New York

Quick trip to New York over the weekend to take care of some personal and family stuff. I was done with everything by the end of the day Friday, leaving Saturday for a little socializing.

Met my old friend D. for coffee mid-morning on Saturday. D. is on the art history faculty at NYU and is currently working on a radical reinterpretation of a Michelangelo drawing. We walked over to Ninth Street Espresso, at the corner of – duh – 9th Street and Avenue C in Alphabet City. I had not explored that neighborhood much before, and was pleasantly surprised. Evidently, gentrification has not quite reached it, and it had the feel that the rest of lower East Side had fifteen or twenty years ago. The coffee shop was decidedly New York – a tiny one-room space with barely a decoration on the walls, ten or so tables scattered densely around, it screamed “we do coffee and nothing else.” They did stoop to making iced drinks – even purists can’t avoid that if they want to stay in business – but I had a plain old cappuccino, the measure of any coffee shop for my money. It was spectacular, quite possibly the best one I have ever had. It was of a classic, Italian size, not an ounce bigger than the very first cappuccino I had in Venice over twenty years ago, with a perfect proportion of espresso, steamed milk and foam, and – a trend in certain circles from what I understand – a bit of a symmetrical pattern poured into the top of the foamy head. The flavor was delicious – deep, roasty coffeeness, just bitter enough, foiled nicely by the rich warm milk. I was surprised to discover that the place used beans roasted by Stumptown, based in Oregon – I would have thought they could have found something acceptable in New York. D. and I caught up inasmuch as it is possible to catch up on something that doesn’t really require any catching up. When we exhausted our uneventful personal lives (his is a bit more eventful than mine at the moment), we talked about architecture. Afterwards, I had some time to kill, and we walked around Alphabet City at random, always ending up on the sunny side of the street for some reason. The heat was stifling.

It is worth pointing out that on the way from the train station at 6th Ave. and 9th Street to D.’s apartment a few blocks away, I passed by Washington Square park and discovered that the center of it had been fenced off and turned into a constructions site. I asked D. about it. He rolled his eyes and told me that NYU, which owns the land, was moving the fountain. “Really? Where is it going to be?” I asked naively. “Oh, they are not moving it to a different location,” D. replied, “just a few feet over.” I looked at him incredulously. “They want to line it up with the arch,” he said. “Looks better in convocation pictures.”

After D. and I parted, I met C.S. for lunch at Momofuku Noodle Bar. C.S. had arrived in New York earlier that morning to run in the New York Half-Marathon the following day. The lunch proved to be delicious. We started with a beef tongue appetizer – paper-thin slivers from the tip and a generous slice from the thicker part grilled to a rich, smoky flavor, served over some frisee and slices of pickled cucumber. It had the spongy taste that many people find off-putting about tongue, but I loved it, and so did C.S. even though he claimed not to like tongue just before ours arrived. For the main course, noodles was the way to go. C.S. opted for ramen, which was absolutely delicious, with a rich, porky and fishy broth, generous slices of pork belly and fresh locally-made noodles. Having just walked around for a better part of an hour and a half in late-July heat, I went with somen, which was served cold. It came dressed with a kimchi-like sauce, cucmbers, seaweed and a topped with a fried egg. It was hearty, but the cool temperature and the refreshing spiciness of the sauce made it summer-appropriate.

After lunch, we stopped in at the Strand, where I bought a non-falling-apart copy of George Kennan, walked around some more, then parted ways, he to his hotel to rest up for the race, and I to Ft. Lee, NJ, where I was staying at my parents’ house.