men

Some of them can be quite persuasive.

You have your law text with you. (I do.)
You can call and find out about postponing your meeting. (I can.)
Do you want to stay until the conclusion of the trial? (This from Ed, and the answer is yes, I do.)

We’re at a critical juncture in the proceedings and things are at an explosive stage. There is a trial within a trial as various parties are scrambling to throw in their version of what they would like you to believe before the whole thing shuts down. In other words, a circus!


We eat an attorney’s lunch at the place just around the corner from the courthouse (Allbella). The waiter is happy to tell me that I can have an espresso. As of this spring, we have the machine!

Okay. Thanks. Make it a double.

We walk back from the courthouse and think to the days ahead. Tomorrow there is another pause in the proceedings, giving me time to catch up with work. Wednesday, the drama resumes, but only briefly. We expect to be home Thursday or Friday.



On our walk back to Bleecker, we pass the well tended these days world of SoHo. A guy is giving his point of view and it strikes me that everything about him exudes confidence.





...and, north of Houston, enter the more quirky world of the Village. I’m so used to seeing younger adults here – maybe because older types can’t handle the constant stair climbing in the elevator-less buildings. But, there are the exceptions.





There’s a grocery store here and I suggest we pick up a few essentials so that we can cut back on snacking on the run. The store is predictably expensive, but we get the bananas and the tasteless crackers that’ll work well with the $6 bottle of Cava we hauled in earlier.

A few steps before our entrance to the walk-up, we pass a pizza joint. New York style pizza, eaten at a narrow counter, on the run. Thin crust and light marinara. A slice with mushrooms, Ed says.





I think to myself – I’m glad I’m here. Even an occasional traveling companion needs a helping hand, or a person with whom he can share a pizza slice. And of course, the trial is at this point riveting. Speeding along to a brilliant (I hope) denouement. In the alternative, I’m picking up a truck load of observations on trying a complicated family/property case and enjoying feeling just a little like a New Yorker again.


Late, very late, we cross Bleecker and eat supper at a table on the sidewalk. Spanish rice on a warm spring evening.





But why is it that the half dozen photos I took today are all of men?

Sunday in New York

What would you do with it? I can’t think of a block of Manhattan left undiscovered. Yet here we are – another beautiful warm day, telling us to get up and get moving.

It’s not easy to get up from a deflated mattress – to push aside the computers, to put away anything when the only place to rest things on is a radiator cover that we carried over to serve as a shelf.





But by noon, we have a plan. Pickles. We’ll chase down the pickle place that Ed has proclaimed as the only good pickle place left in the city. Except that it’s not in Manhattan anymore. This March, it closed its doors on Orchard Street and moved to Brooklyn. We’ll find it. Inferior Brooklyn map in hand, we set out on foot. Starting in the West Village...





... with a pause for a nutritious breakfast. We’ve not paid attention to food during the daytime here. Sometimes it comes at us in large quantities (attorney lunches), sometimes in junky batches of scones and cookies, until a late dinner attempts to correct the imbalance. But on Sunday, we do it right: a simple egg and avocado sandwich on seven grain bread. There is such beauty in the ordinary!






Wanting to avoid the standard trek toward the court buildings, we cut in toward the east and pick up Mulberry Street in Little Italy. And what a surprise – the street has gone pedestrian and here it works! The sidewalks are taken over by people eating, the street belongs to the ramblers. Little Italy has turned into a lovely place for a Sunday stroll.





We cross Canal Street and, of course, everything changes. The Chinese fruit and vegetable stalls are squeezed into small spaces along the curb. I note that the exotic fruits are taken from crates that are from Vietnam.





But not only. Cherries from Florida are a steal at $4 for two pounds. And mangos – 75 cents each, most likely from Mexico or Guatemala. We buy two mangos and cover our hands with sticky mango juice as we peel the sweet fruit and eat it on the crowded street. I need a sink with running water.

On Chinatown’s Mott Street, we pass restaurants and food shops, but we’re not eating here. I can’t see us barging in with mango on our hands asking for bathroom privileges.

Ed pulls me into a building that announces itself as the Chinese Community Center. Downstairs, in a packed auditorium, two singers are performing.





We watch with clean hands, after making good use of their restrooms.


