New York (New York)

New York (Sept 2011)

My father raised me to believe in cities: raised me to believe unquestioningly in their steel cathedrals, forever arcing toward the heavens, and taught me to have faith in the grey subway cars, ornately adorned with such brightly colored prophecies, which could surely tell us right from wrong. He told me to find serenity in the chaos, and to expect miracles around every unknown corner, and that to see the light, one simply needs to awake to the orange glow that surrounds the night, and know that the ether does most assuredly exist.

We lived in Iowa. And no, he was not a false prophet. But from an early age in my family, the concept of the city was placed in the highest regard. Perhaps from the outside it is best possible to understand and appreciate what exists within such undefined walls. To go downtown and shop at the old department stores (ones now long closed for good), or take the bus just because it was different: these were things we did to recreate what did not exist in the plains of Iowa, where Des Moines and its 200,000 inhabitants was the closest thing to a city for several hundred miles.

And so I grew, intent on one day being able to live such a life of urban purity, and matriculated off to college just outside of Chicago, the only place to which I could have ever imagined leaving. I spent hours pondering the stolen “L” map from the Purple Line pinned above my bed, wondering what lay behind each little black dot that marked a station in a neighborhood I had never before visited. The city of neighborhoods, each of which adorned with a unique history and distinct culture, proved to be something I could never explore enough of, or even begin to discover all that it had to offer.

Chicago quickly became my second home, and in a way I always felt as if I belonged there just as much as I did in Iowa. It was the capital of the Midwest, where students, young professionals, wanderers and just about anyone else who needed something different in their life ended up. If this at all sounds analogous to the allure of New York for those searching for fortune, fame or fellowship throughout this vast country, then it should come as no surprise, as Chicago is the New York of the Midwest. I’ve always welcomed the comparison, eager to show that the middle part of America has its own world class city that’s capable of going head to head with our country’s most notable metropolis on a number of fronts. But recently, when contemplating such a comparison, I found myself wondering why I had never actually spent any real time in New York.

It seemed fairly hypocritical that, despite my professed love of large cities, I had never spent any significant time in the biggest city in my own country, and arguably the most famous city in the world. New York had managed to escape me for the first 26 years of my life, and I decided that it was time to finally fix this situation. I needed to make the pilgrimage.

It wasn’t to be an overly ambitious trip, but a long weekend in New York over Labor Day figured to be a good place to start. A close friend of mine from high school, Sarah, was doing the big city lawyer gig in New York, and had a Hell’s Kitchen apartment to offer up for us to crash at. The “us” referring to myself and Phil, another good high school friend who would be making the trip out as well, his journey bringing him from Des Moines, where he still worked and lived.

To say that I had never visited New York before is actually a bit inaccurate. Three years prior, as part of a trip driving a car from Minnesota out to a relative in Massachusetts, I made a quick one day swing through the Big Apple. It was in December and the weather was appropriate for the time of year, yet I was determined to make as much as I could of my short time there by spending the entire day walking around Manhattan, pausing only briefly to warm up with a slice of pizza or cup of coffee every so often. Thirteen miles in one day was the result, of which I was quite proud. But it merely a taste, and as I headed out the next day, I knew that I needed to return again. This time we would have 4 full days in New York, which seemed like an eternity compared to my previous visit.

I arrived Thursday evening before Labor Day into La Guardia, which impressed me as being a remarkably outdated and mediocre airport for such a large, modern city. I suppose airports are an expensive and cumbersome thing to renovate in the middle of a dense urban jungle, but it seemed a less than exhilarating introduction to step foot into the bright lights and glamour of New York by way of decades old carpeting and décor.

