Have you seen New York lately?
It’s doing fine, thank you. Oh, the brass and swagger were
missing for a while, still aren’t what they were, but even
at 88 percent of its energy, the old town—my old town—has
more going for it than any other city you can name.
I don’t mean just theaters and restaurants, museums and
jazz spots, department stores and specialty shops. I’m
talking about the human quotient: the raw personality of the
place, the unrehearsed theater playing out on every street corner,
the action, the chatter, the kibitzing. Or as Walt Whitman put
it, the “blab of the pave.”
April is anything but the cruelest month in New York. It’s
a coming out, a re-awakening. It’s time for cherry trees
and azaleas to pop open in Central Park, for afternoon baseball
to return to the Bronx and Queens, for sidewalk and garden cafés
to dust themselves off all over town. So get ready to spend
three perfect days soaking up the spirit of a new New York.
DAY ONE
/ Wake up in the heart of Midtown at  The
Algonquin, a literary landmark at 59 West 44th Street. The
165-room hotel was nicely refurbished a few years ago, but
you can still hear the echoes of the Round Table crowd (including
Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley) who lunched here daily
in the 1920s. Like the institution of Broadway theater, The
Algonquin is celebrating its 100th anniversary. Actors have
long been among The Algonquin’s faithful, from Douglas
Fairbanks and Orson Welles down through Lily Tomlin and Kevin
Kline.
To get your bearings from on high, head for the Empire State
Building at 34th and Fifth, an easy morning stroll. Pass The
New York Public Library at Fifth and 42nd Street, the mighty
marble edifice guarded by two crouching lions. The library doubles
as a first-rate museum, and behind it Bryant Park has become
an upbeat green meadow that fills on warm days with lunching,
sunbathing New Yorkers. Often there’s entertainment, perhaps
musical numbers from current Broadway shows belted out by the
lead actors themselves. Have a cappuccino at one of the kiosks
in front of the library.
Since the  Empire
State Building opened in 1931, more than 120 million visitors
(3.8 million a year) have ascended to its observatories. In
the wake of 9/11, the building once again provides the best
and loftiest view in New York. You’re whisked to the
86th floor, and from either the glass-enclosed pavilion or
surrounding promenade you’ll think you’re looking
halfway across the United States. Some great movie moments
have been enacted here—Cary Grant’s futile wait
for Deborah Kerr in An Affair
to Remember, the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan
hookup in Sleepless in Seattle.
If the lines at street level are too long, come back later:
The deck is open till midnight, and the last elevator goes
up at 11:15.
Taxi down to Chelsea, the city’s burgeoning art district.
Here, in a welter of brick-and-concrete warehouse buildings
and garages between 28th and 14th streets, Sixth Avenue and
the Hudson, are more than 150 galleries. The art covers the
waterfront, from David Dewey’s watercolors of Maine Coast
cottages to vast Richard Serra cavelike metal sculptures. The
heart of the district is a band of blocks from 24th to 26th,
between 10th and 11th avenues.
For lunch, drop into the hip  Bottino
at 246 10th Avenue, a cool Tuscan hangout for the art and
fashion crowds. Inside, there’s warm skylighting and
a series of small minimalist rooms with sleek Eames and Knoll
furniture. Try a tuna tartare starter, and then tuck into
ravioli verdi or sea bass in Merlot sauce.
After lunch, walk (or hop a cab) south to Washington Square,
the traditional crossroads of Greenwich Village. The park is
a maelstrom of Frisbee-throwing, chess-playing, stroller-pushing
bohemia. Head west on one of the quiet streets leading away
from the park. The outdoor basketball court at Sixth Avenue
and West Fourth Street has pickup and tournament games that
often draw spectators three deep at the mesh fence. Across Sixth,
Bleecker Street is a pocket of oldtime Italian New York. Zito
& Sons bakery (No. 259), once a fave of Frank Sinatra, is
packed with crisp fresh Italian loaves. At Faicco’s Pork
Store (No. 260), slabs of meat hang on hooks in the window.
For me, the true Village begins west of Seventh Avenue. Grove,
Bank, St. Luke’s Place, and Morton Street are narrow,
shaded, and quiet. It could be 1972 or even 1942. Christopher
Street, one of the west-pointing spokes from Sheridan Square,
is always festive. The Stonewall bar at No. 53 is a landmark
in gay rights history for a 1969 uprising in which gays resisted
police demands that they leave the premises. A purveyor of
coffee and tea since 1895,  McNulty’s
Tea & Coffee Co. (No. 109) is legendary in caffeine commerce.
Dark, littered, and chock-a-block with barrels and burlap
bags, McNulty’s stocks about 100 coffees, but it’s
the aroma of exotic teas that hits you.
Next, you’ll come to Hudson Street, a busy north-south
thoroughfare with plenty of antiques shops, saloons (the famous
White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas held court, is at No.
567), and a slew of good restaurants.  Mi
Cocina is a cozy corner spot at Jane and Hudson that serves
authentic Mexican dishes, rare in New York.
Stay up for some jazz.  The
Village Vanguard, behind a red awning at 178 Seventh Avenue,
is still a mainstay after 67 years. Coltrane, Miles, and Monk
all played here. There are sets nightly at 9:30 and 11:30
and a late-late set Saturday at 1 a.m. Around the corner at
Small’s, 183 West 10th Street, a cozy candlelit basement
of a joint, the jazz doesn’t give out till 8 a.m.
DAY TWO
/ Take breakfast in bed, and then catch a taxi uptown to 72nd
and Broadway. The Upper West Side may not be on most tourist
itineraries, but it should be. This was always rich literary
turf, its boundaries once defined by the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway
between 73rd and 74th streets (a wedding cake of a Beaux Arts
building) and Ralph Ellison’s apartment in Harlem. The
area is not as thick with bookstores and movie houses these
days, but creative types abound and chatter spills from cafés.
