Exploration

It can be fairly tempting to stay within about a 10-block radius of the apartment -- with all of life's creature comforts easily found within walking distance, it takes effort not to get too provincial. This Saturday and last, John and I have pushed our boundaries out by exploring the far reaches of what we know about New York.

Last weekend we walked from our place in the 60s up to 125th Street, one of the main drags in Harlem. Along the way we strolled through a street fair, fed ourselves at Zabar's, wandered around Columbia's campus, discovered a tiny little museum, and visited Grant's Tomb, among other things. Then we hopped a train to the far northern tip of the island, where there's a lush park and Columbia's football stadium. Yeah, I know -- Columbia has a football stadium?




































This Friday, we trekked out to Brooklyn for pizza with a couple we met at a recent dinner party. They were great hosts and a lot of fun to hang with, and Park Slope is a hopping area. We didn't want to seem like tourists with them, so JT got a few arty shots on the subway but then kept the camera put away for the night.

















Saturday we got a slow start. While I was lounging in bed, reading the paper and sipping coffee, I saw an article that mentioned an old Lipton tea factory in Hoboken that's been converted to condos facing the Hudson River. We keep hearing how people love Hoboken, so after a little Googling about the condos and good restaurants, we headed off to the birthplace of Frank Sinatra.















The moment we got off the train, I loved it. Loved it! The downtown area has great old historic architecture, and the business district seems to have the aesthetic appreciation of a place like Amsterdam, where each shop and cafe is more beautiful than the last.

We spent the afternoon mainly walking around and taking it all in, including a little real estate fantasizing. If we had any notions that getting out of Manhattan would mean affordable housing, the dozens of real estate offices with million-dollar homes advertised in their windows disabused us of that foolish notion. It's cheaper than Manhattan, but for the price of a pretty nice Old West Side home in Ann Arbor, you might be able to get a one-bedroom condo. Seems everything's becoming "luxury" housing, with prices to match.

Fortunately, there's still some of Sinatra's hometown that hasn't become pure yuppie-ville. Like Leo's, an old-school Italian restaurant where the waitress grabbed my arm and told me we couldn't get the spinach -- haven't I been watching the news, sweetie?

Five years later

This is the view from our roof deck tonight, looking downtown at the lights shining up from Ground Zero.







Twin Beams to Light Sky Again. But After 2008?

Sporty Spice

Few people who know me would mistake me for a jock. My eye-hand coordination leaves a lot to be desired, and I am proud to have earned my high school varsity letter by serving as a manager for the boys' swim team.

You wouldn't know that based on our social calendar lately, though.

We've been at the Park Avenue Country Club the last two Saturdays to watch Michigan football with hundreds of other U-M alumni. This Saturday I felt a mixed allegiance since U of M was clobbering my undergrad alma mater Central Michigan, but at least we got to hang out with fellow MAC undergrads Rick and Gladys, and we got in our first euchre playing as New Yorkers while we killed time during a rain delay of the game. (We split 1-1 with our uber-competitive real estate agent Brett and the partner he drafted, Aaron. A tiebreaker will come when Brett rounds up a partner who won't confess to reneging before he's caught.)

Jim and Courtney gave me an extra bleacher ticket for one of the Detroit Tigers' games at Yankee Stadium. They got their tickets through the MSU alumni club, so it was a thrill to be surrounded by Tiger fans as our typically lousy Detroit team beat the Yankees.










Last night we took the subway out to Flushing for the women's finals of the U.S. Open. When John opened our bank account at Chase, the staff was slow and unhelpful and not terribly bright but the upside was the free U.S. Open tickets they gave us. We didn't realize at the time they would be for women's finals, and we didn't realize until we got there that we'd get a double feature -- the mixed doubles finals followed, including Martina Navratilova playing in the last game of her career. This was after seeing -- and hearing -- the tennis tart Maria Sharapova win the finals.



(these photos courtesy of the US Open web site)








(these photos shot on my Treo cell phone -- can you tell the difference?)









We haven't been all sports and no culture, though.

We took in First Friday at the Guggenheim, including a great exhibit by Jackson Pollack.
















And inspiring massive jealousy, and reminding me I need to finish my novel damnit, we went to a reading by fellow Wolverine Brad Meltzer. Brad is a multi-hyphenate writer, hitting the NY Times best seller list with his novels, as well as writing comic books and the short-lived TV series Jack and Bobby.
http://www.bradmeltzer.com/
If you look closely, you can see me and John in this video of Brad telling a hilarious story about a junket to Bulgaria: http://www.bradmeltzer.com/2006/09/video-book-of-fate-signing-in-new-york.html

This is a cell phone picture so sadly you probably won't be able to make out the guy in the Star Trek Convention T-shirt who asked the first question during Q&A. Yes, as Brad joked, it was a comic book guy.









And finally, in honor of this week's total eclipse of the moon, one of my favorite scenes from Old School:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2Vy4Iqu0fU

Oh, that?

New Yorkers are generally not people who take things in stride -- they honk like mad if someone impedes their travel on the roads, they are unabashed about calling someone out who cuts in line, forgets to put cheese on their sandwich or otherwise wrongs them, you hear them all over the city in the midst of impassioned cell phone conversations about some thing or other that cheesed them off.
In a city this densely populated, it seems you learn not speak up firmly and promptly if something chafes you, lest you get trampled upon.
That's the context that makes it so bizarre that New Yorkers seem so nonchalant about the prospect of terrorism.
Recently we had a fire drill at my office. Our department walked down 16 flights of stairs then blocked traffic with a few hundred other employees in a chaotic mess on the street. New York does not have the market locked up on fire drills -- we all did them in elementary school -- but there's something that is just unspoken about knowing you might be evacuating for reasons other than a garden variety electrical fire.
My office was completely empty on my first day -- not a single piece of paper in any filing cabinet, not one book on a shelf. What I did have was my standard issue respirator mask, which is issued to every employee. They're on desks all over the place, just sitting there in a box, with the same nonchalance as having a box of tissues.
Meanwhile, I've gotten involved in a committee that's called, innocuously enough, disaster recovery. The premise is to ensure that we have redundancy in our operations so that if our headquarters were ever, ahem, not around, the company could continue to function.
We're apparently late to this game. The financial services companies all have duplicate trading floors and such 50 or 100 miles outside the city so that if a bomb goes off in Manhattan, they can be up and running in a matter of minutes ... if they still have any traders left.
Is it just me, or doesn't it seem like if a bomb is dropped that wipes out a chunk of Manhattan, maybe society just might be in too much disarray to care whether they can short a stock that day or whether their weekly payment was on time to the AP?
Truth is disaster planning can also apply to much more mundane events like a power outage or a pipe bursting or computer system failing. That all makes sense.
But being blase about terrorism seems strange ... unless maybe you just happen to think that with two completed acts of terrorism on our soil in the last 11 years, maybe the danger is overhyped. Unless maybe you think that Americans take off their shoes and throw out their carry on lip gloss before getting on planes, but we get on subways, trains, bridges and highways without getting screened and we are willing to trade some security for ease of living. Unless you perhaps think that shopping malls and elementary schools and health clubs and hospitals are all places where lots of people are vulnerable every day, and we mostly do just fine.
I know that a lot of people think of New York as having a terrorist bullseye painted on it, but like many New Yorkers, I made a very conscious decision to live here anyway. If the terrorists really wanted to nuke NYC, maybe they would have already. Or maybe they will tomorrow. But we choose to live our lives the way we want to, and if that means dying young in New York instead of living to be 90 in North Dakota, well, that's just fine with me.