Everyone knows that New York is one of the best places in the world for shopping, especially if you have a lot of money to spend.  Tiffany’s, Macy’s, FAO Schwarz, even Barnes & Noble – all of the flagship stores are here.

But what if you don’t have the money for Tiffany’s, and you still want to get something different for that special someone?  After all, you’re in New York, why get something you could get just anywhere?

If that’s what you’re after, maybe you should consider the Holiday Markets:

Located in Columbus Circle, Bryant Park, Union Square and several other locations, the Holiday Markets are open throughout the Holiday season.  Most open in late November or early December and run through Christmas Eve, but the Market in Bryant Park opens as early as October and closes after New Year’s.

The Markets are full of every weird and unique trinket you can imagine: handmade jewelry, hand-carved wooden boxes, puppets, hot drinks, pastries, icons sold by what appear to be Eastern Orthodox nuns…the list goes on.  Just last year I bought my mother a beautiful dragon brooch at the Union Square Holiday Market.

(Oddly enough, the prices was lower when I paid cash instead of credit.  I wonder if something was up with that.  Hmm.)

In fact, I went and did it again this year.  When my folks came down to visit in early December, my sister and my mother took my grandmothers and my aunt to see Anything Goes while my dad and I went to the Columbus Circle holiday market and picked out -

Ah, ah, ah, sorry Mom.  No peeking.  You’ll have to wait for Christmas Day.

How can I talk about Christmas in New York without talking about the most iconic image of Christmas in New York?  The image that movies and TV shows use as shorthand to let us know that it’s Christmas in New York.  The Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center:

Of course, the Christmas Tree itself isn’t the only thing to see:

And of course, there’s more to do than just look, as the second most iconic image of Christmas in New York will attest:

Just watch out for the prices:

Another post on Christmas in New York coming soon, followed by the final post on the Intrepid, because I’m not very good at this.

The first thing we did upon arrival at the Intrepid (after buying our tickets of course; regular price for adults $24, the Swedish Physicist got in free as part of some deal with Columbia) was to visit the USS Growler, a nuclear submarine from the early Cold War that’s tied up across Pier 86 from the Intrepid.  This might not have been the best choice we could have made, given our limited time: with the limited space on a submarine, you have to wait in line to get in, and that wait is about a half hour long if the queue is full.

If you’re not in a hurry, the wait isn’t so bad, since there’s a short documentary on the history of submarine warfare playing on a continuous loop for you to watch while you wait (hint: the early stages involved a lot of drowning).  The real trick is getting into line in the first place.  You see, there are several doorways on the Growler that look like this:

And you have to pass through a mock-up just to get in line.  Our group had no problems – the Girl From Washington Heights is tiny, the Swedish Physicist is incredibly tall but apparently capable of folding up like a lawn chair, and I’m pretty much just an average dude – but if your party includes anyone who won’t be able to get through that door for any reason, you’d best move on to the Intrepid itself.

The wait was only twenty minutes or so for us, which relieved my worry about missing the one thing about the Intrepid that I consider and absolute must-see.  I’ll get back to that in my next post.

Anyway, the tour starts with a brief history of the Growler – whose history is actually pretty brief.  See this?

That’s a Regulus missile, loaded for launch, as it would have been if the Growler had ever actually needed to use it.  The problem?  They needed to surface to fire.  The tour guide informed us that one of these could be loaded and fired by the crew in fifteen minutes, but that’s fifteen minutes of vulnerability.  As you can imagine, that got obsolete real fast.  The Growler was only in service for six years.

The tour guide emphasized – and I will emphasize – not to touch anything in the Growler.  Not because the nuclear submarine is necessarily delicate (though I’m sure that, at more than fifty years old, it requires a lot of maintenance), but for your own safety.  The day we were there, a panel was hanging open at head-smacking height because someone in a previous tour group touched something.

Once you’ ve heard the introductory speech, you start down the…torpedo tube?  Launch bay?  Missile silo?  The corridor they would have used to load the missiles and raise them to the surface.

