 |
| Typical post-storm snow bank Broadway at 84th |
--André Aciman, "New York, Luminous,"
Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere
Most of my visits to New York have been in autumn. When the sun is warm but the air is cool. Cool, but not cold. When the leaves along the streets and in the parks are changing color. When the oppressive heat and humidity of summer are history, and tourists throng the streets.
I returned home last night from four days in New York -- but this time, New York in March. Temperatures changing radically, within hours, from mild to cold, from cold to mild. Rain threatening hourly, but drenching the city only occasionally. Great piles of snow heaped at every corner, left behind by snowplows a week earlier, when the Northeast was hit by an unseasonable snow storm. Kids who couldn't figure out how to dress in March, apparently -- some bundled up in parkas and scarves, while their friends wore t-shirts and shorts.
My first thought, upon arrival Thursday night, was that tourists must abandon or avoid the city in March. But maybe not weekend tourists, I later discovered, and not basketball fans. Hordes poured out onto the streets the following evenings, on Friday and Saturday nights. Especially in Times Square. And in the blocks around Madison Square Garden, dressed in school colors, in town for the NCAA playoffs.
What do I do in the city on a short visit? If I had been with family, hours would have been spent eating, talking about eating, and debating where to eat. Alone, eating is primarily a rapid exercise in re-fueling.
 |
| New 96th Street Station |
I had only two pre-planned activities. One -- to the derision of some friends back home -- was to ride the newly opened first phase of the Second Avenue subway -- a Second Avenue line planned for over a century and opened -- a short stub of it, that is -- just this year. At present, the three new stations on Second Avenue, between 63rd and 96th, are served by an extension of the Q line. Attractive stations, and the ride to the end of the line gave me a chance to walk back down to Midtown from E. 96th. A West Side kid (by self-adoption) braving the streets of the East Side!
My other explicit objective was attending the Metropolitan Opera's production of La Traviata. This production was unusual in that the settings and costumes were more or less contemporary (although the score, of course, was totally traditional -- in Italian, with English subtitles on the back of the seat in front of you). I always question updates of classic works, although I thought the 1995 motion picture production of Richard III, set in the 1930s, was interesting and well-done. Unfortunately, the story of a high class prostitute with a golden heart, a fallen woman, surrounded by devoted flocks of partying men, who falls in love with one man for the first time and then sacrifices her romance at the behest of his family -- a story that may seem marginally conceivable in its original nineteenth century setting -- seems ludicrous when staged in a room sparely decorated with 1950s style furniture where the heroine entertains mobs of adoring men dressed in black tie.
But the singing was great, Lincoln Center is always fun, and I defer to the critical reviews that swoon over the production.
The rest of my visit -- like most of my visits around the world, starting with my travels as a 21-year-old student -- was devoted to wandering, looking at people passing by, and absorbing the architectural surroundings. These pursuits are perhaps more rewarding in Manhattan than they would be in, say, Kansas City. My hotel was on West 87th, in the heart of my favorite part of the city, where the people and families passing by all look worth knowing, and the ornate brownstone row houses turn me green with envy.
 |
| Art imitating art Metropolitan Museum of Art |
Each time I visit New York, I try to get a better feel for the Upper West Side, from Central Park to Riverside, and up to and including the surroundings of Columbia University. And I get that feel by walking. My phone's pedometer tells me that I walked a total of 32 miles in three days which -- considering that I also spent a number of hours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as eating, and sitting on benches, and riding on subways -- was a fairly impressive total.
As Aciman likes to say, an ideal way to enjoy New York is to "let yourself wander down unfamiliar streets." In this respect, he sums up that which for me, at least, is much of the joy of travel. At least, urban travel. And especially travel within New York City.
No comments:
Post a Comment