New York City Daytrip

I’m not sure what starting me thinking about New York City again, but yesterday, somewhat impulsively–but with a little planning–I decided to visit. By myself. Cheaply. Without a concrete plan, I did a lot and spent just a little over $100.

I’ve been to NYC about half a dozen times. As a freshman at MIT, I took the train down from Boston, stayed at the West Side YMCA, did a quick sightseeing tour and hopped the train back the next day. A couple of years later, I followed the Gary Hart campaign to New York and camped out on someone’s floor in a Central Park apartment for a week while we rode the subway trains gathering petition signatures. I think that experience imprinted on me not just the “grit factor” of doing a crazy thankless task but also the geography of the city–enough so I feel “comfortable” in the immensity of it all. In 1992, I spent a week in the city with the Democratic National Convention–commuting back to a friend’s house in Staten Island every night.

Perhaps this trip began by watching one too many episodes of Louis C.K. Maybe it was cabin fever after my family went up to Lake Champlain while I started work on a new contract project and continued my job search. I thought I would bike and run every morning–but then it rained for 3 days. As the weather cleared I decided it was time to do more than just another bike ride or 6-mile run.

Fung Wah!

In Boston, there’s an infamous way to get to New York: The Fung Wah bus. Twenty years ago, they had a booth in Chinatown with a sign: “New York: $10.”  Sometimes I saw crowds of Chinese people and students lined up outside. When I moved back to Boston in 2002, I heard stories of how they now had a counter at South Station. I also heard about their bus crashes and fires on the local news.

The trip now costs a whopping $15. You can’t beat $15, especially when you are looking to go cheap. So I bought my ticket online and purchased a return ticket for the last 11pm bus. I drove to a 24-hour parking lot ($11 for 24 hours!), walked 5 minutes to South Station, checked in and hopped on the first bus of the day at 6:30am.

Born To Run

The bus ride was uneventful. No fires, no rollovers, no raucous partiers. I brough along my wife’s Kindle to read Born to Run. Christopher McDougall’s book is about the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico’s Copper Canyons and their incredible endurance. But it’s more about the joy and love of running and at a deeper level, the power of joy and love to enable us to accomplish things that seem impossible. The miles flew by and three-and-a-half hours later, we were in New York’s Chinatown.

TKTS to Broadway

I wasn’t completely without a plan when I left Boston. I had some things I was thinking about doing and one of those was to see Green Day’s American Idiot. It’s a 90-minute show that starts at 8pm though and I wasn’t sure I would really be able to pull that off. But I thought I’d see what developed.

TKTS sells day-of-show 50%-off theater tickets starting around 3pm in Times Square. From my 1980’s visit, I remembered long lines and could only imagine what that would be like 25 years later, but there is a satellite TKTS office in South Street Seaport that opens at 11am. Perfect. I walked from Chinatown and arrived just as they were posting the available shows. I stepped into line to wait half an hour–and got my ticket.

So, ticket in hand–and firmly committed to a 12-hour day–I set out across lower Manhattan.

Ground Zero – World Trade Center

I didn’t know anyone who died on 9/11, but after that day, we started to think about how our life on the West Coast separated us from our parents. We started  thinking about starting our own family. Now…my daughter starts 1st grade in two weeks. 9/11 didn’t “cause” things to happen, but it made us reexamine our lives and put some perspective against what had seemed important to us before.

I remember the World Trade Center from the late 1980s. Somewhere around that time, I rode to the top for the “worldview.” Later, in ‘95, my wife and I had some of the best falafel sandwiches I can remember from a vendor in Zuccotti Park. Yesterday, as I made my way across from Wall St, I remembered the park and begin to feel a sense of things different.

As I looked into the construction pit–now full of cranes and rising steel–it looked like any massive construction project. But then I looked up and tried to see what was no longer there. What once had blotted out the sky was now filled with light. Visually, it was wrong. It is hard to capture what is missing in pictures or words without the memory. I wonder as we fill that space with newness and as a new generation imprints on the newly built environment–will they feel the absence of what was? I can only imagine that feeling for the thousands affected by the gaping hole ripped not only in the sky or earth, but in their lives from the pain of those lost.

The photo I should have taken was as I ascended the Liberty bridge. One man crouched on the stairs, hands grasping the chain link, face pressed up close to peer through a small gap to see directly into the main pit. I wish I’d captured that moment. Whether he was fascinated by the construction or thinking about 911, who knows, but it stood in contrast to business of life moving on around me.

MoMA

I made my way north through what seemed and endless sea of shopping malls and shiny affluence and boarded a #2 train to head uptown.

When I was thinking of visiting the city, I thought of museums and remembered a rather stuffy tour of the Museum of Modern Art in 1992 when I was staying in New York for the Democratic National Convention. But I remembered the Monet water lilies and that they had a number of other impressionist works, so I figured if I had one museum to visit, this would be the one.

I’m no art history major. I don’t have a clue actually. But even since high school French class, I felt an affinity to the Impressionists. That was reinforced in 2005 when my wife and I took a biking trip in Provence and rode through the fields Van Gogh painted. So it’s kind of cool to have been where this was:

The feature exhibit was Matisse. Yawn. Sorry, I really tried to get into it, but his stuff just doesn’t do anything for me. I left the exhibit wondering if maybe I do need an art class to appreciate this stuff. But then I found Picasso, Van Gogh, Cezanne and Monet…

Nearly everyone in the museum was taking photos of the art which seems kind of lame to me. You can just go online, right, and download a copy. You can look at the photos in a book, right? Well, yes, but…

There is something more to the experience in person. There is a three-dimensional aspect to the canvas and also a situational aspect to viewing things at a world museum where hundreds of thousands come to regard what has stood the test of time as defining art. The camera…we document the experience, not so much the art. I was there; I took this photo. I captured the image and in my memory I can reconnect the experience through the photo. The photo in a book has no context for me.

