NYC Girls' Weekend: Day 4

Day 4 of our trip was September 11--and it was a bit eerie to be in the city not only on 9/11, but on a day just like that awful day in 2001--a Tuesday morning, warm weather, crisp blue sky. We had seen several fire stations with memorials to fallen comrades; on our way to breakfast on the 11th, we passed a station in SoHo where the men were in their dress blues, welcoming (I assume) family members of lost firefighters. A strange occurrence on the subway later made us a little edgy. And as we wandered throughout the city, especially down in the Financial District, I kept thinking of what it must have been like on that day. So unimaginable...

We took the subway to NoLita for breakfast at Prince Street Cafe, recommended by my friend Danielle. The special trip out of our way was well worth it--besides getting to see yet another part of Manhattan, I'm pretty sure the French Toast Vanilla and Citrus Brioche was the best I've ever had in my life. So, so good!

Then we caught a train back uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I read somewhere that if you looked at every object in the Met for five seconds, it would take you more than three years to get through the whole museum! We came with a list of a few highlights to hit, but it was still completely overwhelming. I can't say I've ever been a big art-museum girl, but I'm increasingly drawn to fine art; if I lived in the city, I'd want a Met membership and I'd go often. So much beauty, so much talent and history. Two of my favorite things of the highlights we saw were the Arms & Armor hall...

 

...just look at the intricate detailing on this suit of armor!:

 

...and Camille Pissarro's paintings:

 

But I was struck by so many things...the gorgeous lines of marble sculptures; the texture of Van Gogh's paintings; the sheer scale of Washington Crossing the Delaware. Our Met visit was topped off, literally, by rooftop views of Central Park and the skyline...

 

...as well as Tomas Saraceno's Cloud City sculpture (have to give my mom credit for suggesting this cool shot of me, the reflected skyline and the sculpture):

 

From the Met, we traveled back to the southern tip of the island to start our second Stray Boots tour. First we explored Battery Park, which has several tributes to the fallen firefighters of 9/11.

 

We caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, then began the Wall Street and Old Manhattan tour, which took us through the oldest park in the city, Bowling Green (the revolutionaries cut off the crowns that used to cap the fence posts in 1776):

 

...past the famous charging bull, up Broadway to Trinity Church and then to the Federal Reserve. At this point my mom's camera died, and I haven't gotten pictures from my aunt's camera yet. Unfortunately, at the Federal Reserve we took a wrong turn, and walked several blocks before we realized our mistake. By that point we had run out of time to finish the tour, as we had flights to catch. Still, it was a great way to explore--I'd definitely do a Stray Boots tour again. Learning a little history about the oldest part of Manhattan was fascinating.

The bright side of our wrong turn was that it put us near a different subway station--which meant I got to stop in Chinatown after all! I had been hoping to grab authentic jiao zi, something introduced to us a couple of years ago by our friends who used to live in China. One of the best dumpling places in the city was near our itinerary route on Monday, but we had to rearrange those plans. I hadn't quite given up on the idea, and realized that another dumpling place was just a few blocks from the Canal Street station where we'd have to change trains. So I put Mom and Judy on the right train to get back to our hotel (they had no desire for Chinatown *or* extra walking), and ran over to Tasty Dumpling, a little hole-in-the-wall on Mulberry Street that sells the best fried dumplings in Chinatown. I sat in Columbus Park enjoying my jiao zi and listening to two elderly men playing Chinese music. It was the experience as much as the food.

From Chinatown, I had just enough time to get back to the hotel, grab my luggage, and set off on another public transportation adventure. I didn't want to pay cab fare since I had the unlimited subway pass, so I  opted to take the subway out to Queens and catch a transfer bus to LaGuardia. I'll spare you the details, but it was a pretty stressful trip, with me freaking out that I was cutting it too close. Thankfully it all worked out just fine (and then my plane ended up being delayed, go figure). So I sat at the gate using the free iPads to complete our Old Manhattan tour with the help of Google :)

And that was our trip! So, so, fun. Priceless memories with my mom and my aunt in the city I love more each time I visit. Thanks, Mom and Aunt Dewey, for a fabulous 30th birthday celebration!