After that, you descend into the living areas of the Growler.

That one was the Commanding Officer’s Stateroom.  That’s right, that’s the best room in the house.  The rest are more like this:

The mess areas were a little more comfortable…

Crew's Mess

Officers' Wardroom

While some other rooms…

...a little less so.

Those tiny closets in the back are showers.

But of course, the crew weren’t on the Growler for a pleasure cruise, they were there to work!  And so…

Navigator's Station

Missile Checking and Guidance Center

Control Room and Attack Center

Sonar Room

Radio Room

Scullery

Engine Room

Maneuvering Room

And then there were the places where they combined the two, apparently just to save space:

The Aft Torpedo Room. If you look to the left, you'll notice more bunks. That's right, enlisted men on this boat had to sleep with nuclear missiles.

It doesn’t take long.  The whole walk-through takes maybe fifteen minutes.  Which is the whole point, really: the crew were confined to that tiny metal tube for months.  The pictures don’t really capture just how claustrophobic it was in there.  It takes a special kind of person to handle that.  I probably would have gone mad.

But at least they never went to war, and thank all the merciful gods for that.  Their kind of war had only one ending.

The story of the Intrepid itself is very different.  Stay tuned.

Believe it or not, the Girl From Washington Heights and her family are not the only people I know in NYC.  I know it’s easy to get that impression, but it’s true.  There are others.  There’s the Swedish Physicist, the Marathon Painter (who more or less constructed this site for me) and her sister the Published Librarian, the Grognard, and my own sister the Bubba’s Bartender.

The Swedish Physicist is a grad student at Columbia, and as his name implies, he is not an American citizen.  He’s here on a student visa, and he’s going back home to Sweden as soon as his studies are through.  That time is coming very soon, and one of the things he wanted to see before he had to leave is the USS Intrepid.  I thought that was an absolutely smashing idea – he gets to see a bit of serious American history before he leaves and I get a good article to restart this blog – and that’s how I, he, and the Girl From Washington Heights (we invited our other friends, but they couldn’t make it for one reason or another) ended up visiting the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum one bright Saturday afternoon in October.

Had to steal this picture from an earlier post, because the pictures I got on our approach weren't nearly as good.

Now, right from the get-go, we did one thing right and one thing wrong.  On the plus side, we picked a good day to go.  A visit to the Intrepid involves a significant amount of walking around outside.  If nothing else, a large part of its “exhibits” are the aircraft on the flight deck.

With that in mind, a sunny day in the mid-sixties was just perfect.  I’d been to the Intrepid on another occasion, a cold and damp day in late November, and let’s just say that I didn’t enjoy it as much.  The Intrepid is anchored in the Hudson, and there’s no shelter from the wind and the rain in all that wide open.

The mistake we made was to arrive too late on that perfect day.  Between travel time and a stop for lunch, we didn’t arrive at the Intrepid until 3:30 or so – and the Intrepid closes at 6.  Now, unlike many New York museums, it’s entirely possible to see everything there is to see on the Intrepid in a single day, but you need a significant chunk of the day to do it.  With about two hours to work with, we had to pick the things we absolutely had to see, then keep an eye on the clock the whole time so we didn’t miss one.  Not the best use of time.  Go and do thou better.

My original plan was to discuss my entire visit to the Intrepid in one post, but I have since realized that that one post would be friggin’ huge.  So happy Thanksgiving to all, and stay tuned for Part 2.

Hey, all.

I’m still working on a post about a visit I made to the USS Intrepid a few weeks ago with some friends, partly because it reached me more deeply than I thought it would, and partly because I have over a hundred pictures to sort through.  In the meantime, I thought I’d show you a few pictures of New York decorating itself for the holiday season.

First, the fountain I walk past every day in Grand Army Square, at the corner of 59th and 6th:

And a night view:

Sorry I didn’t get any pictures from earlier this year, when it had sculptures of the heads of the creatures from the Chinese Zodiac in there.

