Notes on Trip to New York

This "trip" was actually two days a couple of weekends ago. The parents of an old schoolmate of mine who lived there had recently died and as my friend was cleaning out their apartment I was invited, along with several of my children, to come and stay overnight and take any books or other things I might want. Since I hadn't been there in seven years this was too good an offer to pass up, so after staying over Friday at the camp in Vermont to cut an hour and a half off of the drive we got up early on Saturday and with the light weekend traffic made it onto Manhattan Island and even found free street parking before noon. Once I was there I realized how easy it would be for me to come down this way for the day on a Saturday several times a year, though I probably won't do it because while I don't seem to do much somehow there is always something going on that makes it almost impossible to take a spontaneous day trip to New York. But I will have to watch for my opportunity.


I had three of my children with me--the ones aged 15, 10, and 8--and I didn't make any real plans for serious sightseeing or activities on this occasion, which is my way of saying we didn't do anything original or challenging in town by the higher standards of such things, though I felt excited enough just to be there again. As such our visit consisted of riding the subway to Times Square, walking around that area and then up Seventh Avenue to Central Park (Saturday) and then taking the subway to Coney Island, doing some rides and games there, then walking over the Brooklyn Bridge (Sunday). On Saturday night my friends took us out to an Indian restaurant, which was great, especially as they had enough food snob hauteur to insist that my children try the Indian food, where I probably would have thrown up my arms and gotten them pizza or a burger.

Weekends are obviously a lot different than if I were to go there doing the week--I don't seem to have gotten in any important person's way, except for one guy riding a bicycle across the Brooklyn Bridge, who (in my opinion unneccesarily) admonished me for having wandered a few steps into the bicycle lane to sidestep the crowd. I did get to walk a little around the gentrified part of Brooklyn near the bridge as well as the area of Lower Manhattan around City Hall and the Woolworth Building, which I had never done before. I would have walked a lot more, but having my 21st century children with me, they don't get wandering, they want to get somewhere.


The street vendors/food carts were selling things for a lot cheaper than I remember from my previous visits. One guy was selling hot dogs for $2, which is less than what it costs in Concord, and I saw $1 drinks (in plastic bottles) all over the place. I suspect something fishier than just the free market working its magic is going on.

I unfortunately couldn't make it to a bar this time. I did get some beer at the Indian restaurant at least.

I loved my subway ride, especially on Saturday. All of the beautiful women dressed for the 90 degree weather doesn't hurt, of course, but I like the ambience anyway. I read about all the complaints about the system, how antique and slow it is compared to every other great city, even London and Paris, but for me it's hard to bash it as it is now, considering that this is what the ride to Coney Island looked like for about the first 25 years of my life.



There is much discussion and celebration of New York's famed diversity, and much consternation from the denizens of that city about why much of the rest of the country cannot embrace it with the same enthusiasm. Of course the dynamic in New York, perhaps especially in 2019, is completely different from what it is in some exponentially smaller community, or even a larger but less cosmopolitan city. There are just so many people there everywhere all the time, most of whom at this point are either self-selected or have some purpose for being there--unlike Akron or Baltimore, there don't seem to be that many people trapped or left behind, especially in Manhattan and the gentrified parts of the other boroughs, anymore. For someone like me, the circumstance of there being so many  people--especially women--like the people you went to college with, or imagine you went to college with anyway, combined with the substantial decline in the crime rate means that the overall environment remains attractive and also familiar enough to not be as alienating as maybe some would wish me to find it. Also the continued presence of so many longstanding institutions and landmarks central to mass America's cultural identity, from Broadway to Carnegie Hall to the Yankees to Grand Central Station and on and on, make you feel that you are still at home even if you are the kind of old American who is not in the highest favor among the intelligentsia at present.

There was a blackout in midtown on Saturday afternoon about an hour after I was walking through there. I was back up near Fort Tryon Park where I was staying getting ready to go out to dinner when it happened and I didn't actually find out about it until I got home.

