 |
| Erhu serenade |
We’re back from a long weekend in NYC for the wedding of
Frieda’s oldest nephew: it turned out better than I expected. For one thing, the weather was fabulous. Early Friday morning we Super-Shuttled from JFK
to our hotel on Grand Street,
where Chinatown is slowly absorbing what’s
left of Little Italy. We picked it because it was near the wedding venue. Too early to check in, we dropped off our
luggage and ventured into the teeming, grimy streets, wending our way down
Mulberry through the bowels of Chinatown to Columbus Park
where some guy bent our ears with an erhu.
When we’d had all we could take of that we headed back on Mott, checking
out all the exotic fish the vendors were hawking. The city seemed old and dirty, a warren
hemmed in by brick, concrete, and iron. Much
of New York
is downright ugly, but if you want the status of an insider you must not merely
embrace this but celebrate it as part of the hard-edged, macho aesthetic of the
place. There was plenty of construction
going on but it seemed less about building anything new than about staving off
the processes of decay.
 |
| Erminia |
After a nap to recover a bit from our red-eye flight, we
dressed for the Rehearsal Dinner and took a subway uptown. The peeling, probably lead-based paint and the
accumulated ground-in dirt of decades gives these subterranean chambers a forbidding,
feculent air, but the only actual problem we had was getting oriented upon exit
and locating the restaurant, a little Italian place called Erminia on 83rd. Gavi di Gavi was flowing freely inside so we soon
felt social, and the food was excellent as well. We met the bride’s family and grew convivial with
her uncle and his husband. They were from
Palm Desert and were staying at our hotel. Afterward they offered to share a taxi for the
return trip. Back at the hotel they
suggested we go out for a drink, so the 4 of us ambled up Elizabeth into Nolita to preview the wedding
venue, a restaurant called Public. It
had crowded bars on both sides too noisy for easy conversation, so we moved on
to a quieter place called Jacques where we sipped cocktails and chatted about
their extensive travels while perusing an incessant parade of stylish revelers
passing by on the sidewalk. With so many colorful, energetic people filling the
streets at all hours, the excitement of the city can’t be denied.
 |
| Columbus Circle from the Time Warner lobby |
Next morning, the day of the wedding, we took a subway
uptown again and got off on 72nd, near Strawberry Fields in Central
Park, which was jammed (it was Saturday and the weather was superb, sunny in the
high 60s, though the trees had yet to leaf out). Escaping the milling crowds and circling
bicycle rickshaws, we strolled south along Central Park West. David Brooks, the political commentator, passed
us headed in the opposite direction. At
Columbus Circle, an awesome arc of glossy towers, we went into the Time Warner
building, thinking we would pick up something to eat and take it back outside,
but after sampling the view from the 2nd floor lobby we changed our
minds and instead wandered up Broadway to have panini outdoors at a little café
next to the Folk Art Museum.
From there we headed for the nephew’s apartment, behind Lincoln Center,
and borrowed his X-5 to drive over to Jersey and
pick up Frieda’s mother for the wedding.
We were putting her up in our suite for the night. Our intentions had been to return to Manhattan via the Holland
tunnel but traffic was horrendous so we took the Lincoln instead and then drove downtown along
the West Side Highway. The traffic was
still intense, maybe on account of it being the first beautiful spring weekend. It seemed a 10% increase in the number of
cars would have been sufficient to gridlock the entire island. Later we heard someone who had stubbornly insisted
on using the Holland tunnel did not make it to
the ceremony, there was a major clog on the New Jersey side. As it was we were supposed to be at the venue
by 5:30 and got there about 5:45, still prior to the 6:00 ceremony, but we had
to sit at the back.
 |
| Public |
Public was composed of three rooms, a
small bar on the left, a main dining room in the center, and a combo
bar and dining room on the right. The street end of the room on the
right had a garage door that opened to a loading dock with a chain
railing and narrow stairwell. Maybe it had been a factory at one
time. With the tables and chairs removed, this area became a dance
floor and stayed cool if you opened the door. Traffic passing in the
street could ogle the dancers and vice versa. After the ceremony the
bar opened in there and ran until 8 when dinner was served. The
place seemed as noisy as when we’d previewed it and I had a hard
time having a conversation with the person across the table. Dinner
was followed by dancing until about 1 AM.
 |
| The High Line |
Sunday Frieda spent the morning taking her mother back to
Jersey, dropping the nephew’s car off at his garage (he and his bride had spent
their wedding night in the honeymoon suite of another hotel), and riding the train
back to our hotel. After a local lunch
we took the subway over to W. 14th to take a walk on the High Line, the
elevated park that meanders for a mile along the west side, then ambled through
the Meatpacking District, an area of gentrified former slaughterhouses laid out
on cobblestone streets, and got some ice cream at Chelsea Market. The weather was again stupendous and hordes
of people were everywhere. In the
evening we had dinner at Amazing 66 in Chinatown,
and when we came out around 9:30 the sidewalks, normally choked with people during
the day, were strangely empty. Threading
these dark, spooky, silent streets to the edge of Little Italy we found, in
front of Ferrara’s,
bright lights and a lively crowd, and joined it for espressos and desserts.
 |
| The West Village |
Monday the nephew phoned to suggest we meet for lunch at
Café Cluny, on W. 12th, so we took the subway to 4th for
a leisurely stroll north through Greenwich Village to Abingdon Square. The weather was still good but high clouds
were moving in; rain was forecast for Tuesday.
We were leaving from JFK in a few hours and the 2 of them were leaving
for Madrid at about the same time from Newark. They looked appropriately happy, the wedding
having gone off well. I had the best
burger I’d had since the summer of 2011 in Clear Lake, Iowa. Afterward we walked around the neighborhood a
little with them and saw the actor Willem Dafoe on Charles Street helping a couple remove a large
package from the rear of a minivan. An odd
coincidence as I saw him the last time I was in New York, only that time outside
a restaurant in Soho. He did a
double-take on our double-take, realizing we had recognized him.
Like Rome at the height of its
Empire, New York
is a cosmopolitan, international city filled with the babble of many
different tongues: Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Spanish, French, Italian, German,
Russian, and others I couldn’t recognize.
German seemed particularly prevalent in the West Village. The Germans have a talent for sniffing out
all the best places, and the money to hang out in them.