And then there’s this, at the corner of 57th and 6th:

What you see there is the biggest snowflake in New York City, no matter what kind of winter we have.  It’s also one of the first decorations to go up every year.  The Girl From Washington Heights once told me that she considered it to be one of the major signs that Christmas was coming.

Stay tuned.  More to come.

…I’m back.

A lot has happened in the time I’ve been away.  The Girl From Washington Heights and I aren’t together anymore.  It ended about as well as such things can, and we’re still on good terms – which means you’ll still hear about her from time to time – but it’s still a bit sad.  That’s a big part of why I’ve been gone; partly because I’ve been putting my life back in order and partly because I was using her camera to take my pictures.

Anyway, now I’m the one who lives in Washington Heights.  It’s quite a change.  Astoria is almost a suburb in some ways, a self-contained community out at the end of the N line (but then, you could say that about a lot of neighborhoods; that’s one thing that still gets me about the sheer immensity of this city: the areas that would be suburbs – small towns or even cities in their own right – anywhere else that are still part of the city proper here).  Washington Heights is pretty much exactly what you picture in your mind when you hear the words “inner city”: buildings crowded shoulder-to-shoulder and pressed right up against the street with but a narrow ledge of sidewalk.  People sitting out on the stoop in good weather.  Bodegas on the corner selling fruits (including plantains) and vegetables in stalls out front.  Tiny cheap greasy restaurants.  Check-cashing places.  Pirated DVD’s spread out on a blanket on the sidewalk.

Scary image to some of you country folk, isn’t it?  Me too, to be completely honest about it.  I spent the first month or two I lived here walking the streets as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.  I’ve calmed down a little since then, seeing as the most aggressive thing I’ve seen since I moved here in July is the old men in front of the bodega slapping down their dominoes extra hard.

Not that I was being completely silly.  The Heights was a genuinely rough neighborhood back in the day, and it’s not entirely tame now.  I live on the very leading edge of gentrification in the neighborhood, but the Projects are no more than two Avenues over.

Of course, if that was all there was to Washington Heights, I probably wouldn’t bother telling you about it.  It would be nothing more than a crash pad, a home base that I sally forth from as I venture out into the city.

But it’s much, much more than that.

See that picture at the top of the Wikipedia article?  I live right at the foot of that great gray bridge.  It’s an awesome thing, a reminder of just how vast and monolithic and powerful the City really is.  When I walk in the park at the foot of that bridge, and I see the huge foundations that support it, I’m reminded that I’m not just looking at an extension of the street.  This thing is a landscape feature.  And yet, it doesn’t make me feel small.  Instead, it gives me an odd feeling of freedom, knowing that at any time, I could just walk out my front door, around the corner, over the bridge and out into America.  I don’t particularly want to do that, but it’s a good feeling to have when the City presses close around you and you start to feel trapped.  The Girl From Washington Heights tells me that she loved that bridge for that very reason when she was growing up.

Living here has given me the experience – a new one for me – of being in the minority.  English is not the language I hear most often in the street.  My white skin is uncommon, my blue eyes even more so, and I can count the number of redheads I’ve seen since I moved here in July on one hand.

There’s an independent bookstore right around the corner from where I live.  The first weekend I was there, I looked in to see that they were sponsoring an Open Mike Rap Night.  Two avenues over and five streets up, there’s a restaurant that specializes in mofongo.  At the foot of that great gray bridge is a a park that lets you forget that you’re in a city.  In that park is a little red lighthouse that you’ve probably never heard of, but which has been a key part of childhood for generations of Washington Heights children.  A few blocks north is another park, and in that park hides a unicorn.

Even this rough, crowded part of the City hides beauty and wonder.  That’s just the way this city is.  And I’ll tell you all about it, sooner or later.  That’s what I’m here for.