My mood was great, especially the first day. I haven't been able to get much excited about going places lately the way that I used to. Part of it is the children getting older--when they are small you can just drag around to where you want to go and they usually will like it well enough but now they have their own ideas about what is fun, or would be fun, that are usually at odds with my vision. Also both of my cars are very old (255,000 and 185,000 miles respectively), and while they have actually run this whole year since I had them inspected in January and gone on separate occasions to Florida, Maryland and New York in that span, I anticipate that they are going to break down anytime such that I can't really enjoy the journeys until I can breathe the sigh of relief upon arriving (and then immediately begin to worry about the ride back). But arriving in New York on a sunny Saturday morning was a tonic. Some people will make a sour face if I say anything about riding on the train with all the attractive women--theater people, Italian tourists, even the hostile progressive-signaling book readers shooting darting looks at the subhuman male dreck populating the car--but if that isn't a part of your regular experience it is a lift to the spirits.....

Shortly after I returned home I had an Ashley Smith dream. I don't know who Ashley Smith is or why exactly she keeps showing up in my dreams, which has occurred now at least twice. She is somewhere between 19 and 23, albeit very mature for her age, probably 5 foot 7 or 8, with pale skin and blue eyes, but straight dark hair which would fall to the middle of her back except that she always has it pinned up with those knitting needle/chopstick looking things girls like this wear in their hair. I have always loved this look, perhaps because I have only seen it on people who were strangers to me, never having gotten into or near a social circle or even a school where anyone was like this. During the dream I imagine that she is like the Franny character from Salinger, but she is a completely contemporary person, she wouldn't have to tell you that she disdains Trump or racism or homophobia, her superiority to all of these petty temptations projects itself from her being, at least where I am concerned. Ashley lives in New York City of course, in an apartment like one story house situated right on a busy but unidentified highway with what looks like the Triboro Bridge in miniature about a hundred yards away. Ashley's New York is very much the New York of Salinger in character, though I imagine it is the present, or at least no earlier than 1989-93, since I am obviously about 22 or 23 myself in these dreams. Hers is the kind of house that one always visits during some kind of holiday time, never on a Tuesday afternoon in March. Ashley herself, whom I always imagine for some reason when I arrive that perhaps something may exist or develop between us, always greets me at the door with great warmth that makes me feel like 50 million dollars, after which her charming parents come and say hello as if I were the Harvard quarterback in 1947 or something and actually belonged in their apartment as a personal friend of their incredible daughter. Ashley and her parents then invite me to sit in the living room while Ashley repairs to the kitchen and the parents to wherever it is they repair to, and I wait for Ashley to rejoin me; which however, she never does. As further evidence of her genius she never leaves me alone, for there are always other interesting people waiting with me in the living room, such as her adorable younger sister, whose name I don't know, invariably accompanied by one of her equally cute friends from boarding school who is visiting the city over the break, and these two actually talk to me a lot. When I wake up I always wonder why I don't pursue love with the sister, who is a 1% cutie herself, instead of pining for Ashley, though I think the sister is only 14 or 15, which does however seem to be about my maturity level. Other times there were humorous artists talking shop in the living room, and on this last occasion a classmate of mine from college who actually does live in New York, a robust and caustic fellow, a great smoker and drinker, who would be the sort of person who knew Ashley without being a romantic rival for her, not because he is not more desirable than me but because she is not really his type. When we met up on this last occasion we determined to walk out into the road and figure out which highway we were on and where this was relative to anything else and it all had the spirit of a great adventure. But Ashley never turned up again....

Here are a few pictures. I haven't done this much in recent years, since I got a phone. I had uploaded some to Facebook and then copied them to here but those seem to have disappeared. I'm not a big picture taker, especially when I have my children with me, so these aren't much.

Our triumphant entrance to the city on the Henry Hudson Parkway.

We happened to be wandering past Carnegie Hall, so I had them take a picture of me in some dignified surroundings. Not the greatest look, but it was about 90 degrees, which is hot for me.

My three children by the Dakota apartments. They don't pose, so I have to try to catch them when I can.

The view of the George Washington Bridge from the roof of the apartment building where we were staying.

The children in the subway waiting for the "A" train.

I thought this was a very good, eye-catching ad. It speaks to the New York dream many non-aspiring mogul type people have.

When we went above ground in Brooklyn, my children took many pictures from the train windows.

My daughter was fastidious about not getting any graffiti in her pictures (there still is some).

Coney Island. They were going to go on this Ferris wheel but they burned out.

The golf took a lot out of them.

Gentrified Brooklyn.

You can see that the pedestrian lane was crowded and it was difficult to stay out of the bike lane.

Me on the Bridge, shortly before the incident with the biker.

As with Carnegie Hall, I wasn't looking for the Woolworth Building, but I was quite excited when I noticed I was walking by it.