Touring New York City

“When I was in the Minneapolis airport, heading to the Ocala hike (via Atlanta ;-), I ran into Chris Welsch, the travel editor of the Minneaoplis Star Tribune, whom I've done some writing for on previous occasions. He was flying off to New York City that day. He told me he was doing a story on the places to see once you've taken in the big-name, typical things.

Today that story ran in the Star Tribune. Might be fun to read for people looking for new things to do in the Big Apple. I'm copying it below, cuz otherwise you have to register at the newspaper's website.

Here's the link, if ya want it

It's long (so he rally ought to like my writing, huh?? LOL)... but his antecdotal tales are always fun and interesting.

A Big Apple notebook: Finding the world in one city
Chris Welsch, Star Tribune

Published February 29, 2004 NYTR

The cab driver who picked me up at LaGuardia Airport was from Ghana. His name was Martin Sowah.

On the way to Manhattan, we exchanged the rough outlines of our lives. Sowah's father was a diplomat. The family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, when Sowah was young, and he spent much of his adolescence in Brussels, Belgium. He said he speaks English, French, Flemish and five African languages. He visited New York as a young adult, fell in love with a New Yorker, married and became a U.S. citizen.

Later he got divorced, married a woman from Equatorial Guinea and added Spanish to his language lineup (Spanish being the first language of Equatorial Guineans). They live in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, "which is a big Chinatown these days," he said.

I said, "New York is perfect for you -- all the cultures you're connected to are here."

As he put my luggage on the sidewalk at 95th St. and Broadway, he said, "New York is special that way. It's like being in the whole world at once."

His words rang in my ears for a week as I explored New York. It's the most densely populated 307 square miles in North America. Every block held the world in microcosm: Ayurvedic clinic next to Chinese grocery next to Starbucks next to Lenny's Bagels. Construction workers in canvas Carhartts next to fashionistas in Manolo Blahniks. On one block in Queens, Louis Armstrong's house. On the next, a Dominican bodega.

The city is a mosaic of 8,008,278 human pieces. They somehow come together as the biggest, boldest, grandest urban experiment on the planet.

Chance serves up many opportunities in the Big Apple if you give yourself up to them. My aim was to explore neighborhoods and to avoid icons such as the Statue of Liberty or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I went with a checklist, but it looked quite a bit different after the first night, when a friend invited me to dinner at a Chinese restaurant with a group of New Yorkers who used to be tour guides at the United Nations. I left with my list enriched by their favorite places and didn't hesitate to improvise as I made my way to and fro.

When I got home, and looked at my photos and notes, this is what I found: a rainbow of fragments that make an amazing, inexplicable whole.

Satchmo's house

"I call this the psychedelic, funkadelic bedroom because it blows your mind," said Damian Parks, our guide in the Louis Armstrong House in the Corona section of Queens. We were in the upstairs guest bedroom, adrift in a seasickness-inducing peach-and-pink palm frond motif, swirling in all directions.

A couple of persistent themes had emerged on the tour. One of them was that Lucille Armstrong felt very strongly about wallpaper: She liked it a lot, and she liked it bold. Every room was wallpapered, and so were the closets and some drawers and ceilings.

The other theme was laxatives; more on that later.

The Armstrongs moved into the house in 1943 and were among the first blacks in the neighborhood. Armstrong died in 1971, at 70. Lucille died in 1983. The house is left as it was, with the Armstrongs' furniture and knickknacks exactly where they were when they were alive. Even Armstrong's voice lives on in these walls.

Armstrong made more than 1,000 reel-to-reel tapes -- some are diaries, some are dinner-table conversations, sometimes it's just him humming along to a record. As we passed from room to room, Parks would pass his hand over invisible panels, and Armstrong's gravelly, joyous voice would fill the room.

In the dining room, he said, "Who was it asked me if Brussel sprouts was raised in Brussels? Heh heh heh. They are miniature cabbages. Heh heh heh." His deep-throated laugh made us laugh.

Armstrong was not only a musician, but a collage artist and journal writer, and in the display cases in the basement, decorated tape boxes and open journal pages are on display. One explains why it was that a renowned (and wealthy) jazz artist lived in a dumpy house in a working-class section of Queens. The grammar is his: "We don't think that we could be more relaxed and have better neighbors anywhere else," he wrote. "The house may not be nicest looking front. But when one visit the interior of the Armstrong's home they see a whole lot of comfort happiness + the nicest things. Such as the wall to wall bed [and] a bathroom with mirrors everywhere since we are disciples of laxatives."

The Armstrong bathrooms were indeed spectacular, especially the one on the main floor, done entirely in mirrors and chrome. Armstrong was quite vocal about his devotion to Swiss Kriss, an herbal laxative. He even came up with a slogan for it: "Leave it all behind!"