Food has become a chief commodity here, not so much because
of the restaurants, though they offer great ethnic variety and
value, but because of the string of outstanding markets and
delis.
Start with the  Fairway
Market (on Broadway between 74th and 75th), a once-modest
produce purveyor that in recent years has eaten up almost
a full city block in a vast expansion. Get ready to go shoulder
to shoulder with some picky and aggressive shoppers—a
common neighborhood species. Check out the cheese department,
voluminous and esoteric, famous for its tiny signs such as:
“Vare (Vah-ray), from the hills of Asturias, Spain, produced
by a farmer who has 200 goats and five houses.” You’ll
pass buckets of olives, and there’s a full sushi counter
with two slicers.
On the corner of 75th is the expanding  Citarella,
which began as a small fish market and is now brimming with
all manner of takeout and vast seafood and meat counters.
The seasonal window displays are as artful as the stuffed
wildlife exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History,
an Upper West Side landmark a few blocks away. At 80th and
Broadway, 
Zabar’s is still the reigning noshery in all of New
York. Grab a stool in the corner café for a cappuccino.
Then stroll the main food hall, past the cheeses (a match
for Fairway in variety if not in verbiage), a prepared-foods
counter that goes on forever, and another long glass case
(the heart of the original Zabar’s) holding smoked salmon,
whitefish, sturgeon, and other Sunday-morning delicacies.
The breads are to-die-for: sour rye, Russian pumpernickel,
raisin pecan, sourdough boule. For a genuine Upper West Side
experience, mosey a few blocks to 
Barney Greengrass, “The Sturgeon King,” at the same
site (541 Amsterdam) since 1929 and looking it. You’ll
enter a buzzing room with glass cases along one wall groaning
with sturgeon, smoked salmon, and other delicacies; the adjoining
room is a noisy coffee shop. Diners are deep in conversation
and pickled herring. Feast on triple-decker sandwiches, eggs
and omelets, or smoked fish platters.
Catch a cab or a bus across Central Park to Fifth Avenue and
 The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, at 82nd. On view through May 12
is “Surrealism: Desire Unbound,” featuring the heavy
hitters of that genre—Dali, Man Ray, Magritte.
When you’re ready to move on to the newest museum in
town, hike up Fifth to the  Neue
Galerie New York, a Beaux Arts mansion at 86th Street. Named
after Vienna’s famous Neue Galerie, it’s a celebration
of German and Austrian fine and decorative arts from 1890
to 1940—Beckmann, Klimt, Breuer, Mies Van der Rohe. Take
a load off at the museum’s Café Sabarsky, a work
of art in itself, modeled on the great cafés of Vienna.
Save tonight for the theater. It’s but a stroll away
from your hotel—the big Broadway houses, the off-Broadway
theaters of the far west 40s, and the TKTS booth with its
last-minute bargain tickets. For a pre-show bite, walk to
the venerable  Joe
Allen, at 326 West 46th Street. The rib-sticking fare includes
salads, burgers, and steak tartare. There’s always an
excited buzz in this old-style Manhattan saloon; actors fall
into the joint 10 minutes after their curtain.
DAY THREE
/ For a quick and quintessential New York breakfast, walk
to the  Cafe
Edison, at 228 West 47th Street. Its regulars—producers,
directors, showgirls, and other Broadway theater folk—call
it the Polish Tea Room, a glancing reference to the posh,
celebrity-favored Russian Tea Room on 57th. The place has
a slapdash warmth, the blintzes are legendary, and the matzo
brie (a sort of Jewish french toast) never disappoints.
Walk over to  Grand
Central Terminal, pausing to take in the beautiful vaulted
ceiling, and catch the Metro-North Railroad to  The
New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, a 22-minute ride.
Spring explodes across the parkland with blankets of color.
You’ll be drawn as if by magic to the 19th-century crystal
palace known as the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, the largest
Victorian glasshouse in the nation.
Hop the train back to Grand Central, and have a late lunch in
the Oyster Bar on the lower level. Step through the gilded doors
into the gilded past, a landmark eatery that opened with the
terminal in 1913. Choose from 20 to 30 varieties of oysters,
a like number of fish dishes, and chowders, stews, and pan roasts.
Put aside the rest of the day for Lower Manhattan. Take a cab
(or subway) from Grand Central to Canal on the West Side and
hike southward along Hudson, then Broadway. This is hip TriBeCa—the
triangle below Canal Street. You pass two historic churches,
remarkably unscathed by the 9/11 attacks: tiny St. Paul’s
Chapel, a headquarters for rescuers, then Trinity Church with
its grassy graveyard, resting place for such early New Yorkers
as Robert Fulton and Alexander Hamilton.
Turn away from Trinity Church and head east up Wall Street.
Darkness comes early to these cramped quarters, the financial
towers seeming to reach each other above the narrow streets.
Take in the noble, pillared New York Stock Exchange at Broad
and Wall and, cater-cornered from there, the statue of George
Washington on the steps of Federal Hall.
Head north and east to  South
Street Seaport, a lively and cleverly wrought marketplace
that celebrates New York’s early seafaring days. You
can loll in the newly re-cobbled main square, go aboard several
tall-masted ships, and whiff the Fulton Fish Market, whose
early-a.m. stalls have been shut down by this hour. Circle
back to Hudson Street and have dinner at  Acappella,
a handsome Northern Italian restaurant with brick walls, beamed
ceiling, and romantic lighting.
Catch a taxi back to The Algonquin for a farewell drink in the
hotel’s Oak Room, one of the best spots for late-night
cabaret. It’s oh-so convenient and oh-so New York. |
