I love New York
Several weeks ago I had a chance to visit New York City for the first time in over ten years. This is a city I love. There have been many changes since I last lived there and worked at the Bahá’í NGO. The most notable change, for me, was the addition of about 4 million Starbucks occurring approximately every one-half block. (Except, for some reason, right near the United Nations.) I also learned, for the second time, that I am not cut out for riding cabs. I would rather walk nine miles than take a cab. For one thing, they are expensive, and for another thing, they are life-threatening.
I was visiting the city to attend a Bahá’í web development conference at the NGO offices at 48th Street and 1st Avenue. Most of us attending stayed at the Metropolitan Hotel a few blocks away, which felt very romantic for River and me, since it was just up the street from the Marriott Hotel where we first met—again, at a conference, although that one was sponsored by AT&T. We felt like we were on some kind of honeymoon, without our three kids, staying at what felt like a luxury hotel (it was not, really), and having so much time to ourselves (again, not really, but we sort of pretended, and that was fun). Plus we got to visit my old workplace for the conference (I was employed at the Bahá’í NGO for about a year, after college, and left to get married).
The people at the conference were wonderful. There were a few people from San Francisco, a couple of people from New York City as well as upstate, one person from Maine, one from Toronto. We spent many hours around the large tables and under humming fluorescent lights talking about how to reach the children of the world via the medium of the internet. It felt quite momentous, somehow extremely significant, and yet the task was huge, and could only be approached in small steps taken one at a time. Maybe we chased our tails a bit but we also came to a lot of important agreement that will hopefully lead to action.
Aside from that gratifying work, I really loved being able to walk through the city streets, whether that meant just a few blocks or… miles. Since I had not returned to the city in so long—not since getting married, or having children—I was actually very afraid of going. We chose to drive to New Haven and then take the commuter train to Grand Central, and I was determined to walk everywhere; I didn’t even want to take the subway. In a way I was concerned that I would not remember how. But also I was feeling deeply nostalgic. I always have, since I left. There’s no city like New York… not anywhere. The smells of New York, like them or not, are so uniquely its own. And the feeling of vastness, yet intimacy, that one can only get standing on a single city block and looking around. It is like visiting canyons that have been created by years and years of water and wind furrowing through the landscape.
On our first night in the city we were enticed to head to the East Village to check out some hip restaurant for dinner. The cab ride was inevitable. I gripped the handle of the car door for my very life. The driver was particularly bad. He seemed to feel that he needed to go at top speed between every slow-down or traffic light. Every braking experience was a near-collision. To make matters worse, I got some speck of something in my contact lens right when I got in the cab. So during all the stop-and-go-and-race-til-you-die, I was fumbling around to remove my contact lens, try to see what was stuck on it, and replace it in my eyeball. I gave up after the removal and just sat there trying not to crush my contact lens in the palm of my hand as the cabbie raced us toward our doom. Finally, $400 later, he was able to find our intersection in the Village and we were released into the dark and foreboding streets of the grittiest, hippest section of town.
We tried to get into the super-chic restaurant but they were full and didn’t have room for us. So we tried another place across the street. They were empty, but didn’t have room for us either. This place was too hip for our own good. We stood on the street corner and wondered what to do. Finally one of our group was somehow able to use the Jedi Mind Trick on the restaurant’s hostess, as she agreed to seat us if we would not spend very long there, since they had a lot of late reservations coming in. Sufficiently humbled by not having a reservation at such a very very hip place, we took our seats and gratefully overpaid for the food. After all, one is paying for the atmosphere, not really the product. And I did manage to get into the restroom and replace my contact lens. I was grateful just for that. The cab ride back to the hotel, after that, was much less grueling, and reminded me that even though dinner was maybe not the best, and of course way too expensive, including all the cab fare, I still do love New York.
I had a much better dining experience the following evening when we walked (thanks very much) to Topaz restaurant, somewhere on west 54th Street. This was the best Thai I have ever eaten… and the company was also really splendid. In the mirror you can see Shahani Towfiq of San Francisco, who incidentally was pregnant at the time with her first child, and next to her, Amethel Parel-Sewell of Louisville, who is the creative director and editor for the Bahá’í magazine Brilliant Star. We gabbed about falling in love with our spouses and becoming Bahá’ís over pad thai, curry and delightful orchids and candles.
Next we headed to Central Park to visit the Gates. That was pretty cool, even though it was night and it was hard to see the whole thing, and we were cold and didn’t want to stay out too late, and we were walking so we could not explore the whole park. Even so there was a feeling of peace and wonder visiting the place and listening to the nylon fabric rustle in the cold wind. Not many people were around at that hour—it was the night of opening day for the exhibit—but there were some folks riding horse-drawn carriages through the park. It felt desolate, but quiet and happily so.
Amethel is a professional photographer and had the most amazing camera—a really slick Canon with a flash that could light a long city block. She seemed to be enjoying herself. My Nikon could not really hold a candle to her camera but I had a good time snapping some photos nonetheless. I loved how the sodium lights of the city (which glow orange) mirrored the sodium lights of the park, and, wouldn’t you know, matched the “saffron” color of the Gates’ fabric.
There were a lot of people skating on the ice rink near the southeastern corner of the park, so we enjoyed standing there in some kind of blurry, detached awe at the silent specter of all these orange gate things, stoic and metal and solid and unmoving, with rustling, stiff, folds-still-showing nylon fabric, surrounding a brilliant white, flooded-with-light, skating pond… small black bodies flitting about below on the ice.
The trees were brown and grey and black and an interesting contrast to the orange and metal. Very much like the artist intended—he likely wanted to choose a season that would offer some contrast. Nothing like late February for that.
Thanks New York.