Previously:
Prologue: how the trip came about
Day 1: 9/11 memorial, Thai food and a Broadway show
Day 2: Upper West Side church and brunch, library, Union Square tour
Day 3: Grand Central, Brooklyn Bridge, Gramercy Park, The High Line

NYC Girls' Weekend: Day 3

Day 3 began bright and early: my mom and aunt wanted to watch Good Morning America being filmed live in Times Square.

 

So we stood around outside doing that for a while, and watching for celebrities. No one I really cared about, but it was funny to watch my mom and aunt get all excited about the GMA personalities. We actually stood for a while in the little fenced-off area for the paparazzi, next to the door where GMA guests enter and exit--I snapped this photo of Trista and Ryan from The Bachelorette.

 

Then we ate breakfast at a little diner called Evergreen before heading to Grand Central Terminal.

Aunt Judy had never been there, and we needed to pass through it via subway anyway, so we came up into the terminal to gawk a bit. Sadly, I had all kinds of camera issues this trip. First, I forgot that my 50mm lens really isn't ideal for tourist photography. Not a huge issue since I had my pocket point-and-shoot which has a wide angle lens...until the battery died. Then I filled up the memory card on my Nikon. Then I killed the battery on my mom's camera!

Anyway, at Grand Central we caught a train down to the Brooklyn Bridge,

then walked across the East River to Brooklyn. 

Definitely a fun (free!) thing to do, though I would suggest starting in Brooklyn instead, and walking *toward* Manhattan (we spent most of the walk turning around and rubbernecking).

 

From there we returned to the Flatiron District to finish our walking tour. Here are my mom and aunt completing a photo challenge--this picture cracks me up! :)

The last few clues took us to Gramercy Park, another fascinating historical neighborhood I'd never visited. The park looked so enticing, and we needed a place to sit and rest--we were startled to find it gated and locked! Turns out it is the only remaining private park in the city; only residents of the adjacent homes have keys.

For lunch, we ended up at Pete's Tavern, the oldest continually operating restaurant and bar in NYC. During Prohibition, it was disguised as a flower shop.

It's also known as the tavern where O. Henry wrote "The Gift of the Magi"--and a hotspot for celebrities, apparently. The food wasn't anything spectacular, but the atmosphere and the history were really fun.

 

Our tour concluded back at Union Square with a recommendation to treat ourselves at Max Brenner's "Chocolate by the Bald Man". So we did. The service was kind of terrible and the prices steep, but there's nothing like dipping an "OMG Cookie with dark chocolate" into melted milk chocolate.

A little bit of heaven in my mouth. Plus my aunt and I split a piece of s'mores pizza. You'd have to have a ridiculous sweet tooth to enjoy it, but since I do, we were in the right place.

With our tour over, we were only a couple of blocks from Strand Book Store, "New York's legendary home of 18 miles of new, used and rare books." I took the opportunity to browse the New York history section and pick up a couple of bargains.

Then I realized that we were just a short walk from Everyman Espresso in the East Village, recommended by my favorite food blogger. Deb at Smitten Kitchen says of their latte with faintly spiced Mexican chocolate, "I’m pretty sure I wept the first time I tried it." So I left Mom and Aunt Judy to sit and rest while I ran over a few blocks to try one for myself. I can't say I really tasted the spices, and I didn't cry, but holy cow, was that an amazing latte. So incredibly smooth and rich and creamy. I don't think I've ever had a coffee that smooth.

From there we crossed town to walk The High Line, a park built on an old elevated railway on the West Side. Another new neighborhood (Meatpacking District/Chelsea), with views of the city from a unique angle. The railway has been landscaped beautifully, and early evening was the perfect time to stroll the length of it.