After the tour, curator Michael Cogswell sent us down the street to the M.M.R. Deli Grocery, a Dominican corner store with three bar stools, a counter and no menu. You get whatever the cook dishes up. We had stewed goat meat, fried plantains and rice and beans. It was delicious and appropriate. One of Armstrong's favorite foods was beans and rice, and he often signed his letters "Beans-and-ricely yours, Satchmo."

Louis Armstrong House: http://www.satchmo.net, 1-718-478-8274. It's near a subway stop: Take the 7 train to 103rd Street-Corona Plaza. Anyone in the neighborhood can point it out from there.

Blowing smoke

Another friend recommended trying out a hookah bar on Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens. Two blocks of Steinway (between 28th Avenue and Astoria Boulevard) are the center point for a Middle Eastern neighborhood. Many of the restaurants and coffee houses feature hookahs, also called shisha pipes.

My friend and I chose Al Sukaria Egyptian Cafe, where the tables were occupied by burly men smoking fruit-flavored tobacco in water pipes and watching a soccer game on a big-screen TV. We ordered coffees and a water pipe with apple-flavored tobacco. The coffee was served Middle-Eastern style, with the powder-fine grounds in the water. It was black, strong and sweet.

Counterman Issam Adly set up the 3-foot-high water pipe at our table, setting several burning chunks of charcoal on top of the foil-covered bowl of the pipe. He used his apparently super-strong lungs to jump start the flow, pressed a disposable mouthpiece on the flexible stem of the pipe and left us to blow smoke.

It was surprisingly smooth and cool, with the apple flavor dominating. The owner told us that although New York had passed no-smoking laws last year, the hookah bars have been granted an exception while their owners challenge the law in court. For Muslims who don't drink, the shisha bars are a community gathering place that takes the place of a bar.

I'm not a smoker, and I left Al Sukaria more than a little dizzy, but for an hour, I was in Egypt, and for that I was glad.

Williamsburg

As dusk fell, we took a cab from Astoria to the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Parts of Williamsburg are still pretty rough; others have become a haven for artists and hipsters. We were looking for an experimental Thai restaurant called the Chicken Bone.

After some searching, we found the empty storefront where it had been, but it was gone, blown away by the fickle winds of the New York dining scene. As we looked for another restaurant, we ended up walking through the Satmar Hasidic community of south Williamsburg. Shabbat -- the weekly day of rest -- was ending.

Hundreds of men in cylindrical fur hats, long black suit coats, knickers and white tights were walking purposefully down the sidewalks. Each step brought sway to the long, springlike coils of hair dangling in front of their ears called payot.

In separate groups, pale women wearing wigs and long black coats pushed strollers in the same direction, toward a giant white canvas tent glowing with the lights inside. A thunderous drone of chanting filled the air. The music was beautiful, the scene surreal.

Getting around

The biggest, most spectacular show in New York is on Broadway, under Broadway, across Broadway, and over and under and across nearly every other street in the city. It's the public transportation system.

On a typical day, 4.5 million journeys will be made by subway. That's not counting the millions of riders on the buses and ferries. The ticket is a steal. A one-day unlimited MetroCard is $7. A seven-day pass is $21. They can be bought in subway stations from automated machines or attendants.

On my most public-transport-intensive day, I spent nearly five hours on subways, buses and the Staten Island Ferry (which takes about a half hour each way).

I went from deep in Brooklyn to Snug Harbor on Staten Island, then made my way to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I did get tired, but I was never bored. New York public transportation is a never-ending variety show.

The Staten Island Ferry (which is free, even without a transit card) is a great way to take in views of the city from the water.

A New York secret: the tramway to Roosevelt Island. The four-minute journey costs $4 one way or $8 round-trip. It's worth the price for the spectacular views of Manhattan from 250 feet above the East River. Pick it up at 59th St. and 2nd Av. You can reconnect with the subway system on Roosevelt Island. The escalators that plunge you deep below the river are as memorable as the tram that takes you high above it.

Big Apple Greeters

What better way to see a place than through the eyes of a native? Big Apple Greeters takes that notion and makes it a reality. It's a volunteer program, supported by the city, that matches curious visitors with New Yorkers who want to show off their town.

A few weeks before leaving, I sent an e-mail to Big Apple Greeters (http://www.bigapplegreeter.org/ 1-212-669-8159) requesting a volunteer to show me around any neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Greeter Tom Murphy, 76, appeared at the door of my bed-and-breakfast in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning.

A big, ruddy-cheeked Irishman with the sloping shoulders of a linebacker, Murphy said he grew up in the Clinton Hill neighborhood, which is what he wanted to show me. When he was growing up, it was a working-class neighborhood of Irish, Italian and German immigrants.

"I went into the Marines at the end of World War II," he said. "When I got back, I moved to Long Island, with all the other whites. Lower-income blacks moved into Clinton, and couldn't keep up the infrastructure. It became a slum, a place where you could get killed very easily.

