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| From the Nephew's Apartment |
This year we
decided to coordinate our visit to Frieda’s nephew with the US
Open. We flew into JFK early Saturday morning before the tournament
began and he picked us up in his X5. Soon we were caught in an
unexpected traffic jam funneling into the Midtown Tunnel. This
kicked off the theme of this trip: crowds, everywhere.
Well, not absolutely everywhere. After
a family dinner at a nearby Japanese restaurant we had a pleasant
walk through a mild Saturday evening in the nephew's tree-lined Upper
West Side neighborhood, and a sense of awe, which can always sneak up
on you in NYC, actually did overtake me as we passed through the
plaza and into the little park behind Lincoln Center.
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| Arthur Ashe Stadium |
But we got to the crowds on Monday, our
first day at the Open, when we took the subway to Penn Station and
caught the LIRR out to the venue. After getting our tickets we
waited under the big board to see what platform our train would be
on, and once it was announced the real crush began, the crowd
cramming through a pair of double doors like toothpaste through the
nozzle of a tube. At least the train was air-conditioned, a relief
in the 85° high humidity,
and we even found seats.
Although we arrived at 11:30, we still
had to wait in a long line snaking around the huge venue to the south
entrance, but once inside the gates it wasn't that crowded. We
headed for Court 17 because Monfils was scheduled to play the second
match there. It's a sweet little stadium and we got killer seats in
the corner, second row. However, to get to Monfils we had to sit
through a woman's match with Bencic, a Swiss we had seen get beaten
at Indian Wells back in March, and every minute we sat there it got
hotter. The match went 3 sets and there was not a shred of shade to
be had, anywhere. The slight breeze that had provided some relief
early on, dwindled and died. By the time she won, we were wilting
badly. I don't know how the players can do it. In the break between
matches Frieda went on a supply run while I held down the great seats
and when she returned with a hot dog, curly fries, and an ice cold
bottle of Evian I found that it was the most delicious water I had
ever tasted. She complained that, at 1PM, Carnegie Deli was,
unconscionably, already out of pastrami and corned beef. How could
they possibly have allowed this to happen? Nevertheless the hot dog
and fries quieted the ravenous beast in my stomach and the cold water
revived me. Monfils came on and displayed some of his usual verve,
but the temperature continued to climb and by the end of the first
set, which he won, we simply couldn't stand it anymore. We had to
get out of the sun. So we abandoned our primo seats, even more
desirable now that the stadium was packed, and headed for Ben &
Jerry's for some ice cream and some shade to eat it in.
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| The New Grandstand |
Fortunately, we had reserved seats at
Arthur Ashe. They were up in the nosebleed section, but they were
shady, as more than half that stadium is, now that the retractable
roof has been added. The roof also contains and thus intensifies
the crowd noise, even when it's open. Nadal was playing Istomin
there, not a bad match, but so far away it was hard to get
interested. Other people in the vicinity were having the same
problem. They were mostly eating and drinking, talking and laughing,
having a party and ignoring the match. After we'd cooled off, Frieda
started getting sleepy, so we left and wandered over to the new
Grandstand court, stopping to watch a little of a Baghdatis match in
a small court along the way. We had seats in the Grandstand for
Wednesday so we wanted to check them out ahead of time. We were
pleased to find that they appeared to be shady.
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| Bruce Springsteen Concert at MetLife |
We were staggered by the size of the
grounds, like a city unto itself, about a third larger than the
French Open, with 16 matches going simultaneously, plus practice
courts. All of it jam-packed with people. If you crave crowds, it's
heaven. We left about 4:45 and caught the 5:05 back to Penn, itself
a shit storm of commuters at that hour on a Monday, then caught the
#1 to Columbus Circle, where we stopped at Whole Foods to pick up
dinner fixings.
Tuesday we took the day off from tennis
and strolled along Central Park West to the Natural History Museum,
but then decided, due to lack of time, to save it for Thursday.
Instead we headed to Artie's Deli on Broadway for the corned beef and
pastrami sandwiches we'd missed out on at the tournament. We can't
visit New York without having pastrami or corned beef sandwiches,
preferably both. In the evening Frieda went with the nephew to a
Bruce Springsteen concert at MetLife Stadium in Jersey while I took a
break from the hoards of humanity, stayed in the apartment and
watched tennis on the 50” TV with surround sound. The concert
attracted around 80,000 shoulder to shoulder. She said it was great
and the online reviews pegged it as one of his best ever. The
nephew, a Bruce Springsteen fanatic who has been to about fifty of
his concerts, concurred. It clocked in as his longest ever US
concert at 4 hours and 1 minute.
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| T-Rex |
Wednesday we were back in the tennis
fray and, if anything, it was even more crowded than it had been on
Monday. It turned out our seats in the Grandstand didn't get shade
until 2PM but we found some shady bleacher seats higher up from which
to watch Pospisil and Kevin Anderson, whose wife writes a blog that
Frieda sometimes reads. Then we went over to Court 8 to watch some
doubles, for a change, but the seats we found there were in the sun
so we didn't stay long. Some high clouds took the edge off but it
was still hot. When we got to our reserved seats about 2PM shade had
found them and we were able to watch Ryan Harrison upset Milos Raonic
in relative comfort. But then we had to fight our way through the
intense crowds to catch the 6:22 train back to the city. Between the
day-people exiting and the night-people arriving, it was a two-way
stampede. And then you had the people who were just milling around aimlessly, apparently lost, getting in the way.
The next day we returned to the Museum
of Natural History and it too was jam-packed due to intermittent rain
driving people to find some sort of indoor activity. We headed
straight for the dinosaurs where masses of humanity milled about,
snapping selfies and pictures of exhibits they didn't bother to look
at, with thigh-high brats racing around, bouncing off walls and
crashing into us and each other, all howling like maniacs. It was a
loony bin. Finally we couldn't stand it anymore and bailed for a
late lunch out on the sidewalk beneath a canopy at Ella's on Columbus Avenue. Despite
all the crazy commotion at the museum, I still came away feeling
profoundly impressed by the immense fertility of nature, not in terms of quantity, but rather the amazing
richness of variations the process of evolution throws up.
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| Central Park |
Friday we went back to Landmarc in the
Time Warner Building (it's a regular stop for us) for a breakfast of
their memorable pain perdu. Then
we ambled over to Le Pain Quotidian in
the southern reaches of Central Park for some shady seats and cold
drinks while we soaked in views of the Sheep Meadow and environs. It all looked lovely from there. Because we were flying out
on the Friday before Labor Day weekend and were concerned about
traffic, we decided to take trains to the airport instead of a car.
The E train took us to the Air Tram, an easy, smooth ride. Only
problem: no seats due to the crowds. One thing the world needs more
than anything else: less people. Overpopulation is all around us but
people don't see it anymore because they've adapted, they take it as
a given.