 

After all that, we were spent. We returned to the hotel and crashed for a while before going back out to grab a late bite at Junior's.

[Day 4: NoLita brunch, the Met, Old Manhattan tour and dumplings in Chinatown]

Previously:

Prologue: how the trip came about

Day 1: 9/11 memorial, Thai food and a Broadway show

Day 2: Upper West Side church and brunch, library, Union Square tour

NYC Girls' Weekend: Day 2

Sunday morning's breakfast on day two of our NewYork girls' weekend featured a nice slice of humble pie. You see, when I'm in New York, I like to pretend I belong there. I know the names of the neighborhoods. I don't wait for the "walk" light at crosswalks. I can navigate the subway system. So well can I navigate the subway system, in fact, that I can rush you onto a train just before it leaves the station--only to realize that it's an express train, which will take you 40 blocks north of your stop. Nice, huh? I was so concerned about missing the train and having to wait 20 minutes for the next one that I didn't look closely enough. Thankfully we'd allowed plenty of extra time, so we got on a downtown train and rode back, no big deal, and I got knocked down a peg or two :)

Our destination was Redeemer Presbyterian Church's West Side campus, where I was fervently hoping to hear Tim Keller. He typically preaches at four of the church's six Sunday services, but they do not publish the schedule, so we just had to pick one and hope for the best. Unfortunately Keller wasn't around, but the service was still great. The music was stellar, as you might expect in New York: a piano and brass quintet played a Vivaldi concerto for the prelude/offertory/benediction! And a lovely soloist led the singing. David Bisgrove, the pastor who preached, gave a wonderful sermon on the story of Naaman--in fact, if I'd only heard it and not seen him, I might have thought it was Tim Keller. Not only was it a sermon I could imagine Keller preaching, but their voices even sounded alike.

After church we walked just around the corner to an Upper West Side brunch spot called Good Enough to Eat--only to find a long line stretching down the sidewalk.

 

I didn't know if Mom and Aunt Judy would want to wait, but they said, "Of course--that means it's good!" And oh, it was. I'm normally a sweet-breakfast girl, but I wanted to get a good, pure taste of their strawberry butter, which I'd never heard of until I read about it on more than one restaurant website. My BLT omelette was fantastic, and the strawberry butter on my biscuits...yeah, I could have eaten it with a spoon. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

 

Our next stop was the New York Public Library's "main branch," the landmark building on Fifth Avenue.

 

Beaux-Arts architecture is my favorite style. Just absolutely majestic and awe-inspiring. We started out with a guided tour but ended up ditching it to explore on our own (the sweet old man who led it was pretty long-winded). So many gorgeous architectural details...

 

 plus the Rose Reading Room (which you've probably seen in movies):

...and the stuffed animals that inspired A.A. Milne to write Winnie the Pooh. I was drooling over the children's collection.

Then it was on to Union Square for an interactive walking tour/scavenger hunt from Stray Boots. Given that I could be happy just walking up and down the streets of New York, this seemed ideal: a tour conducted via text messages. So you go on your own timetable, you have no annoying guide; you can make pit-stops and detours. They point out all kinds of things you wouldn't otherwise know to look for, and you get to learn fascinating trivia along the way. Stray Boots has these tours in several major cities, and more than a dozen of them in various Manhattan neighborhoods. We started with the Union Square and the Flatiron District tour, which took us up Broadway to the Flatiron Building and Madison Square Park.

 

While we were there, we grabbed dinner at the Shake Shack. It's technically a chain now, but it met my criteria since it started as a hot dog cart in Madison Square Park--the one where we ate was the original location. The burgers and fries were good but not spectacular (I think Five Guys is probably better), and the line was awfully long. I did really enjoy my Shack Attack Concrete though--"concrete" is their word for blizzard/McFlurry/etc., made with frozen custard, and mine included hot fudge, chocolate sprinkles, and chocolate truffle cookie dough. And it was a great spot for soaking up a gorgeous late summer evening.

