New York Touristic

I was born in Brooklyn and lived in New York until I was 30, so I consider myself a native, but since I'm here for the weekend staying in a hotel, this gives me a perspective with which to evaluate New York as a tourist spot.

First of all, New York is crowded and busy. I'm guessing this is not surprising information, but I'm serious. Try arriving at Penn Station on Friday 6PM and then attempting to get from the south side of the concourse over to the subway. Try to do this quickly and without touching anyone else. Simply not possible. You can do one or the other but not both. It's interesting to me that although I haven't lived here for 25 years, I have not at all lost my ability to navigate crowds. You show me a hoard of people headed for a bank of stairs or a subway entrance and I'll show you the quickest way to get there. My traveling companion, a fit, recent college grad, struggled mightily to keep up with me as we wove through the waiting room, even though I was exhausted and running a fever.

Second, there are a lot of Starbucks here. I know there are a lot of Starbucks everywhere, but again, New York has to one-up everyone else. My hotel is in the middle of the block on 56th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues and there is one Starbucks directly across the street, one on the corner of 56th and 6th and another between 55th and 56th on 7th. While traveling from the 6th to 7th Avenue outposts, you will also pass 4 other coffee shops as well.

That's another thing about New York. Proximity to competition is no impediment. There are coffee shops next to coffee shops, delis next to delis next to other sorts of restaurants, and rows of souvenir shops on the same block. How can this be? See my first point. The streets are too full for a single outlet of anything important to city life to be sufficient. We need superfluity (which may or may not be a word but should be) just to accomodate everyone.

New York hotels are allowed a certain quirkiness that would not be tolerated in less concentrated environments, and ours is no exception. With the advent of flat screens, the hotel took advantage of the opportunity to wall mount the TVs and eliminate the bulky furniture underneath. This leaves the rooms feeling almost expansive, with generous space between the end of the bed and the opposite wall. It also leaves the room without any place to store one's clothes, if one is inclined to unpack. My room had one small drawer to the right of the desk and a shelf to the left. That's it. But you do get the expansive feel and a wall that really looks like there should be a piece of furniture there, especially because there are no less than 3 sets of electrical outlets that were probably useful when TV was sitting on the dresser.

We went to Chinatown for dinner last night. Try to choose a good place in Chinatown using Yelp. I dare you. It is an extremely helpful guide to where to eat at 3AM after a night of heavy drinking. It seemed like every other comment said something of that nature. The place we picked was fine (My favorite review comment: "Service is wham bam thank you ma'am, without the thank you"), but I learned far too much about the interaction of alcohol and fried food and about the health code grades that are posted on the door of every establishment. Don't worry, all of the Starbucks are graded A, which means 7 or fewer code violations on the most recent inspection. Most of Chinatown is graded B or, for the truly brave, C (below C means shut down).

Breakfast this morning was at the famous Carnegie Deli, where a corned beef sandwich costs as much as our dinner for three at The Great NY Noodle House, and is so large that the one time I had lunch there when I was working in the neighborhood, I got 4 full meals out of it. I had salami and eggs, which was yummy, and one of my wife's cheese blintzes (you have to order 3 and each one weighs about half a pound) which was even yummier. It amazing how deep frying improves everything.

Every inch of wall space is covered with autographed 8-by-10 pictures. Within my sight were David Hasselhoff, Bobby Murcer, Billy Joel, Chris Noth, Miss Teen USA 1996 and too many more to remember. Our favorite moment there was when the group of 2 adults and 6 middle school-age kids sitting to our left got their sandwiches, both of the adults sat straight up, agape and unsure how to deal with the massiveness of it all, while the 13 year old boy next to them gave it a quick glance and a squirt of mustard and dug right in without any change in facial expression.