I was also disappointed to learn that La Guardia is not served by a subway line, instead requiring travelers to use the bus first in order to get anywhere else in the city by way of public transportation. This is something that annoys me to no end. When I build a city, the first thing I will do is build a transit system with some sort of rail line. The second thing I will do is build an airport on that rail line. Then after that I will build roads and sewer systems and the rest of the other crap you need but not until I put the airport next to a rail stop. “Why should we make it affordable and easy for visitors to our city to get where they need to go when they arrive?” must surely be the mantra of people who allow this to happen.

Dallas has to be one of the most egregious offenders of this that I know of, though I guess I shouldn’t be terribly surprised that a city in Texas has trouble figuring out how to actually be a city. They have a brand new, super shiny airport, and a brand new, super shiny light rail system, neither of which come within about 10 miles of each other. Why would you not somehow connect these two important pieces of urban living? Whoever decided to build each of these enterprises without considering that they should be integrated into one another should be shot. And though I am aware that there are probably many political reasons why this did not occur, I don’t think it’s a crime to shoot a politician in Texas, so I’m going to still give it the go ahead anyways.

Why New York has not been able to connect La Guardia and the subway system may as well have a long and complicated answer, but for the time being it did not matter as I still found myself waiting for the bus on a warm September evening. The M33 bus to Manhattan was supposed to come every 7 minutes according to the schedule, but I stood there, with an ever increasing number of disgruntled passengers, for almost 40 minutes before one arrived. By this time the awaiting crowd had grown beyond the capacity of a single bus, and they began to push and shove towards the entrance, each one hoping to be select enough to be crammed onto a bus full of strangers. I remained back, fully acknowledging that my position in line afforded me not even the smallest chance of making it onto that bus, whic put me in prime position to board the second bus that pulled up only minutes behind the first, and thusly I boarded and we started out in the direction of Manhattan.

By the time I reached Sarah’s apartment it was close to 9pm and I was starving. Sarah and Phil had already eaten before my arrival so we hit the streets in that I could grab something quick for dinner. We popped into a quick corner store that had a host of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food options, and I tried to order something that could be made quick and into a sandwich so I could eat it on the go. The man pointed a tray containing a stagnant looking stew of curious meatball-like objects and some sad looking veggies, claiming that he could make a pita sandwich with “bopalo” and so I asked him again what it was. “Bopalo” he explained, at least that’s what it sounded like he was saying. I looked towards Phil and Sarah who both shrugged in confusion, so I gave up and ordered it, unsure of what the hell he was talking about, but too hungry to care.

My bopalo sandwich was neither good nor bad, but I inhaled it in about 2 seconds and just like that the ordeal was over. We headed to the Pony Bar, which happened to be a nice corner bar just down the street from Sarah’s apartment that offered all Microbrews on tap. The lady standing outside offered up that all beers were only $5 tonight as we passed by, and I balked for a second before realizing that I was not in Milwaukee but instead New York, where $5 for a beer was actually considered quite the deal. I was no longer in Milwaukee indeed. I sampled a few beers from New York and the surrounding states, but failed to alight upon anything of particular interest, and rather instead found myself closing the evening in a conversation with the bartender and another customer about the great Microbreweries of the Midwest. Still it wasn’t a bad start to the trip.

II.

Phil had visited New York several times before, and with his having been to many of the main tourist sites already, and my general lack of interest in most of them, we had fairly little planned for our trip. I had arrived in New York with 2 goals: to check out the High Line Park, and to go to Brooklyn. It seemed like a manageable agenda over the course of 4 days.

To start our Friday I proposed we get the first one out of the way immediately, and so Phil and I headed south towards Chelsea to find the High Line Park. As we walked south the stark industrial world of Hell’s Kitchen and the Meat Packing District gave way to the greener, more residential streets of Chelsea, a charming neighborhood to be sure. I had heard of the High Line Park while reading a couple newspaper articles a few years back, and from the beginning I had loved the concept entirely, and was eager to see if the real thing would match my expectations.