Sunday. We’re near the courthouse now and of course the area is completely shut down. The financial district of lower Manhattan on a week-end looks as if an eraser has taken out every New Yorker from the streets. But we’re also at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge and here, you see again the comfortable mix of tourists and city folk. We make our way across the bridge to Brooklyn.





So now we're in Brooklyn. Oh course, I could do a search on my iPhone and I would get some sense as to where the pickle store is. But it seems so pleasant just to walk, vaguely in the direction of the store. We continue past the Brooklyn courthouse buildings, past parks where joggers run and children kick soccer balls. But after a while, I falter.

Okay, Ed, I’m lost and I don’t know where we’re going.

You have an address?
Yes, even a subway stop, were we to take the subway. I thought we would walk. (We’d been walking for a couple of hours already, but in my mind, no walk is uninteresting or too long.

We ask a police officer to assess the distance to our final destination – 39th, around the Church Avenue stop.
You need to take a bus there. That’s really far.
No no, walking is okay. I count the subway stops. Eight. Eh, what’s eight stops on a beautiful day.
There’s a free shuttle from here to Church Street.
Free? – this from Ed.
Yes, because they’re working on the F line tracks. So we’re shuttling people between stops.

I give in. It’s already late in the afternoon and we have pickles to buy.

The bus takes us just to the edge of Borough Park: home to the highest concentration of Hasidic Jews outside Israel.





It hard for me to digest this abrupt change in neighborhoods. New York, to me, has always felt looser in its religious boundaries. Of course, there are conservative Jews and conservative Christians in every urban center of the country. But in Borough Park, there are nearly 100,000 people who appear, at least to the casual observer, to be as traditional in their lifestyle as the Amish in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.





Indeed, I read later that they maintain the highest birthrate in the city: nearly seven children per family. The children are quite beautiful and they seem to be dressed in the same way as their siblings – perhaps to distinguish them from the children of others?





We go into a bakery and pick out a handful of very tasty in a bland sort of way cookies.





Ed is the Jewish boy who stands out: no head cover, no traditional attire. I stand out in all ways. But unlike the Amish communities, the people here are not especially shy or suspicious of strangers (even as they like to protect their children from the bad influences of the outside world). They are, more than anything, oblivious to us.





And, unlike other insular communities, they are not opposed to the use of modern technologies.





We find the pickle lady. They calls themselves Ess-a-Pickle now.

So, you like it here?

Yes, it’s good for us to be here. I didn’t think I’d still see a camera once I left Manhattan! She laughs.

We buy a gallon and talk abut transporting the pickles back to Madison in a carry-on.
Drain the brine and make new brine once you get there – she tells us.
We also buy a quart for now. I know Ed will finish those by the time the day is done.
Please, the newer ones for me! (I like them to be new, not even half sour yet.)
Throw in a few for her, Ed sighs. Every pickle for him is a treasure.


We walk back to the bus that will take us to Brooklyn Heights. And once we cross an empty street with closed warehouses, we are crossing a great divide, as if crossing Canal Street, or any other street that manages to completely transform a neighborhood.

We’re in Bangladesh now.





And there is a street fair. Crowded, fragrant with grilled meats and the sweet smell of mango milk, colorful and almost exotic, particularly to us, having just spent an hour in a completely different environment.





I want to know what the festival is about. I ask the policeman, standing out as the only other non-Bengali in the crowd (besides us). He shrugs his shoulders. There’s another one coming up at the end of June – he points to a sign announcing this.
What’s that one about? I ask.
I don’t know. I don’t read their writing.

We stroll a little longer, but the music is loud and the day is quickly ebbing away from us and we still have quite the walk...

...back across the Brooklyn Bridge, back to Manhattan.


It’s late by the time we feel ready for dinner. For an hour or two we discuss the trial of the week ahead. Ed is staying and he has some small points that he wants to pay attention to. I’ll be leaving Monday evening. I haven’t enough of my work with me to continue doing it in New York.

But for this night we go back to an Ed family favorite – Katz’s Deli in the East Village area.










We buy a pastrami sandwich for me, a turkey one for him, on rye, with cole slaw and more pickles. Beers are sold late in grocery stores. We pick up those as well and head back for a picnic at our deflating mattress on Bleecker Street.

a New Yorker and an immigrant

You mean your family never took you to Coney Island? I ask Ed.
Not that I recall...

Not to the amusement park? Or the beach?