Oh, yeah.  Before I sign off, I should come clean.  I have to admit that one stereotype has turned out to be absolutely true.

There’s a friggin’ hairdresser, barbershop or salon every half-block up here.

When the thing that we bleeding-heart liberals had feared all along came to pass – that is to say, when some unbalanced individual took all this overheated rhetoric about wars of civilizations and the United States of Arabia and hordes of Muslims coming to enforce Sharia law seriously and slashed a man’s throat for being Muslim – I thought the situation would settle down.  Surely the opponents of the Park 51 Islamic Community Center (the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”) would dial it back now that their cause was associated with a violent madman.

Turns out some people have no shame.  Sometimes I wonder if the proud culture warriors of the Right really believe that there’s no connection between their wartime rhetoric and the fact that some of their less-stable followers occasionally act like they were actually in, you know, a war…or if they actually count on the loonies to lend some teeth to their attempts to intimidate lefties.

I really do.

I honestly can’t believe this conversation is happening in 21st-century America.  I can’t believe there are people willing to say out loud, in public, “We don’t want their kind in this neighborhood.”  I can’t believe that this is happening in New York.  I mean, it’s happening all over the country, far from the sacred ground of Ground Zero – Bryan Fischer of the AFA is arguing that there should be “no more mosques, period”, and there’s even a fool in Florida, head of a church of similar fools, planning to burn Qurans in honor of 9/11 (I was proud to be an American when I heard about those, I can tell you) – but this is the city of immigrants!  This is the city that people across the country point to as their prime example of flaming, eggheaded, lawless, bleeding-heart liberalism!  We’re supposed to be better than this!

I take some comfort in the fact that Park 51 is going to happen.  The zoning board has already ruled, and any government entity might run into some…legal difficulty…in trying to take it back now, when the reason is clearly “no Muslims welcome here”.

As I watch this madness unfold, there are some things I can’t help but wonder: are Muslims the new minority that politicians rally their followers against for political gain?  Is this what the paranoia that led to the creation of the Japanese internment camps of WWII looked like from the inside?  Doesn’t anybody remember that there was a time when they were the unwelcome new arrivals, suspected of being agents for a foreign power (hello, my fellow Irish Catholics!)?

How many of the people out there ranting about Sharia law and making nasty jokes about building a gay bar next door (there are already three within .1 mile) actually know any actual, real-life Muslims?

When I first moved to New York, I worked at a small law firm in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens.  About a quarter of the employees (i.e. four or five people) were Muslim (interesting side note: the largest group were a family – two brothers and one brother’s wife – who were either first generation from Pakistan or possibly even born there.  They were quite close to the boss and her family, who were Indian.  I was proud to be American when I realized that.  This is the place where things like that happen.).  They dressed according to American standards (albeit always with long sleeves), they showed me their wedding pictures, they were occasionally rude enough to have conversations in Urdu with the boss and her family around the rest of the office, and during Ramadan they shared the big meal they had at the end of each day with the Muslim employees in the office down the hall.  Every day, once they’d gone first (they hadn’t had lunch, after all, and probably not breakfast), they would call us all down to share in the rice and beef and chicken.

Those are the Muslims I know.  Well, them and the women I see walking down the street every day, wearing a hijab and leading their children.  And the men I see shooting the breeze in front of a hookah bar on Steinway.  And the people who don’t “look Muslim” in any way who I see going in and out of the two mosques in easy walking distance of my apartment.  These aren’t scary people.  These aren’t the terrifying Arab hordes looking to subvert our country and institute sharia law.  Just my neighbors.  And the the majority of America – the majority of this City, God damn it, though Manhattan seems to have risen above (barely) – doesn’t want them praying in the wrong neighborhood.

