NYC 2016

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.