No, I don’t think so...
Or Brighton Beach? (Brighton Beach of Brooklyn is home to a significant number of Russian Jews and though I wouldn’t exactly identify Ed’s family with this very recent population of immigrants, I thought maybe they had stumbled down to visit. If only for the pickles. Ed’s family had a particular fondness for kosher dill pickles.)
No, no real New Yorker would have any reason to visit Brighton Beach.

I was a real New Yorker.

No you weren’t and anyway, you didn't regularly go to Brighton Beach.
I was a New Yorker! You left New York to go to college and never came back. I finished college in New York. Formative years! And when I was a kid, we went to Coney Island.
You were born in Poland. I was born in here. It’s in my blood!

We are, of course, bantering for the hell of it. We do that a lot here. In Madison, Ed can be very quiet. When he does banter with store clerks back home, I'm often squirming because I know they don't see it coming. In New York, they see it coming. Ed is in his element. His accent comes back, his hands are alive, he delivers the lines and then roars with laughter.

I often wonder why he has hated New York for so long (he doesn’t now, not on our visits here this year and the year before). He is the genuine article. Even though I carry a camera, people assume I live here, just because I walk next to him. They ask us directions. They ask us questions about real estate in the Village. And Ed plays the role of the friendly New Yorker very very well. It's a mistake to say New Yorkers are rude, he tells me more than once.



My last trip to Coney Island was in March of 2005 (yes, I blogged about it then). I went alone and it was perhaps for that reason that I found it a haunting experience. My childhood memories were or vast crowds having a wonderful time escaping the stifling air of the city. Coney Island had rides and food stands and a sprawling beach, with the cooling waters of the Atlantic. It’s an easy place to travel to – the last stop on the Q, D, F or B. But on my 2005 visit, the place was cold and empty.


Let’s go, real New Yorker, I tell Ed. Brighton Beach, before it gets discovered. Then Coney Island.


It’s a beautiful May day. Sunshine and a warm breeze. Short sleeve weather, even for me.





On our way to the subway, We pass a group of musicians with an energetic doo wop sound.






We pause to listen. They call themselves Spank and they’re superb. And they have a small, but tremendously appreciative audience.





We play cruises. The lead singer tells us. We’ve been all over the globe. He looks at his watch. Now I gotta go meet my girlfriend in Macy’s. Macy’s, on a nice day like this. She wants me to buy her perfume. Sweet smell, but it’s $130! I throw Ed a “see what men do for their girlfriends or traveling companions” look.



At the station we wait for the B train.

The D comes and goes. (That one only goes to Coney Island, I tell Ed. I thought we’d start with Brighton Beach. You might enjoy a swim there.)

The second D comes and goes. (That’s strange, Nina. You sure this is the right platform? Of course it is. I retort. See? The sign does say D and B.)

The third D comes and goes. (Maybe we should just take the Coney Island train... No, we’ve waited this long, just one more and if it’s not B, we’ll take it.)

I glance at my subway map and notice the fine print: B runs only on weekdays. Oh dear.
New Yorker, huh? Ed grins. What I like about Ed is that he always chooses to laugh at me rather than getting annoyed. Because we have now wasted half an hour waiting for a train that was not to be. And the ride on the local D to Coney Island is a 45 minute affair. In all, we’ll have spent a good part of the sunny May day enmeshed in the subway system.





Never mind. The day is fresh and brilliant as we alight in Coney Island. Ed asks – do they still have the original Nathan’s there?

Of course! (Nathan's Deli has been around since 1916, and in case you want to know where the idea of a hot dog eating champion arose, it was here. Record thus far: 68 hot dogs and buns in twelve minutes )

Let’s split a hot dog. With the works! (This from Ed, who does not eat red meat out of respect  for the feelings of cows. Me, I avoid hot dogs because my imagination puts all sorts of gross things into that orange toned cylinder of whatever.)
Of course! I say. New York, New York, you are messing with our principles.

The best shot of the day would have been one of us starting in on the same hot dog with sauerkraut and onions and mustard from the two ends. No such shot was taken, but I at least offer you this.






The boardwalk is reasonably busy. But the beach is nearly empty. And we understand why: it’s still closed for the season (official opening: next week). You risk getting zapped with a fine if you swim. No one is swimming.

But Coney Island is as good as any road carnival that comes to the county fairs in Wisconsin. At the end of May, a new amusement park is scheduled to open here. For now, it’s completely charming to watch the wee ones have their wild moment on a kiddie ride.