The concept was so simple that it was brilliant, and made you wonder why it had not been done earlier and more often in major cities around the globe. A decade ago, a group of preservationists and neighborhood residents took on the daunting challenge of getting the former elevated rail line, known as the High Line, which ran along the western edge of Manhattan, converted into a greenway, an elevated promenade so to speak, thus sparing the abandoned and run down structure from demolition. The fight was long and the cost not insignificant, but in the end the project was successful in transforming the line into a new elevated park running through the Chelsea and Meat Packing District neighborhoods.

I was also aware of a sister project currently attempting to get the funds in Chicago to convert into green space a former elevated rail line known as the Bloomingdale Trail. Having lived in one of the neighborhoods, Wicker Park, through which it would run, I was familiar with the line and thought it would be a fantastic addition. So was this park in New York really worth it all?

My immediate impression was “yes”. Upon hearing about the elevated park my initial thought was that it was merely that, a green space with a trail running through it that offered up some nice views and a sense of escape in the heart of Manhattan. But the reality was so much more. The real High Line Park is a wonderfully designed and uniquely landscaped trail, preserve, and art gallery. A sign posted along the trail explaining the history of the park and its development explained it best, detailing the concept of park designers to make it like the city itself, where one does not know what to expect around every turn.

Whether it was a sculpture, a different type of flora, or just a stunning vista, every 50 feet of the parkway brought new surprises and experiences, and I thought it a great way to entertain and educate people right in the heart of the city. The park is not as big as you would think, and it took maybe 20 minutes to stroll from end to end. But I thought it a great concept with beautiful execution, and can only hope that Chicago is capable of following in the footsteps of New York, even if they hate admitting to doing such a thing.

From there we continued to wander through Lower Manhattan, first through Washington Square Park and on towards Ground Zero. I had visited Ground Zero a few years back on my short trip through the city, but at the time it was only a massive hole in the ground. That was before One World Trade Center began to rise from the rubble. The site was now only a week away from a private opening for the families of the victims of 9/11, though from the outside it was impossible to see anything beyond the large construction walls that surrounded the area.

Still, with the nearly completed One World Trade Center towering above, the pulse of panic that occurred on that fateful day felt more real to me than ever before. The sheer size and scope of what the World Trade Center had been, and the tens of thousands of people who were there that day: I could have only imagined the chaos and terror that would have been on 9/11. It was something I didn’t understand until I craned my neck towards the shimmering One World Trade and saw truly how big and grand a structure it is, and how big the towers it replaces had been. But from the tragedy comes the new World Trade Center, rebuilt to stand anew.

After paying homage to the memorial, or rather the construction wall the surrounded the memorial, we hoped on the “J” train and headed to Brooklyn. Forever to Brooklyn. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect as the train rolled into the above ground platform at Lorimer St. If you’re under 30 years of age and someone mentions the word “Brooklyn” to you, the immediate reaction is to think of plaid adorned hipsters in thick rimmed glasses who are off put by everything you enjoy and are constantly seeking reaffirmation of that their unique and non-mainstream ways of doing things are in fact better and cooler than anything you might do.

This seemed an absolutely absurd statement to make about a borough of 2.5 million people, yet we started our Brooklyn adventure in Williamsburg, so actually this grand generalization held true for the most part. Walking down Bedford Ave, the main thoroughfare through trendy Williamsburg, it was easy to feel the sentiment of the neighborhood, where new and modern was rejected (except for iphones and macbooks) and the old, different and intriguing were celebrated. There were stands selling vinyl records on every street corner and blocks of book stores, ethnic restaurants, vintage clothing outlets to keep the masses busy and entertained. The sense of fashion was of course more daring and edgy compared to Phil and my “conservative” Midwestern attire.

“Walking down Bedford Ave is like going to a circus where all the clowns are judging you” was the quote that Kevin offered up on our foray through Williamsburg. Kevin was an old college friend of Phil’s who had recently relocated to Williamsburg. He seemed to both embrace and mock the culture of everything that makes the neighborhood what it is. I thought this was a very good attitude to have.

