicyclists—and soon, on our right side, we could see the Steinway Storage Warehouse and the Hotel Z, symbols of the old and the new Queens, face off. We arrived at Queens Plaza. By eleven o’clock, away from racket and grit, we had reached a quiet residential neighborhood on Skillman Avenue, with sturdy six-story redbrick apartment complexes and front gardens.
At Forty-Third Street, Skillman Avenue becomes known as Lewis Mumford Way, in honor of the twentieth-century American man of letters who lauded the enclave of Sunnyside Gardens, that planned working-class community on quiet, tree-shaded streets, with row and semidetached houses, and one of only two private parks—Manhattan’s Gramercy is the other, more famous one—in the city. At 11:30, famished, we stopped for our first, and only European, food: mouthwatering croissants and brioches at the neighborhood La Marjolaine Bakery.
Then the real urban adventure began.
Roosevelt Avenue, under the elevated No. 7 line, took us away from Woodside, a former Irish area (Donovan’s Pub and the Stop Inn bear the evidence), now largely Filipino. Diversity, that much overused term, is in full view: the V&V Italian Bakery, advertising “Fresh Irish Soda Bread,” stands across from La Fina Colombian Bakery and Restaurant, and close to Salvadoran and Ecuadoran eateries. At El Nuevo Izalco Restaurant, aka La Casa de las Pupusas, we stopped for a trio of the eponymous light corn pancakes stuffed, individually, with pork, cheese, and beans. We planned, but forgot, to top these off with some fig ice cream from next door.
By Seventieth Street, it’s still Filipino (stores advertising balikbayan boxes, for sending gifts), but finding the New York Cho Dae Church (Presbyterian) across the street from the Jackson Heights Islamic Center and Mosque, and around the corner from the Greek Orthodox Church of SS Constantine and Helen, I suddenly remembered that the United Nations’ first home was appropriately here in Queens.
The quest continued. At 12:45, hungry once more, we alighted at the Himalayan Yak Restaurant for—what else?—steamed yak dumplings; goat Bhutan (intestine, liver, heart, and stomach, stir-fried with butter, green chilies, onion, tomatoes, and Nepalese herbs, the whole dish crackling like pork rinds, with tripe the dominant flavor); and laphing—that’s sliced mung bean jelly to you—a slithery concoction flavored with peppers, chili, and soy sauce.
The blocks through Corona are Hispanic all the way. The neighborhood has a few outliers like the anomalous Martiniello’s Pizzeria; otherwise it is Dominican, Guatemalan, Ecuadoran, Peruvian. I wanted to sample the wares of at least one food truck, so at 104th and Roosevelt we stopped, circa 2:15, at a taqueria, where we made our only mistake. In addition to the simpler steak and chicken tacos, we opted for oreja (ear), which my more sophisticated co-travelers found blander and more gelatinous than other ears they had eaten in, for example, Chinese restaurants. Chalk it up to experience. I had never had an ear before. I don’t think I’ll eat a second one.
On we soldiered: under Grand Central Parkway, over the Van Wyck, past Citi Field and the automobile graveyards at Willets Point that look like a dangerous scene out of Dante’s Inferno or The Waste Land. Finally, we hit Flushing. At Main Street and Roosevelt Boulevard, you have reached an Asian epicenter (including, in full view of families strolling and shopping with children in tow, Romantic House Adult Store), with fruit stands selling ripe cherries for five dollars a pound and blueberries for one dollar a pint, one-third their Manhattan prices.
We descended a flight of stairs at Main Street’s Golden Shopping Mall: you find eight separate but largely indistinguishable kitchens churning out individual delicacies, with plenty of authenticity but neither glamour nor pretense, in a grungy basement. We had settled on Xi’an Famous Foods, where we chowed down on Liang-Pi cold-skin noodles, which were inscrutably warm, and buckwheat cold noodles, gelatinous, smooth, spicy, and tender all at once.
In Flushing, you hear a babel of languages. You see odd juxtapositions. Anomalous cultural melting-pot partnerships abound: the historic St. George’s Episcopal Church faces a poster for the law firm of Sackstein Sackstein and Lee (two Jewish fellows and one Korean) on Main Street.
We backtracked, turning right on Northern Boulevard to see Flushing’s historic main square. The shingle-style Friends’ Meeting House (1694), New York’s oldest house of worship in continuous use (and the second oldest in the nation), offered a sober note of austerity to balance a day of self-indulgent sensuality.
This was only our penultimate stop. Almost next door to the Quakers, we finished our day in Queens at Hunan House. We decided against fragrant pig ears, numbed and spicy duck neck, and sautéed spicy fish stomach, in favor of two appetizers, stinky bean curd (fermented in vinegar, and not so easy to love) and wood ear in vinegar sauce (wild mushrooms with plenty of garlic), plus a conventional but spicy sautéed green pepper with pork.
By six o’clock, it was time to stop. At 7:30, I had one final nosh, at home: the dragon fruit I had bought at a Chinese market. It looked like a cross between an artichoke and a big, festive red hand grenade. Cut it open and you fin
d sweet, tender meat. Think kiwi. It goes down nicely with a light French rosé.
* * *
By comparison to Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, my solo trips to the Bronx (not the real Bronx but the leafy, quasi-suburban Riverdale section, perched along the Hudson and offering spectacular views of Manhattan to the south) and the last, on Halloween, to Staten Island (also with the help of a car) were less exotic. The journey, not the arrival, matters. And even quiet Riverdale has its appeal, especially to someone who grew up, as most of us do, in a suburb and may want to get a nostalgic reminder of his childhood. If one likes subways, buses, even a ferry—and the Staten Island Ferry, offering the most expansive, sublime views of Manhattan and its harbor, charges no fare—then the excitement of going to a place, getting out, walking around, and coming home twelve hours later has all the magic of a trip abroad without the accompanying hassle of airports, security guards, long lines, and airplane turbulence. One can have an urban adventure in any city. Even a walk around the block, anywhere, to someone with attentive eyes and ears, can offer new and surprising stimulation, but nothing beats New York for the sheer variety of landscape, cityscape, and urban population.
* * *
My grandmother used to say, “You’ll find nice people everywhere.” By that she meant, mostly, Jews. No matter where you are or whom you are counting, this is a truth universally acknowledged. Until recently, common wisdom has held that New Yorkers, like Parisians, are snooty, rude, or too busy to be approachable. Walking with too much speed and determination, they cannot be stopped. Southern friendliness, with its often unctuous, slow, and treacly charm, gets high marks. I have never found the stereotypes accurate. Parisians have always met my efforts at schoolboy French with nothing worse than patient amusement, never scorn. Smiling always helps in foreign countries. And down-home Texans and other south-of-the-Potomac residents might as easily kill you with whispered insults when you have left the room as greet you with their buttery “How ya doin’?” and “Bless your heart” welcomes. People on the streets of Manhattan, especially in the post–Rudy Giuliani period, engage willingly in conversation when one makes an appropriate opening gambit. Southern molasses sweetness is no less a convention than sharp, tangy New York vinegar.
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