Further down along the boardwalk we come to handball courts. I never see handball in Wisconsin. I say to Ed. How come? It’s a game for places without much space. In Wisconsin, we can afford to have tennis courts.





Still further down is the community of Brighton Beach. As you walk along the boardwalk, at some point you notice that the language around you has become almost entirely Russian. And even if I didn't notice the language change, I’d have guessed the heritage of these people. You don’t grow up in Poland without knowing what a Russian or Ukrainian face looks like.





At the Brighton Beach playground we watch men play cards and dominoes. They speak no English and my Russian is too weak to carry on a sensible conversation. They're a friendly bunch and I'm sure they think they have a soul mate in Ed. Indeed, they're eating the pickles he loves. Still, we are useless onlookers. Communications falter. We move on.





We pass the eateries that spill out tables onto the boardwalk. Volna, Tatiana... Coiffed women, men with big bellies – this is the older generation. Or is it my generation? Strains of Moscow Nights, menus with old world standards.





The boardwalk ends here and we move inland, away from the ocean and the still empty beaches.










In the shadow of the elevated subway, Brighton Beach Avenue has the stores that draw the crowds. Green grocers and aptekas (pharmacies, where I hear you can get knock off pharmaceuticals), stores with glitzy  clothes -- so beloved by immigrants who haven't the money, but who want the symbols that are the immigrant's idea of American success. Cold storage for furs, shops renting Russian movies, small law offices advertising immigration services. The writing is in Russian, the clerks speak Russian, the language on the street is Russian.They say only Moscow has more Russians than Brighton Beach.













We buy some baked goods – poppyseed cake and walnut pastries.





At the diary counter, the woman wears lipstick that is as bright as the roses of June, carefully outlining her full lips. Blouses with flashy, sparkling designs are not uncommon. Counters have smoked fish and sweetened cherry juices. I haven’t felt so immersed in the world to the east of Poland since I visited the Soviet Union in 1969.











We ride the Q train back. Over the Manhattan Bridge, with views of the Brooklyn Bridge to the south.







You think I’ll end with this shot of a city scape? No, our day actually ends with a very late night meal at Suzie’s – a Chinese place just up the block on Bleecker. With okay spring rolls and a wonderful Hunan stirfry.





But I want to end with the walk from the Q train back to our Bleecker Street apartment for the week. Because you’d think New York couldn’t possibly offer you garden space to grow the perennials I love to see in Madison gardens. So wrong. Just two blocks from our brownstone, there is this plot, where neighbors have created a magnificent flowering landscape.





With an apple tree and a birdhouse and a young one, still needing help with her food. It's such a non-New York moment that for me, it is as essential to the story of the day as Nathan's hot dogs and Brighton Beach kolbasa.

distraction

We have a day of no court proceedings. The witnesses for the respondent (the respondents being the bad guys) aren’t available until next week and so there you have it. A hush settles in. It’s as if it’s a snow day, only without the snow.


It’s our walking up and down Manhattan day. I can’t remember a visit to New York that doesn’t include it.

Fortified with a Bruno breakfast of lotsa eggs and breads and butter, we set out. From Bleecker Street...





...and, well, a few steps later, we stop. There is a display of photos of West Village homes (including a number of Bleecker Street brownstones) where artists lived and died at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

It would be a somber way to begin our walk, but for the posted quotes from the men and women, commenting in their final months on the worth of life and their pleasure at having lived it. (I am unfairly generalizing here, but the messages are quite beautiful and positive, without the bitterness that surely at some level these artists must have felt.)


And now our walk takes us to Washington Square. And we realize, as do others, that this is going to be a very warm day.









We continue north on Broadway. At 32nd street we stop for a couple of hours. I visit a friend who is recuperating at the Hope Lodge after a difficult medical procedure. She’s doing well and expecting to be back in Madison at the end of June. It's greatly reassuring to have this chat with her, as if it were any noon chat that we are likely to have on Bascom Hill.


Ed and I continue on Broadway, to the newly jazzed up Herald Square. You have to have somewhat mixed feelings here. Broadway becomes partly pedestrian and then almost fully pedestrian at Times Square.