But the funny thing about Williamsburg was, in the hipster heart of the nation, the one place where everyone’s mind drifts to when mentioned, after you’ve walked the streets for a bit, it doesn’t seem any different than normal.

After about an hour of roaming the streets Phil and I decided it was time for some rest and a drink. We had scouted out a place with a rooftop patio, and made our way towards an afternoon beer at elevation. While we waited to be seated at the patio, behind two other groups of people, and with the wait staff clearly in no rush to be seating anyone, I browsed some reviews of the establishment on my phone. Though they varied from very positive to negative, all of the negative ones mentioned specifically the poor service, and how that had affected their visit. Once again the information age had provided a wealth of information on the go. This was all we needed to hear, and so away we strolled, leaving the other two groups to their wait of indeterminable length.

As the day wore down and our beers reached empty it was time to catch a train back to Manhattan for some rest in the evening, and then out to enjoy a Friday night in the city. For dinner we met up with some friends at The Maritime Hotel in Chelsea, a nice place that served contemporary American cuisine and pitchers of pretty decent Sangria Blanco. I enjoyed the meal, we went with pizza for the economical choice, but not quite as much as I had enjoyed the Vietnamese sandwich Phil and I tried for lunch in Williamsburg.

These little shops are everywhere, and have become in some way the new Sushi in Brooklyn. I had read something to this effect before our visit, and was determined to make a stop during our trip, and it just so happened to be for our first meal. The little sandwiches, packed with traditional Vietnamese flavorings of pork and veggies, and served on a fresh baguette, a relic of the French Colonial era, are wonderful mix of east and west into one dish. The concept of a sandwich was so familiar, but the flavor so different, and the ingredients so much fresher and brighter than the typical offerings we associate with in the US. I knew right then that when the Vietnamese Sandwich fad reaches Milwaukee’s East Side in 5 years, I’ll be in line to pick one up right away.

“The Banh Mi sandwich is the greatest thing to result from colonialism” was a statement I read about them later, though now I can’t place who the originator was.

III.

Where does one go out on a Friday night in New York, the cultural center of the Western Hemisphere, and arguably the world? It seemed like such a daunting task to begin with. Phil, Sarah and I, along with a couple other friends, decided to head towards the Village to begin our night, and it went along well enough, though nothing beyond what I felt could have been obtained in a host of other cities. Over drinks at the Electric Bowery I laughed when a host of 90s classic songs by groups such as Oasis and even, “gasp”, Blink 182, came over the stereo. For a second I thought maybe I was back in Milwaukee, but then I paid for another drink and remembered exactly where I was.

In the end, the best part of the night ended up being the last place we went, after everyone except Phil and I had gone home for the evening, and we stumbled upon a place in the Village offering live music with no cover.

It was after 1am and we had been wandering the streets for about 20 minutes, not sure what we were looking for but not quite ready to surrender to the night either. We headed in to find an R&B band getting ready to take the stage for another set. The venue, Groove USA, looked like it definitely catered towards the tourist crowd during normal operating hours, but at 1am the tourists were gone and the local crowd had filled in. It was a black band, playing to an almost entirely black audience, and Phil and I. But that was the best part, and we slow jammed along to Purple Rain as best we could, not a fanny pack or camera in sight. That was the moment that New York gave to me.

IV

I never realized, as I would imagine most people who have yet to visit New York don’t realize either, just how big Central Park is. After frequenting a bar on the Upper West Side to watch my Northwestern Wildcats play their season opener in football, I decided to take a stroll and work off my afternoon buzz through the park. But at over 800 acres, one does not simply just do a lap around the park and call it a day.

It was early September but the weather remained brilliant, and the park was filled to what felt like near capacity with bicycles, joggers, softball games, and the usual array of blanket bound bodies who crave nothing more than to be amongst it all. Though I was without a blanket, I too counted myself lucky enough to just be encircled by so much life and activity. Central Park may be an oasis in the heart of the city, but that hardly makes an escape.