Bellies full, we resumed our tour and explored a few more landmark buildings in the area

before it got completely dark and we decided to put the rest on hold for the next day.

 

Back in Times Square, incidentally, we spotted Snoop Dogg and the Naked Cowboy (who is apparently now accompanied by a Naked Indian...only in New York) before calling it a night.

[Day 3: Grand Central, Brooklyn Bridge, Gramercy Park, The High Line]

Previously:
Prologue: how the trip came about
Day 1: 9/11 memorial, Thai food and a Broadway show

NYC Girls' Weekend: Day 1

My New York adventure began with a thunderstorm that closed LaGuardia to all incoming traffic and diverted my plan to Allentown, Pennsylvania. UGH! But it really could have been so much worse. I arrived only about two hours late, and my mom and aunt waited at the airport for me. We had to rearrange our itinerary a bit, but no major harm done. We took a thrilling (and expensive, oy!) cab ride into Manhattan and checked into the Hotel Edison near Times Square.

Our first order of business was to buy unlimited-ride subway passes, since I had plans for us to be alllll over the city. We took a train to lower Manhattan and grabbed a late lunch at a decent but unremarkable cafe.

I spent as much time researching restaurants as I did planning other things for us to do. My goal was to avoid chain restaurants at all costs, instead going out of the way to eat at places that were uniquely New York. If I can eat there in Ohio or in Tennessee, why on earth would I want to waste time there in Manhattan?? My mom and aunt are not the adventurous foodies that Steve and I [like to pretend we] are, but they were GREAT sports and let me call the shots, within reason, since it was my birthday trip. I had some hits and some misses, and some plans had to get rearranged, including Saturday lunch--since my flight came in late, we didn't have time for the SoHo sandwich shop I'd found. But the New York-style pizza slice I had at Cafe Bravo was good for being impromptu.

We had passes to visit the 9/11 Memorial on Saturday afternoon, something I hadn't thought of, but which my mom and aunt had requested. I'm so glad they did. After seeing the World Trade Center towers way back when, and seeing Ground Zero as a rubble-filled pit in early 2003, I got to see the monuments established in tribute to the victims and heroes of 9/11. The names engraved in bronze around the actual footprints of the towers give you an overwhelming sense of the scope of the loss, making it at once enormous, and very personal.

Since my brother is a firefighter, I feel a special draw toward, and awed admiration for, the firefighters who led the charge *into* the towers when everyone else was rushing *out*. I found the names of men about whom I've read books:

 

The arrangement of the names is unusual and very deliberate--rather than alphabetical, they are grouped into "meaningful adjacencies." First responders are together...each of the four flights...

 

...people who worked for the same company... Within those groupings, family members had the option to request that their loved one's name be listed beside specific people. The memorial website explains: "Some requests were between relatives and friends; others were between people who had just met, but who responded together as events unfolded. This design allows the names of family, friends, and colleagues to be together, as they lived and died." I saw a handful of names like this, which were particularly piercing:

We saw the Survivor Tree, which was salvaged from the wreckage only to be uprooted in a storm while it was being revived at a Bronx nursery. It survived that, too, and was replanted at the site:

 

And it was moving to see the Freedom Tower going up in view of the memorial--such tremendous loss and tragedy, yet such spirit rising taller, grander, hopeful.

After our visit there, we went out for dinner and a Broadway show. Crunched for time, I was afraid we were going to have to forego my evening restaurant choice as well, but it turned out perfectly. We ate in Hell's Kitchen at a Thai place called Room Service, which I cannot recommend highly enough. The ambiance was classy and hip, not at all touristy...

...the service was FAST, which we needed to make it to our show, and the food was fantastic. My Pad Thai was so delicious, and Mom and Aunt Judy, who'd never had Thai food, both raved about what they ordered. AND, did I mention we each paid under $10 for our entrees? In Manhattan! Thanks to Carmin for the winning recommendation.