Funny thing.  I visited Lower Manhattan yesterday.  Do you know just how dense Lower Manhattan is?  Two blocks away is another neighborhood.  Anyway.  On my way to South Street Seaport, I passed a food truck selling Halal food.  If I hadn’t had somewhere else to be, I might have stopped.  It smelled good.  But something occurred to me as I kept walking: they’re welcome within two blocks of Ground Zero if they’re there to serve the rest of us kebabs, but if they want to build something, pray, generally act like they’re not second-class citizens, then it’s “We don’t want your kind around here”.

That’s not the City or the Country that I’m usually so proud of.  We’re supposed to be better than this.

Last week, when I made the trip that I suspect will be my last visit to Coney Island this year, I wasn’t just going for another shrimp boat and another walk along the shore.  No, this time, I had a purpose.  I was going to visit the cultural centers of Coney Island…such as they are.

The first place I stopped was the educational part of Coney Island…such as it is.  It’s one of the few things that brings a touch of dignity to a tawdry neighborhood.  I’m talking, of course, about the New York Aquarium.

A member of the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Aquarium is rather small as such things go.  You probably won’t be able to make a full day of it, but it’s good for a few fun and educational hours at the beach.

I arrived at 10:30 that morning, just in time to catch the Sea Lion show.  Our stars for the day were Duke:

And Osborne:

As you can see, Ozzie is the more trained and talented of the two, and he made sure we gave him his props:

Osborne asking the audience to put their hands together

I’ve often wondered if sea lions actually feel any affection for their humans, or if all of the apparent playfulness we see is just a result of good training.  Having seen the show, I’m still not sure, but I figure there has to be some degree of trust if you’re going to allow an 800-pound creature to do this:

The show lasted about 15-20 minutes.  Duke gave us a basic introduction to sea lions, demonstrating the difference between sea lions and true seals (sea lions have external ears and the ability to walk, for two examples).  Then Osborne came onstage and put on the real show, jumping out of the water, doing flips, touching colorful balls suspended over the pool and getting right up close to the audience (please don’t touch).

After the show was over, I went to the Sea Cliffs area, a section of North Pacific coastline in New York.  Waiting for me there were the Blackfoot Penguins,

Fur Seals,

Hard to see, isn't he? And that's the best shot I could get.

I said "best I could get". Did you think I was kidding?

California Sea Otters

And Walruses.

A little easier to work with than seals.

A little.

It was a warm day – nothing like the blast-furnace heat of late June and early July, but still pretty toasty – so most of the critters were in the water.  The easiest way to actually see them was to go into the building and look into their tanks from below.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t make for the best pictures (as you can see), but I did the best I could.

After that I moved on to the Shark exhibit,

Which clearly includes things other than sharks

...but of course includes plenty of them, too.

Explore the Shore

And Alien Stingers (the jellyfish exhibit).

These pavilions were full of interesting and educational exhibits, most of which were hard to photograph because they were essentially glass tanks in dark rooms – perfect for creating reflections.  That’s why you see no jellyfish.

Anyway.  That was pretty much it for the Aquarium proper.  I could have stopped at the Seaside Café, but I really wanted to have lunch at Nathan’s.  If this was to be this summer’s last visit to Coney, I wanted a shrimp boat, dangit.  Instead, I went out the front gate and into the “Planet Earth: Shallow Seas 4-D Experience” theatre in front of the Aquarium.  It had cost an extra $4 to buy a “Total Experience” ticket ($17 instead of $13 for a General Admission ticket), but if I was there, I wanted the Total Experience so I could report back on it to all of you.  See how dedicated I am?

Besides, it was more cost-effective to buy the Total Experience ticket than to buy tickets to the Aquarium and the 4-D Experience separately.

For the literal-minded out there, the “4-D” had nothing to do with physics.  Instead, “Shallow Seas” is a 3-D movie with bubbles, sea spray and other special effects to make you feel as if you’re right there at the places on the screen.  It’s an eight-minute show and the line moves quickly, so it seems like a good place to take the kids.

So that was the first…I want to say half, but in terms of time, money, activities, and…everything, really…the Aquarium was a far larger part of my visit than the Coney Island Museum.  So first part, I guess.  Educational as it was, the Coney Island Museum is still to come, and that was educational, too.

