My home town

Well, kind of. Though I'm from New York, I'm really from Brooklyn and Manhattan is what we called "The City." But I found myself awake early in a hotel on 77th and Madison and decided to go for a walk uptown.

Madison in the 60's and 70's is almost exclusively an upscale shopping street, with no aspect of real life intruding. You can shop or you can eat and if you are there you are most likely a foreign tourist. As you head uptown, though, you get more of a sense that people live there. Not people that you would normally hang out with necessarily, but people nonetheless.

The first thing you really notice is that there are no chain stores. One of the aspects of New York that has been most troubling to me over the past bunch of years is the influx of mall stores. Why would you go to New York to shop at the Gap? Nothing against the Gap, but why? But on upper Madison, unless you count the New York outposts of places like Hermes or places with flagship stores in New York that have spread elsewhere, you face a series of stores with unfamiliar names and small bakeries and cafes. This is incredibly refreshing and feels like you could be in a European city.

Starting from 77th Street, I didn't notice the first chain store until 85th street, where there was a Bath and Body Works. In the meantime, I stopped at E.A.T. by Eli Zabar to get a cup of coffee. A 10 oz cup was $2.50 ounce per ounce, about double Starbucks prices. The woman in front of me in line had taken a plastic cup of berries off the shelf, but when the cashier told her it was $14 she put it back. To put it in perspective, we ate dinner last night at JoJo, one of the finer restaurants in New York and their berries for dessert were $10.

As you move further north, the restaurants tend to be of the urban diner variety. I didn't see my first Starbucks until 95th St. It's hard to walk 20 blocks in New York without seeing one of those. After 96th, the streetscape began to change, as if someone with a blender had begun to mix in some of the rest of the world. At 99th I reached Mt. Sinai Hospital and turned around.

Walking in New York has always taken a certain amount of concentration, but it's now even more difficult because so many people are looking at their phones and not where they are walking. It's not fair for those of us paying attention to have to do all of the avoidance. But one of the things that I like about walking in New York is that, compared to less intense places, it's hard to get too inwardly focused. There's too much to see, hear and smell.

My favorite vignette along the way happened at an intersection. I noticed that as soon as I got to New York that I ceased to pay attention to traffic lights when crossing the street. It's all based solely on what's going on at street level. As I approached one corner, I saw and heard an ambulance streaking up Madison. But the light turned green on the side street and cars started across the avenue as if nothing was happening. Even a school bus. A school bus!  Halfway out into the intersection before stopping to let the ambulance by. As the bus sat there, a little girl with big glasses stared out the window at me, smiled and waved. I smiled in reply and kept smiling all the way back to the hotel.