I’ve spent my time decrying how I believe Chicago is the New York of the Midwest, and that as a city it competes in the same level in many areas, despite the fact that a majority of New Yorkers would disagree vehemently with that statement. However, I will easily concede that Chicago has no Central Park, nor does any city that I have visited in the United States for that matter. No city in the country has the surroundings to make Central Park what it is, and no park in the country has the size, scale and landscape to take that surrounding energy and funnel, dissipate and redistribute it the way that Frederick Olmsted’s vision can.

I would have loved to walk for hours through the park, but the afternoon sun was getting warm and my jeans did not make for comfortable walking attire in the late summer heat, so I made for the Upper East Side where the subway could ferry me back to Sarah’s air conditioned apartment.

Saturday night turned into another exploration of the Village, an attempt to see and feel more of what New York means to so many people. We bar hopped a bit, stopping at several places of varying merit and taking in the crowds and atmospheres before finally ending up at a pizza joint at about 3 in the morning. The lines were beginning to form for the post bar crowd in search of an alcohol absorbing snack to sooth the stomach and put one to bed. Even in a city with such a reputation for being able to provide almost any nameable type of cuisine at all hours, a simple pizzeria was really all that many seemed to require.

It was the slice that brought everything home, and made it an evening. It might not have been the best slice of pepperoni pizza in New York available at that hour, but my friend Eric, a tall Chinese-American affectionately nick named “Panda”, and I devoured the thin slices of pizza topped with grease rafts of pepperoni with little regard for such consideration.

Sunday brought us back to Brooklyn in the late morning for brunch in Clinton Hill with my cousin and her husband, recently transplanted from La Crosse, Wisconsin only 10 months prior. The cultural change one must undergo to move from La Crosse to Clinton Hill, a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn that only a few years ago was a much rougher part of town, and still had remnants of being so, was about as stark as one can encounter in the US I would imagine.

But they seemed to be doing great, and none too concerned about cultural changes any more so than anyone else around them. As we sipped mimosas and dined on brunch at a café down the street, where the décor and artwork celebrated the African American history and jazz age prominence of the establishment, it didn’t feel as if we were anywhere besides where we needed to be at the time.

After a stroll around the neighborhood and Prospect Park, we headed back to Andy and Lindsay’s apartment for some wine and to escape the humidity for a while, which had begun to bear down on the city with intensity over the past couple days. Inside, we were given the grand tour of an apartment that measured no more than a few hundred square feet, and consisted of a small bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen/living room. It was a modest apartment to be kind, and by Midwestern standards it was a closet at best.

Still, they were more than happy to host, apologetic but accepting towards the lack of space their apartment offered. The conversation turned towards their place, the building and landlord, and what housing and living expenses cost in New York, and I was stunned when I heard what rent was for their tiny apartment.

When I first started school in the Chicago area, having lived in Iowa previously for all my life, I was startled by the cost of just about everything. What I paid for rent compared to my friends at the University of Iowa, and what we paid for drinks out at the bars in Evanston or Chicago seemed on a whole different level compared to the rural Midwestern style college living I was more familiar with. For years I had gone around believing Chicago to be an expensive city, and oftentimes made comments regarding my relief to be back somewhere cheap whenever I returned home.

Years later, I would finally discover what expensive meant. I claim to be a fairly worldly person, having traveled and lived in a number of places thus far in my short life, but still I was unprepared for what the cost of an apartment in Brooklyn would be. I could understand in Manhattan, the center of the universe, that space would be at a premium and apartments could cost both an arm and a leg. But here too in Brooklyn? I thought this was where people went to escape the high prices, and to live amongst the people. Instead, my friends here in Williamsburg, Fort Green/Clinton Hill, and the like were paying more than I had ever heard of for rent in Chicago, no matter the neighborhood. And compared to Milwaukee? Well I’ll say no more: just so as any New Yorkers who might be reading this don’t get offended when they deduce what apartments go for in the Cream City.

