Every year a group of my high school friends gets together for dinner in Manhattan around holiday time. I try to attend when I can, and this year the stars aligned well: I was overdue to visit with my brother, and the weekend of the high school "Duck Night" dinner (so named because it's held at a Chines restaurant called Peking Duck) was the same weekend as my brother's birthday.
I took the bus up to New York, something I hadn't tried before. It probably took me an hour longer in each direction than driving would have, but I didn't have to worry about having a car in New York and at $30 each way it was cheaper than driving.
I took an early bus so that I could make it to New York in time to grab lunch and see a matinee of a Broadway show before heading out to Brooklyn. I had recently bought Valerie some really pricey tickets to see John Groban, which made me feel a little less guilty about treating myself to a ticket to Hamilton (expensive, but still $100 less expensive than Josh Groban!). Amazingly, a couple of single seats to this extremely popular show were available days before the performance - I snapped up a seat in the second row of the balcony, which was sure to afford me a good view unless someone with a head like Mr. Met sat down in front of me - which is of course exactly what happened.
The bus leaves you off near Penn Station - a very familiar neighborhood for me, as it is where my dad's/grandfather's office was, and I worked at Penn Plaza when I was in college. My first action was to drop off my suitcase so I didn't have to schlep it to the theater. After 9/11 the Port Authority did away with baggage storage lockers at Penn Station, so private businesses have taken over bag storage. Not that there are bag storage businesses per se; rather other businesses now store bags. I dropped my back at Jason Office Supply on 31st St. How it works is that they give you a numbered tag to place on your bag and have you take a picture of it. When you come to pick up your bag you show them the bag and the photo to prove you're grabbing the right bag. Storage isn't exactly secure - the suitcases are all just sitting in a back corner of the store, not locked up in any way, but the tagging offers some security. Payment is based on the length of time you have the bag stored, which is driven not by an app but by a web site where you start and stop a timer. That part doesn't work perfectly. Two weeks after my trip I got an email from the bag storage company saying my timer was still running and asking if I had retrieved my bag. The good news is that there was no hassle when I told them what time I picked up my bag, and they charged me accordingly.
Having dropped my bag off, I walked uptown and grabbed lunch at Ben's Deli. Now, Ben's is not one of the classic been-there-forever New York delis, but the food is quite good and it's in the theater district and was the only deli I had time to get to before curtain time. I eat red meat very, very rarely, only on special occasions - the opportunity to get genuine New York deli pastrami counts as a special occasion (my other two red meat meals this year were sampling a Vietnamese colleague's homemade pho soup, and a burger after I got back from my Georgian Bay trip). I ordered chicken soup with a kneidel (matzoh ball) and a half sandwich - "half sandwich" being the deli term for "normal sized sandwich". Delicious! Having so feasted I continued on to the theater - again on foot.
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| A "half sandwich" |
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| Hamilton! |
As I started walking back down to retrieve my bag I realized I had somehow lost my scarf so I ducked into Macy's Herald Square to see if I could pick up a replacement. I was looking at a nice wool/cashmere scarf when a salesman came over and said, "Can I pay for that for you?" Then, realizing what he had said he laughed and said, "No, what I meant was can I ring that up for you?" He and I wound up joking about it, then talking about the holiday season and how we're both in the Hannukah camp holidaywise. He wound up giving me 30% off the price of the scarf - which is a good thing, because it was kind of expensive.
I picked up my bag and hopped on the F train to Brooklyn. Time between boarding the train and the first time a homeless person tried to hit me up for money? About 10 seconds. I love New York! Actually, the ride out to Brooklyn went without a hitch. I exited the train at Church Avenue (two stops north of the 18th Avenue Station, where people are seen fleeing in terror in the trailer from the recent Joker movie). This is my brother's neighborhood of Kensignton, which sits at the intersection of a Bangladeshi Muslim neighborhood, an ultra-religious Jewish neighborhood, a gentrified neighborhood with olive oil shops and gourmet coffee shops, and good old middle class Brooklyn - a typically New York crazy admixture of cultures. I wasn't staying with my brother - his apartment is already too full of people, dogs and stuff. Instead, I had booked an AirBnB in the Bangladeshi side of the neighborhood (though the host was Chinese). On looking at the building, an old two story multi-unit row house, I wasn't impressed. I walked in to a hallway filled with dozens of pairs of shoes all wrapped up in bags, and cracker boxes pinned to the walls as mailboxes. Hmmm ... Brooklyn hospitality is unique. Fortunately, the unit itself was quite nice, if a little bare bones. Quite clean, with Ikea-level furnishings. A full one bedroom apartment with kitchenette. Other than a very thin mattress, it was fine.
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| Creative mailboxes |
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| What's up with the shoes and suitcases? |
I visited with Henry and Colleen for a while, but I was pretty spent, as I had been on the go since 6:30 AM. Also, I was recovering from an intense if short-lived flu or bronchitis or something. I crashed and slept soundly.
When I got up Thursday I started my day by grabbing coffee and a bagel from a Bangladeshi corner bodega (only in New York would I refer to a convenience store run by Bangladeshis by the Spanish term "bodega", and only in New York would a South Asian convenience store sell bagels). I went for a run. I went down Ocean Parkway (America's first bike path) then across into my old neighborhood, past my childhood home, then back. I was pretty stiff from a day spent sitting cramped into the bus and a small theater seat, and my lingering bronchitis was aggravated by breathing out in the cold - but somehow I slogged my way through a jog. Then I went over to Henry and Colleen's. We didn't do much of anything. Just visited. Walked over and got lunch at Batata, a rather delicious Israeli/Middle Eastern restaurant, then lingered over coffee at Windsor Coffee. Yeah, chains have infiltrated Brooklyn to some extent and I'm sure there's a Starbucks somewhere (there's a Dunkin' Donuts in the heart of Bangladeshi Kensington!), but fortunately it's still mostly a world of local shops. Thursday evening I met my friend Charles - my oldest friend and my only friend left in Brooklyn - for coffee and dessert at a diner. That required a very expensive Uber (Ubers are pricey in New York due to some living wage law) but was money well spent.
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| My childhood home |
In the afternoon I bid farewell to my family and took the subway back into Manhattan, getting off the train along the way to grab a picture at Astor Place - a station that figures in a song I wrote back in the 80's. I had booked a hotel in the city for Friday night. My room wasn't ready yet when I got there but I dropped my bags and went for a walk through the heart of New York Christmas - the tree at Rockefeller Center and the store windows on Fifth Avenue. It's very nostalgic for me. My grandparents lived in this neighborhood (up the street from Trump Tower!) and we always did this walk at Christmastime, ending up at FAO Schwartz toy store, which was an amazing place to visit as a kid). Sigh. Eventually I made it to my hotel and after waiting some more - and eventually throwing a fit at the front desk - I got into my room.
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| Rockefeller Center tree |
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| Fifth Avenue |
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| Bergdoff's store window (can you find the accordion?) |
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| So nice to be somewhere where Gen. Sherman is considered a hero! |
Duck Night dinner was wonderful as always. There's a core group that's always there, but there are also always surprises. There were a couple of people there I hadn't seen in person since high school. It was super cool to reconnect. The dinner always goes by quickly. We go out for drinks afterward. That goes quickly too. I stumbled back to my room around midnight.
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| Duck Night crew |
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| Bagel! |
Anyway, a great trip - family, old friends, bagels and pastrami ... but no pizza. Gotta leave something for next time.
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