Having lived with the Times Square of taxis and traffic nightmares, I should be thrilled to see this freshly created communal space. And yet, it’s only partly that. The cross streets still have traffic and the pedestrians still must pay attention to streetlights and cars. But the boundaries between sidewalk and street are fluid now. A bike path, weaving its way through the nightmare of people, cross streets and food vendors is trampled over by unseeing pedestrians, at the same time that brazen cyclists will give perhaps one warning, if that, and then speed into the crowd.

And so it feels like a loud and brutal place, at the same time, as so many have pointed out, it has also the aura of a mall.





Still, I appreciate the freedom of movement. The walk across Broadway, the easy access to better vantage points.

But it is also true that we are quite happy to move on. Many a stronger person succumbs to the exhaustion of merely being here, on Times Square.





We ramble on. And it is not necessarily a speedy ramble. Occasionally I stop with my camera... (I mean, who can resist recording ads referencing New York’s current plague?)





And very often Ed pauses to make a note. Because he’s not really taking a day off at all. He’s thinking of what still needs to be said at the trial. I know he wants to fill in gaps, his good narrative at the cross exam notwithstanding.


We’re at Lincoln Center now and I want to spend time at the fountain. I’ve read a lot about its recent installation (think Peter Kopik, fountain genius of the world, the man who gave us, on a smaller scale, the fountain at the Detroit airport). I watch its varying streams of water. Ed takes notes. His mind is now officially elsewhere.









Across the street from Lincoln Center, several dozen cooks and chefs are congregating on the sidewalk. A convention? No, actually a bomb scare, emptying out a local restaurant. This, too, is New York in the spring of 2010.






We walk up Amsterdam, and I pause for a coffee and cupcake at Magnolia Cupcakes. Expensive Magnolia cupcakes.





I’m surprised they don’t offer what I am used to seeing at (expensive) cupcake places in DC – fresh ingredients in strawberry cupcakes, or lemon cupcakes, or coconut cupcakes. I ask about the pink creamed one. Oh, that’s just our standard topping, but in pink. Ah. I settle for the blueberry crumble.



We’re ready for the park. It is so warm now that I am down to an undershirt. I’m hesitant, because I know it is an undershirt. Ed walks up to two women – brassy looking women, I have to add. Listen, this lady here – he points to me – thinks maybe she should not be parading in that undershirt. What do you think? Ed knows how to make me blush. Not because of the shirt, but because of the question.
Oh for God’s sake, this is New York! Wear what you like! -- they respond. Predictably.






I tell Ed that I think Central Park has changed. For the better. It’s greener, fresher, less trampled down. Attention is paid to directing people toward spaces that wont be smothered by their presence.










It’s a lovely afternoon. For dogs, men, women, children. For those who speak and look like they just stepped off the plane from the old country. For those (like me once, here in NY) who walk home from school with a book that needs to be worked on at home but who prefer, instead, to dally and eat a pretzel.










We are weaving south now. Past the dazzling and energetic street show of gymnastic movement.





Past crowds of Fifth Avenue tourists (and there are a lot of them), but we are hurrying a little now, because we want to get to the Museum of Modern Art's Friday evening special: free entrance.





Because we are there during the no fee hours, the museum is packed. But we don’t mind. It’s always cool to see people enjoying a museum and there is so much to love now about MoMA.





I had wanted to split our time between the special exhibitions (the photography of my absolute travel-with-camera hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the live art of Marina Abramovic) and the paintings of the early twentieth century, but the special exhibitions were far too wonderful to walk through quickly.

The photos – what can I say, photojournalism doesn’t get much better than that. And the live art, too is fully mesmerizing – much of it is bold, even by New York standards. Take the two very naked and very still women standing less than a foot apart, facing each other, inviting you with their presence in the doorway to squeeze through (a guard is at the side and discourages big people from attempting this). Or the artist herself inviting anyone to sit on a chair facing her, for as long as you want.





Most of this can’t be photographed. By the time we reached the regular collections (where you can take photos), we are spent. A few (far less crowded) rooms, and we are done.





We cheat after the museum. It’s not that we’re tired of walking, even though we’ve been more or less steadily on our feet for some six hours. But it’s Friday and we want to get back to the Village before the week-end crowds make eating dinner difficult. We take two stops on the subway and then walk to the bar at Fish.





For the oyster and wine deal. And for one small lobster roll. Because it looked so good on the plates of others.





In our Bleecker Street apartment, Ed goes back to reviewing court transcripts and taking notes. It’s not time for us to talk about the trial yet. I leave him to his work and take a midnight stroll around the Village.