And the thing about it that floored me more than anything, was that from everyone we talked to, no matter how expensive their place was, and how small the rooms were, and how old and shitty the building was, they always had the same sentiment:

“Yeah it’s expensive, but for this neighborhood, it’s a deal!”

At that point I was too scared to ask what sort of price, or conversely lack of comfort, might constitute a place that was not considered a deal for the neighborhood. Images of poor students paying hundreds of dollars to sleep in laundry rooms or underneath stoops popped into my head as I sat there nodding in agreement with everything being said about the pricing in the neighborhood.

After a brief respite, we headed back out into the slowly cooling evening air for some dinner and a little more exploring to finish our day in Brooklyn. Our wanderings took us to Barcade, which the more quick witted my recognize as a portmanteau of the words “Bar” and “Arcade”. And it is, and so is this “bar”. The idea is wonderfully simple, if not just a variation of the Dave & Buster’s model.

Except here it was without all the crappy commercial appeal and corporate atmosphere. We were in Brooklyn after all, which meant that Barcade featured the now near forgotten arcade games of the 80s: Asteroids, Paperboy, Ms. Pac-Man, Centipede, Rampage and more. These games were actually of a generation before us, and I couldn’t claim the nostalgia of having spent hours of my youth in a dark arcade playing these very games. Instead I remembered them more as the weird old games that no one played in the arcades of my youth as we flocked to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Street Fighter consoles.

But it was entertaining none the less to play something from decades ago and I was pleased to notice that the games still only cost $.25 a play, which on first glance made it appear that we had hours of cheap entertainment in front of us. However, much like a first sexual experience, my youth and inexperience did not serve me well, and the games proved to be difficult, frustrating, and over before I knew it. My first attempts at several of the games took perhaps a mere 30 seconds before it was over, and I was left standing wondering what the hell just happened.

Our hours of entertainment turned out to be only a single hour at best before we had burned through our stack of quarters and our patience with being rookies at such unforgiving games. Lindsay and Andy bid us goodnight, and Phil, Kevin and I decided to check out a few more places before calling it a night.

We ended the night at bar which I can no longer recall the name, but a place that felt very Brooklyn in several ways, with a music selection that featured heavy metal at the beginning, but slowly transitioned to hip hop as the night finished up. We had walked through McCarren Park, the large multi functional park to the northeast of Williamsburg. Walking through the park at night you could still see some of the elements that signaled the ongoing gentrification of Williamsburg, but that the neighborhood still included shadier remnants of a few years prior. At least it seemed so in the darkness of night time, but then again you could run into a priest in the dark and he might even seem suspicious….well ok bad example, but I think the point is made. So maybe McCarren Park at midnight wasn’t bad at all, I guess I wasn’t really even sure.

V.

Monday was our final day in New York, and we had something special on the plate to mark the end of our visit: a trip to the Bronx for a Yankees game. In fact, it was really something special, as Sarah had given us two of the company tickets from the law firm she worked at, which meant we found ourselves sitting only about a dozen rows behind the Yankee dugout, in seats that cost more than I would ever think to pay for a baseball game.

Even though I am a die-hard Cubs fan, I am a baseball fan in the end, so I tried my best not to let the occasion be lost on me. This was after all, Yankee Stadium, the house that Ruth….er well the house that Steinbrenner built. Alas I had missed the opportunity to visit the one true Yankee Stadium before it met its demise, and instead now sat in the $1 billion cathedral that had been erected in its place.

