Borrowed Time in Three Boroughs

I am not staying here

After 7 years of visiting my son in Brooklyn I have finally resigned myself to the fact that I am going there, not Manhattan, as I always used to do. So when I throw out an idea like “let’s go to the Met on Saturday,” not just a hop, skip, and jump uptown.  It would be like someone visiting me in Bethesda and suggesting we go to Baltimore.

With Peter at the Temple of Dendur

The crowd waiting for the 9:30 a.m  Vamoose bus in Bethesda on Friday was so old that I suspected they were taking the bus because their driving licenses had been taken away. 

Staying at The Nu Hotel is old hat for us now, but we still like it and the location. Plus they drew me in with a "spring special"—room rates exactly twice as high as they were pre-COVID. 

We hit the ground walking. Miles of walking, in fact 19 over the weekend. Friday night we walked through beautiful Fort Green Park to La Rina to meet Peter and Nila for dinner, one of Peter’s several premature 30th birthday celebrations. He will be living in California on his 30th birthday, so we are all trying to get a jump on it.  Everything about the food at La Rina was extraordinary,  smoked spaghetti with Calabrian chili and hazelnuts, gnocchi with nettle pesto, caramelle with potatoes, peccorino, peas, and mint. 

Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn

As we were walking to the restaurant I received a stranger compliment: a young woman told me how cool I looked and how she loved my earrings. Then a stranger on the sidewalk called me sweetheart. Now I know this New York behavior I love also grows in Brooklyn. 

Brunch at Peter and Nila's apartment

People in Brooklyn are fashion forward, with a consciousness that covers chapeau to toe. So much better than the waist-up fashion of the remote working bureaucrats on Zoom. 

Saturday Peter and Nila had us over for brunch to post-celebrate Mother’s Day, and our 43rd wedding anniversary.  They had Stevie Wonder music on which was sort of  a magical coincidence because earlier that morning I wondered why am I not listening to more Stevie Wonder. For real. 

 

Then we took the subway to Self Edge a pricy mens casual clothing store that Sean manages. Where, as Cousin Fred put it, men pay a lot of money to look like they don’t have money. Self Edge was the source of the T-shirt chef Carmen was wearing in The Bear and throughout the season, people flooded in and paid $100 a pop to have one of their own. 

Beiser shoots Avedon

On arrival at the Metropolitan Museum of Art we were met with such a long, sad waiting line of people under umbrellas that we thought we would have to go to Plan B. But this is New York, things move fast here.  The Met’s 2.2 million square feet quickly and easily absorbed its hundreds of wet visitors. 

A sidebar about the subway.  NYC has become the world leader in the Fight Against Fare Cards. Perhaps you didn’t know there was a fight. I bet you’ve been stumped by fare card machines at every subway system you've ever visited. Oh, the wasted tourist hours! The Metropolitan Transit Authority has put an end to it. Everyone can pay the fare with just a tap of a credit card, or phone.  As a bonus, once you are underground you have a veritable buffet of people watching. As the cars go by it’s like watching a sequence of frames from a comic book—here’s one with the girl with the green and magenta hair, here’s one with the boy dribbling a basketball, and here’s one where a passenger is lying flat on the bench seats, fast asleep. 

Basketball shoes with bows on the subway

From the Met we took the train to Long Island City in Queens, AKA “the new Williamsburg," for an art show featuring Rachel Hayden, a talented artist and one of Peter and Nila’s besties. A garrulous gallery owner told us that the space, the 5-50 Gallery is the site of a former stone carving business, but it just looked like a big empty garage to me.

Walking through Queens

We then walked, yes walked, borough to borough, from Queens to Brooklyn, enjoying the industrial wasteland that led us to the Pulaski bridge over Newton Creek. 

We were rewarded for our tri-borough expedition by dinner at Paulie Gees in Greenpoint. Outstanding pizzas like A Whiter Shade of Kale cooked in a wood-fired oven straight from Napoli.  

A green getaway

Sunday morning I went to the Brooklyn Bridge Park which is about the best place for a run/walk/ride ever invented. Beautiful wide pedestrian and bike paths, diversionary areas of greenery full of healthy, happy trees, fields for soccer, courts for basketball, sand for beach volleyball, all with a stunning view of the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty. 

 

Later we took the train into Manhattan to meet Fred at Grand Sichuan, which was devoid of noise and customers. But Fred knew his way around the menu and steered us to soup dumplings, and Chengdu Spicy and Aromatic Fish. The we stopped at the International Center for Photography and saw the year-end show by the students. 

 

Ivy at home in Tucson

The last night we ate pizza at Roberta’s with our friend Ivy. Wildly popular and delicious despite its dubious Bushwick setting, the restaurant features a festive Tiki bar where people enjoy spicy hibiscus daiquiris and after enough of these, Bushwick becomes Hawaii. For a girl who has a Tucson tattoo on her arm, she is about far away as you can get. But she loves it.

The triborough weekend adventure did take its toll, so to speak. Using “tri” kinds of transportation, walking, trains, and Ubers we covered a lot of territory.  I was a little dizzy on the ride home. Is it any wonder? Is it any Stevie Wonder?

Peter's surprise 30th birthday party