Hello, all.

Sorry I’ve been gone so long.  Certain aspects of my day job have interfered, not to mention several other writing projects I’m working on.  Worst of all, I’ve suffered some odd form of writer’s block on the post I’ve been promising you all summer about Governor’s Island.  It’s not that I’m having a hard time finding the right words to describe the place – it’s that I visited on two separate days, and I’m still sorting through the pictures!  Still, I promise that will be up soon.

Yesterday, I visited Coney Island for what will probably be the last time this year.  We’re past the tipping point of Summer now, and there’s only so many days in which to do all the things I want to do.  I visited the New York Aquarium while I was there, and the Coney Island Museum.  I’ll have posts about them, too – possibly before the post about Governor’s Island.

I know that I spend an awful lot of time and pixels on Coney Island, and I fully intend to expand my horizons a bit, both in general and in terms of summer fun next year.  It’s just that Coney Island is one of the places in this city that makes me purely and genuinely happy.  I don’t know if it’s Coney Island as such that does that for me – in some ways, Coney is a bit depressing, as I’ll discuss in the post on the Coney Island Museum – or if it’s simply Coney Island as a beach that makes me happy.  I think it may be that.  I think I’d get a similar feeling at Rockaway Beach, Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, the far end of Long Island or Newport Beach, California.  Part of it is just happy memories.  Sunburns notwithstanding, I can’t think of a single truly bad day I’ve ever had on a beach (though this year’s Fourth of July comes close…).  But I think there’s more to it than that.  Something about the boundary between the land and the ocean.  The end of East.  On a round Earth, a beach is the closest you can get to going to the end of the world and looking over the edge.  It’s a good place to stand on the borderline and think about where you’ve been and where you’re going.

Stay tuned.

So it’s Saturday, and I’m riding the 6 train down to the south point of Manhattan so I can hop on the ferry for Governor’s Island.  The trains are running slow even for the weekend, so the damn thing is packed to the doorframes.

Around about 14th Street, this group of…I’m going to say college students…gets on.  They’re laughing, shouting, chattering, teasing, generally having a great time.

When they finally got off – one stop before I did – I heaved a loud, exaggerated sigh of relief.  The woman sitting next to me just nodded and said “Tell me about it.”

What happened?  Just what was it that could make two New Yorkers talk to strangers on a train?

Well, when somebody is being as rude as those people were, most people – even New Yorkers – need to vent a little.

What?  New Yorkers call someone rude?

Here’s the thing: they’ve done psychology experiments where they put too many monkeys in a too-small cage.  As they monkeys got well and truly overcrowded, they all became very quiet and passive, each withdrawing into whatever personal space it could manage so as not to provoke aggression in anyone.  Why do I bring it up?  Because humans do it too.

Take a look around a subway car the next time you get on one.  Everyone is sitting or standing quietly, reading or listening to music or just sort of staring into space.  If anyone is talking to a companion, they’re trying to keep it to themselves.  Everyone is trying, as best they can, to maintain their personal bubble.  Visitors may pity us for that, say how much of a shame it is how little contact we have with our neighbors, how isolating and impersonal the city is, etc., but it’s all for a reason: nobody wants friction.  We’re all crammed together in a metal box, and nobody wants friction.

That’s why raucous groups like Saturday’s college students – not to mention beggars, preachers and buskers – are so annoying: they pierce that little protective bubble like a spike.  On a day like Saturday, when it’s already so hot that the whole world feels like it’s sweating and the trains are running slow and thus more packed than usual, all of that noise was like sandpaper on already-raw nerves.

So.  In conclusion, a tip to avoid being considered rude by people famous for their rudeness: once you’re on the train, you’re no longer strolling the streets (or, in the 14th Street Kids’ case, the park).  You’re not in the station, and you’re not standing on the platform.  If you are in the car, you are officially inside…so use your inside voices.