It is similar to the olive trees. We were there. We felt the wind and breathed the fresh air as we rode through the fields of Provence. We took photos. I absorb Van Gogh’s work. I connect it all in a tapestry of ideas and experience that spans time and space and creates something rich within. The artists do all that and then express it in a way that millions can connect.

Central Park

I spent a few hours at the MoMA, then left and headed north to Central park. It was a spectacular day–mid 70s, clear blue sky, hundreds of people of all ages and backgrounds out enjoying the park. If I lived here…I’d be on a bike or running or something, but I didn’t exactly line up a shower stall for my day visit, so I just walked through the park and started to think about my evening plan. I wanted to go back downtown to Greenwich Village. I wasn’t sure what I’d do there, but I didn’t remember much from my last visit. So I hopped on a 72st subway and rode down to Washington Park.

In the Shadow of Jane Jacobs

The plan at this point was to get something to eat, then head back up to Broadway for the 8pm American Idiot show. It was still before 5pm, so not even the senior citizens would be eating dinner yet, but I walked around a bit and eventually ended up at the White Horse Tavern. It was the only place that had people at this early hour, so I secured an outside table ordered a beer and burger and drank in the scene.

Now I started thinking…Hudson Street–that’s significant, right? It has been a while since I wrote specifically about urban planning and economic development, but as I recall, Hudson Street is where Jane Jacobs, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities lived. I read the book only 2 years ago–it’s now almost 50 years since it was published, but it remains an inspiring call to arms for those who would change society through architecture and planning. I think if I’d read that book in college, I’d have gone to architecture school instead of law school.

I did a quick search on my iPhone–noticing the battery was about to fail–and located an article on Jane Jacobs’s townhouse being sold recently for $3.3 million. And the address–555 Hudson St. I looked across the street to see where I was and saw 554. Yes, I’m sitting practically under her windowsill.

2010 Hudson Street is nothing like the world described in 1961. But step off what is now the main drag and you can still sense the vitality of what has become a pretty gentrified urban environment. There are playgrounds and neighborhood stores. But it’s not like the Freewheelin’ Bob Dyan album cover. Students hang out at the bar but instead of talking about how Dylan Thomas died here or whatever, they are talking about their job interviews and how their friends moved to Brooklyn where they can afford to live.

American Idiot

I was a bit nervous about the whole Broadway adventure. I knew that if I missed that 11pm bus…I would be screwed, stuck in Chinatown at midnight with no ride home. So as my iPhone battery continued to go red and show 20% or less remaining, I double-checked the subway path home and set out a little early to give myself plenty of time before the show started at 8.

Earlier, I had downloaded iTrans, an iPhone app which gives you a map of the subway and helps you figure out how to get around. It was marginally useful. Mainly, I just looked at the map, but I did figure out there was a B/D train from 42nd St/Bryant Park that would take me to Grand St–about 2 blocks from the Fung Wah bus. That should work to get away from the theater around 945pm and leave plenty of room for any Fung Wah surprises.

So I hopped on the 2 Uptown to 42nd Street and walked the route from the St James theater on 44th St to plan my exit strategy: across 44th St to 6th Ave and down 2 blocks. D to Brooklyn, but make sure to get off at Grand or plan on taking a trip to Brooklyn.

With the exit route prepared, I grabbed a beer and then went to the theater about 1/2 hour before the show.

It’s a great show. It’s kind of confusing even for someone who has been listening to both albums (the show includes songs from 21st Century Breakdown and American Idiot) for months, but you know…these things are “non-linear.” It’s an emotional experience, not a story with a neat solution for angry depressed youth. So like those Picasso works–I can’t tell you the meaning or the why of it all, but I can tell you the feeling.

The opening is the most powerful. It’s an all-out assault that captures the overwhelming and confusing media barrage of conflict that kids today grow up experiencing. My eyes are watering because it really hits me in the face. Our media culture exposes so much violence and conflict to us all that we are left wondering “what am I supposed to do with this information?” Especially when we are young and idealistic, we want to DO something but it is just overwhelming. I think watching this production shares that feeling across what might be a generational and memory divide.

We worry about the future we are leaving our kids. Perhaps we should worry more about the present.

When the show ended, I found my way to the subway and headed back downtown as planned.

Fung Wah encore

I arrived at 139 Canal St with plenty of time to spare, but the scene grew testy as more and more people arrived for that last bus. We stood on the sidewalk next to the off ramp from the Manhattan Bridge, and observed an incessant ritual of taxis angrily blowing their horns at cars unfamiliar with the concept of the flashing red light at Canal St. (Turn already!)

The crowd appeared to exceed what would fit on a single bus. The bus operators began to run back and forth, counting and recounting us and yelling at each other and into walkie talkies. Then they told us to go. Everyone picked up like a herd of antelope started by the sight of a lion and ran towards the bus. They stopped us and told us to line up in a single line. Then the counting continued while people in line started to worry about standing or being left behind.

It seemed clear to me that we’d be OK. There were at least 30 people behind me in line and they are not going to send us all home, right? Then, they told the people in line to get on the bus…but stopped at me and told me and everyone else to wait.

Eventually, I think we all got on the bus. I grabbed a seat and settled in for a three-and-a-half hour ride home that I mostly slept through. My car was there. I was home and in bed by 3:30am.

What a great trip!