As we walked to the theater, we had our first celebrity sighting. A wedding between two theater moguls was just letting out, and as charter buses waited to load glamorously-dressed guests, we spotted Judith Light (who remembers watching Who's the Boss back in the 80s??). We found out later that it had been quite the guest list: Barbara Walters, Tyra Banks, Donald Trump. But we didn't have time to stand around and gawk, because we had tickets to Nice Work if You Can Get It, a new Gershwin musical starring Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara.

I could have listened to O'Hara sing all night long; she was phenomenal. Honestly, though, I was a bit disappointed with my show selection. Some of the themes/music/costumes were pretty risque; a lot of the plot celebrated/winked at promiscuity (the main character, Broderick, falls in love with O'Hara while engaged to his fourth wife). It wasn't the 1920s feel-good family musical I was expecting, though there were some funny parts, and the ending was pretty satisfying. All in all, I'd recommend downloading O'Hara's songs from iTunes and getting tickets to Newsies or Wicked instead.

Once the show was over, we couldn't resist running back to a little bakery we'd passed on the way called Schmackary's, for after-theater cookies. I had to try one with candied bacon in it--yum. Can't resist that salty-sweet combination...and doesn't bacon make everything better?

And that was day one!

[Day 2: Upper West Side church and brunch, library, Union Square tour]

Previously:
NYC Girls' Weekend

NYC Girls' Weekend

I'm not sure when or how my love affair with New York City began. I have to sheepishly admit that Stacey McGill of The Baby-sitters Club may have had something to do with it. But from the first time I visited Manhattan, on a summer vacation with my family in 1995, I was officially hooked.

Since then, I've been back for family vacations, choir trips, and even college visits (I was this close to attending NYU before choosing Indiana Wesleyan instead...talk about polar opposites!). I love the city more every time I go. I can't even explain what happens when I step off a train or out of a cab and onto a busy New York sidewalk. It's like it's just in my blood. AAAHHHH, I'm giddy just thinking about it.

But with my brother-in-law no longer living near the city, and my husband hating it (gasp! for shame!), I sadly had no prospects of returning anytime soon. That is, until my mom and I had an email exchange back in March that went like this...

Me:

Here's a thought to consider.
Favorite daughter turns 30 = girls' weekend in NYC?
Obviously I'm not talking about the actual birthday weekend, since that's a mere two weeks away :) But what do you think, could we make that happen later this year? Like, Steve's present to me could be a plane ticket, and your present could be the hotel room?

Mom:

I LOVE your idea!!!! I only wish I would have thought of it! Your dad even said I could go. :)
...Let's do it!!

I then decided I wanted to invite my beloved aunt, my mom's older sister:

So I'll just cut right to the chase :)
Mom and I are planning a girls' weekend in NYC to celebrate (belatedly) my 30th birthday. Are you in?

Aunt Judy:

Oh my goodness, I am so-ooo in!!
...Now I won't be able to sleep thinking about how much fun this could be.

:) Thus began the planning for an epic adventure that my uncle would later refer to as "New York City boot camp"--ha! We converged on the city in early September and spent four glorious days packing in as much of the city as possible. All of us had been there more than once and had done a lot of the typical touristy things (Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, etc.), so I had a blast scouring the internet for ideas and recommendations for different things to see and do. I've been wanting to do a big travelogue series ever since. Stay tuned for a play-by-play with photos...this prelude has already gotten long and naptime is running short!

Day 1: 9/11 memorial, Thai food and a Broadway show
Day 2: Upper West Side church and brunch, library, Union Square tour
Day 3: Grand Central, Brooklyn Bridge, Gramercy Park, The High Line
Day 4: NoLita brunch, the Met, Old Manhattan tour and dumplings in Chinatown


Previously in New York:
"I Want to Wake Up in a City That Never Sleeps"
I Heart NY