New Yankee Stadium is, in a word…new. Sitting there, in our lavishly cushioned seats, large enough to accommodate your 21^st century sized average American, I looked around and felt not a whole lot of anything. We were definitely sitting in the Bronx, starring at Jeter, Rivera, Cano and the others less than 20 yards away at times, but still it just didn’t feel that special. New Yankee Stadium is great if you like things that looked shiny and expensive, but in trying to meticulously recreate so many aspects of the original, iconic structure, the architects seemed to merely be calling more attention to the fact that we were no longer sitting in that same hallowed stadium.

History, tradition, and legend are very difficult things to build from scratch.

The game itself as more than entertaining, as the Yankees and visiting Orioles squared off for 9 innings of home run derby, with the Yankees eventually coming out on top in the bottom of the 9^th after a seesaw back and forth game. Sinatra’s famous rendition of “New York, New York” belted from the stadium speakers after the final out had been made, signaling another Yankee victory. It was a nice touch I thought, until the song ended…and then began again a second, then a third time over. If only New York was a big enough city that someone besides Frank Sinatra would record a song regarding its merits to also play for sporting events.

Following the game we took a walk around the stadium as I like to observe the neighborhoods and outside fascades of the ballparks I visit. I was surprised by the lack of connection between the stadium, crowd, and surrounding neighborhood. The Bronx that lies just across the street from the newly completed billion dollar project does not appear to have benefitted much from the professional sports team that is its neighbor.

On the north side of Chicago following a Cubs game, the entire stadium, or so it at least seems, pours from Wrigley directly into the dozens of bars that fill the surrounding neighborhood, where the revelry continues, win or lose, for hours and hours. In Milwaukee the hoards of baseball fans return to the adjacent parking lots to resume their tailgating activities. But here I stood witness as the crowd patiently moved towards the subway stop, waiting for the underground cars to ferry them away from what was quickly returning to be just another neighborhood in the Bronx.

Save for a handful of street vendors, souvenir shops, and a couple bars, there was little in the way of post game atmosphere following a Yankees victory. I was saddened and disappointed by this.

Back in Hell’s Kitchen we dined at a small Mexican restaurant just around the corner from Sarah’s apartment. In what I would guess is typical for New York, this unassuming restaurant, no more than 10 tables and located on a nondescript intersection, actually provided some great Mexican cuisine.

They specialized in enchiladas, and between the three of us we covered the roja, verde, and mole enchiladas, all done extremely well. I sipped a jamaica water to remind me of Mexico, even though I don’t think it’s a drink typically served with dinner. It was a good meal to go out on, nothing especially unique, but well made, satisfying and comforting.

This was what New York was really about I felt. Save for the most ambitious foodies, I can’t imagine most New Yorkers are able to spend all their free time gallivanting around the boroughs looking for the newest food craze. The majority of New Yorkers just know that at their fingertips they have access to an amazing array of authentically prepared cuisines from all over the world. I thought about how many Mexican restaurants were located within a 2 square mile radius of Sarah’s apartment in Manhattan, and then thought about my apartment in Milwaukee, and sighed a bit. Not even Chicago can offer its inhabitants the world in the way New York can, and I understood this now.

My bus to La Guardia, yes the airport was still only accessible by bus and the situation had not changed since our arrival 4 days prior, drove through several miles of Queens, but in which neighborhood we were driving I was not sure. There were busy commercial streets line with shops and residential ones full of brownstones and brick buildings, seemingly stretching as far as forever.

We never made it to Queens, and as I stared out the window I so desperately wanted to pull the cord, hop onto the street and begin exploring the surrounding streets that on the outside appeared indistinguishable from thousands just like them, but just maybe offered up clues into a unique and inspiring neighborhood flush with history and soul.

But I had damn plane to catch, and so Queens was forced to wait. A long weekend might have been enough to get a good taste of Manhattan, but there was so much more to explore, and I just didn’t have the time.

As I made my way through the chaos of an airport built to handle terminal traffic prior to 9/11, I made a promise to myself that I would try to live, if only for a short while, in New York at some point. A pilgrimage had not been enough, I needed a sabbatical.