"I got married, got divorced and moved to Queens. Now the neighborhood is totally changed. I couldn't afford a house in Clinton Hill -- some of these apartments go for more than a million. So today you not only get the story of my neighborhood, but the story of my life."

For two hours, Murphy and I walked around Clinton Hill, admiring its brownstones, mansions and churches. True to his word, Murphy told me about his life as well as his borough. We ended the day with lunch at an Italian cafe in Brooklyn Heights, and I ended up with the best souvenir of the trip: a new friend.

Big Apple Greeters has more than 400 volunteers who speak more than 20 languages. It's a good idea to call or write six to eight weeks before your trip to guarantee the best chance of getting a guide and the neighborhood you want.

Neue Galerie

When asked for his recommendation for an off-the-beaten-path museum, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art told me to check out the Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art. An Austrian friend had separately told me that Cafe Sabarsky in the museum was an excellent and authentic Viennese coffeehouse (with German cabaret dinner shows on Thursday nights).

They were both right. Neue Galerie is in a former Vanderbilt family mansion on 5th Avenue (New York's "Museum Mile"). Its permanent collection includes several masterpieces from the Viennese Secession movement (Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele) and elegant displays of 20th century Austrian and German fine art and design.

The cuisine and atmosphere at Cafe Sabarsky is a perfect complement, evoking the kind of coffeehouses where Viennese intellectuals steeped their heady thoughts during the early part of the 20th century. The day's English and German language newspapers are neatly arranged in the entry, the waiters wear traditional black vests and ties, and the sachertorte was a work of fine art rendered in sugar, eggs, cream and flour. Admission to the museum is $10. Lunch at the cafe was close to $50, including dessert and the best coffee I had while in New York (and I drink a lot of coffee). http://http://www.neuegalerie.org. To order cabaret tickets, call 1-212-628-6200, ext. 107.

United Nations

"We have now left New York; you are in international territory," said United Nations guide Marian Aggray as we began a tour of the U.N. The U.N. even issues its own stamps; and if you send a card home from here, it will be from this 18-acre territory on the shore of the East River, not New York.

A 45-minute tour of the U.N. -- including the General Assembly and Security Council chambers -- is $10.50, and provides a quick education about the institution.

Take the chambers of the Development Council, for example. "We almost never hear of this council, but this is where 80 percent of the U.N.'s resources go," Aggray said. The Development Council administers programs for health, safety and education. They include the World Health Organization and the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF).

The chamber of the Development Council was designed by a Swedish architect who left the ceiling unfinished "because the work of this council will never be done," Aggray said.

She closed the tour by reminding us that the United Nations is not a world government with power of its own; it works at the behest of its 191 member states.

"You can never have a United Nations without nations uniting," she said.

United Nations tours: Guides come from 36 countries at last count, and tours are conducted in several languages. The guides are knowledgeable about each day's events and meetings, and every tour is different. http://www.un.org/tours

Harlem

There were six of us standing together at the corner of 116th St. and Malcolm X Blvd. at 10:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

Neal Shoemaker -- a handsome, slender fellow wearing a wool driver's cap and a long tweed coat -- popped up from the subway entrance and said, "Welcome to Harlem. I've got a lot to show you, but right now, we're running late for church."

Shoemaker's Harlem Heritage Tours are an insider's look at America's most famous African-American neighborhood. Shoemaker grew up in Harlem, loved its history and people, and saw an opportunity to bring business to the community by creating a tour company to show off his home turf.

We started the tour by attending a gospel music service at Memorial Baptist Church on 115th Street.

We filed into the light-filled church, and shortly a stately woman in a yellow dress played a simple melody on a grand piano. On the dais, another woman sang gently, "I love to praise him, I love to praise his name."

People were still getting settled, but a couple of voices joined in, and some people started to clap. Over the course of about 10 minutes, a house of song was built. More women's voices joined. Then men. The bass player laid down a strong foundation to lift up the walls. Then a guitar. The drummer kicked in, and the pace picked up.

From that point on, the music never stopped, except for a short interval when everyone got up to meet and greet everyone else. Our hands were shaken, our shoulders clasped, by what seemed like the whole congregation.

The service was the highlight of the day, but it was only the beginning. Shoemaker pointed out Harlem's jazz clubs (we had a drink at the supremely cool Lenox Lounge), stopped by places where history was made by luminaries such as Malcolm X, finished the tour with an amazing soul-food lunch at Sylvia's (328 Lenox Av.), accompanied by live gospel music. The tour that was supposed to last three hours went for five.

Shoemaker's Harlem Heritage Tours range from walking tours to multimedia bus tours and cover a wide range of topics, from the Harlem Renaissance to landmarks of jazz and hip-hop. The Gospel Walking Tour was $35; dinner at Sylvia's was extra. The big bus tours charge in excess of $80. http://http://www.harlemheritage.com or call 1-212-280-7888.

Staten Island

The Staten Island Ferry runs on the half hour from the southern tip of Manhattan Island. The water is vast and broad enough to make clear something that is very easy to forget about New York -- four of its five boroughs are on islands (only the Bronx is part of the mainland); the city is an international port with a long history of ships and seamen.

That explains, in part, how the Snug Harbor for Aged, Decrepit and Worn-out Sailors ended up on Staten Island.

Robert Randall, whose fortune came from his family's shipping concerns (and a father who was a privateer -- that's a pirate with a license), left a good portion of his wealth to create a home for old sailors. In the early 1800s, there were no retirement plans. A farm on Staten Island was purchased, and in 1833 a campus of lovely Greek revival buildings was completed and then occupied by hundreds of tired, crippled, but often feisty, old seadogs.

Herman Melville's brother Thomas was among Snug Harbor's early administrators, who by all accounts had a tough time keeping the men sober and out of trouble. Eventually a high wrought-iron fence was constructed to keep them out of nearby pubs.

"Each sailor got a new blue wool suit, and they all had to be called captain," said Julie Laudicina, a Minneapolis native and associate director of the Noble Maritime Collection, a museum that now occupies one of the buildings.

The last of the decrepit sailors moved to a new retirement home in North Carolina in the early 1970s, and campus was reopened with a new mission, as a center for the arts on Staten Island.

It was a cold, blustery day when I stepped off the S40 bus (pick it up at the ferry landing, and tell the driver you want off at Snug Harbor). But even in February, there were things to do inside and outside. I took a tour of the Staten Island Botanical Garden. Its crowning glory is a 1-acre, walled, Chinese Scholar Garden that was serene and austere under a mantle of snow. The only one of its kind in the United States, it's modeled on the gardens built for notable Chinese philosophers in past dynasties. The gardens create an ideal environment with carefully designed use of rocks, water, pavilions and plantings.

The Noble Maritime Collection preserves Snug Harbor's marine heritage with displays about the decrepit sailors and a central exhibit about John A. Noble, who dedicated his art and life to recording the end of the age of the great sailing vessels. His painstakingly detailed lithographs of decaying ships in the nearby Port Johnston coal docks are a poetic tribute to life at sea.

The Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art occupies the former main dorm hall of Snug Harbor, and its spectacular stained-glass windows and eyeball-shaped atrium were every bit as interesting as the show of modern, Buddhism-influenced art filling its cool, spacious galleries.

There's also a children's museum, art studios, a performing arts theater and two restaurants in Snug Harbor. More information on events, concerts and exhibitions: http://www.snug-harbor.org or call 1-718-448-2500.

Chris Welsch is at welsch@startribune.com.”

“
Bite the Big Apple!
Don't mind the maggots!

-- Mick Jagger




Sorry guys. It had to be done, <G>”

“shadoobie”

“Nice story Liz. Thanks.
However, if he went to NYC and didn't see the Tree people, he didn't see squat. ;o)”

“That piece reminds me of why I love NYC (in moderation). Thanks for sharing that. It makes me want to go again.”

“It's not as much fun as it used to be, when the crackheads were a big problem. They were fun to watch (from a distance).”

“Just finished reading Chris Welsch's New York City article. Let me say that he really approached his visit here in a smart way by avoiding the traditional tourist attractions. Although these are intersting items to see, he got a much more 'insider' view of life in this great city by doing it like he did. He did his homework very well and gave a very accurate description of the places he visited. Very well rounded, too. Thanks for posting it. I found it very entertaining to read and nice to see NY potrayed in a positive light. Lord knows, there is enough negative stuff published about this town. One thing, though. Pennsy's right. He did miss out on the 'Trees-eye view' of the city. Next time he comes through, give him my name and number. I can guarantee him a rip-roaring visit!”

“LOL... I didn't know it was on the "must-see, must-stay" list for any New York visit.

It was funny running into him. I haven't seen, written or talked to the guy in maybe five years. At least he remembered who I was after my somewhat tentative, "Chris??????" He recalled I had taken a hike at Angel's Landing at Zion Ntl Park and he had done that since then.

Oh yeah, as far as NYC, he did say he was staying at a friend's place. The best way to go, it sounds... EVEN IF IT'S **NOT** THE TREE'S. lol (then again, he didn't get to see a personal car towed, did he??? LOL)”

“Not only did he miss the tree people, but he missed Manhattan's premier attraction: the car impoundment lot. Had he thought to contact the trees, he could have avoided that unfortunate oversight. Entertainment at its best!”

“He hasn't lived till he's seen the 'pound'! BTW, the Park Slope neighborhood that he visited is where we just moved from in November. Very interesting place...”

“I'd LOVE to tour NYC...but I don't even have a band.”