Tuesday May 15th – Well-slept and raring to go, I made my way to the New York Public Library – the famous one, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 41st Street. I’d like to say that my love of the building comes from a deep intellectual place, but if I’m honest I have to say that I love it because I grew up loving Ghostbusters. That opening scene with the old librarian… classic! Not to say that I don’t love books, of course (I am a nerd, after all), but my glee at seeing the place was really not that cerebral! I ran up and down the stairs out the front, trying to get a good look at the two lions, named ‘Patience’ and ‘Fortitude’ (what else?), which stare regally over the heads of us plebs. I then made my way through the huge entryway, past the massive Lego versions of the lions (quite impressive, really), and up the stairs to poke through grand reading rooms and enticing small annexes. The highlight for any visitor, though, has to be the Rose Reading Room upstairs. It really is like the place you wished you could study in when you were at school; a place where you could chew the end of your pencil and gaze artfully out the window without feeling like a poser (well, not too much of a poser, anyway!); a room to best Belle’s library from Disney’s Beauty & The Beast; it’s reading nook heaven. The big, bright arched windows and the stacks of books, complete with a balconied gallery level, were beautiful enough; the sunset-cloud mural with gilded edging on the ceiling left me gaping open-mouthed, eyes wide. It almost made me wish that I was still studying, just to have an excuse to rock up and look all scholarly.
From the library, I made my way further up Fifth Avenue to get a taste of how the other half shops. I dropped into H&M, passed a number of other mainstream stores, and peered in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue (which was nowhere near as interesting as I might have imagined). I had a wander in Uniqlo (the t-shirts were a bit young for me but they have some great basics), and kept going up Fifth Avenue until I reached Henri Bendel, near 56th Street. It had the air of being one of those old stalwarts that had been on 5th Ave since the 50s, but I suspect it’s actually much newer than that. The windows were what I was really there for: apparently, they were designed by Rene Lalique, who was famous for his glassworks. I don’t know a huge amount about the Lalique brand, but I remember hearing his name bandied about a fair bit in the 80s so I figured the windows would be worth a squizz. And… well, they were. Not quite the colourful stained-glass mosaic I’d imagined, but actually quite a bit nicer; just an understated pattern of flowers marked into the glass. I decided to have a look inside the store; it looked pretty sophisticated and out of my price range, but I figured a look round couldn’t hurt.
The first thing I noticed as I walked in was that they were playing ‘Goodbye Horses’ by Q Lazzarus – a song which, in my head, is irreversibly connected to THAT scene in The Silence of the Lambs with Buffalo Bill prancing about in his silk dressing gown. I was in the middle of thinking, Oooh, wierd choice for a girlie store like this’, when BAM! I was accosted by a series of ladies, one after the other, all of whom seemed intent on smearing something on my face and/or body. I felt like a hapless camper batting away mosquitoes: “Can I put some makeup on you?” “Check out our new summer shades!” “Do you want to try our new self-tanner?” “Perfume?” And, my personal favourite, “Can I fill in your eyebrows?” Uh, fill in my eyebrows? I didn’t realise my eyebrows needed filling!!! That was not the only blow my self-esteem took in that store; the makeup lady seemed disgusted that I wasn’t wearing any in the first place, and when I told the eyebrow woman that no, she could not fill in my eyebrows, she actually wrinkled her own brows and said, “Uh, really? Because it looks like you need it.” Uh, THANKS. Less than three minutes after I walked in, I walked out again, feeling slightly shrivelled and less confident than when I entered. Bloody hell. I’m sure they didn’t mean to be raging, judgemental bitches, but that sure is how their actions came across!
I kept on keepin’ on along 5th Avenue, and the fog got thicker and thicker. By the time I turned the corner to head east, the middles of the buildings were barely visible, let alone the tops. I made my way to the Lipstick Building (aka 885 Third Avenue) and was thoroughly underwhelmed. Maybe it was the weather. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but previous reports of ‘stunning architecture’ kind of fell short. I mean, it was pretty (shaped like – you guessed it – an oval lipstick tube, and pinky-red in tone) but I certainly didn’t get the same feeling of architectural awe that was inspired by the roof of the Rose Reading Room, for example. Still, I didn’t regret it. I had finally seen a part of NYC that I’d never been to; this part of the east side had never been on my radar before. It’s definitely business-oriented. Lots of little delis serving fast food, print shops and shoe-shine places, and lots of stressed-looking guys in expensive suits and women in power heels yammering urgently into mobile phones.
I kept wandering up Third Avenue, making a small detour off the street and into the massive Bloomingdale’s department store on the corner of 59th Street, resisting the urge to buy one of those famous little brown bags. The flourescent lights were quite violent on the eyes after the dim, foggy light outside, and the store was full of stuff that I could probably get elsewhere at a better price, but it was nice to see the fully-restored inside. The last time I went in, it was 2002, and I had snuck in just to use the loo (one of the very few free, keyless, not-attached-to-a-restaurant bathrooms I had found up to that point), and I’ll be honest – the place was a mess. I don’t remember much about the shopping area itself but the toilets had insulation exposed in the walls and wood scaffolding hanging around, and half the locks didn’t work. Going in this time, everything was sleek and glossy and ultra-modern glaring white. Definitely an improvement. I did not revisit the bathrooms, but instead wandered past the Magnolia Cupcakes stand (which definitely piqued my interest) and exited at the northern corner of the store back onto 3rd Avenue, pointed straight at my afternoon culinary target: Dylan’s Candy Bar.
Oh my. Shining like a vivid, multi-coloured neon beacon on the corner of 3rd Avenue and 60th Street, Dylan’s Candy Bar looked like Santa’s Workshop, full of the stuff that dreams are made of. Candy stripes line the walls and giant plastic lollipops spray out from the ceilings; huge gumballs and giant chocolate rabbits appear everywhere, in corners and on walls. God forbid anyone should take LSD and pay a visit; it would be like pop rocks going off in their brain. I walked in and found myself wishing I could just go all Augustus Gloop on the place, shoving my mouth full of all the various goodies on the shelves until I found myself drowning in a fountain of chocolate. Three stories of sweets, chocolates and sugar-related indulgence awaited me in this brightly-lit nirvana. I resisted the candy-printed towels, the giant jugs of jelly beans and the old-school sweet selection, but I definitely got my hands dirty by buying my cousin a frozen chicken lollipop and going mental on all their custom chocolate bars. I was halfway through salivating over my choices when I noticed that the music playing in the background was, in fact, the theme from the Gummi Bears. I smiled like a loon and sang along to childhood memories, and as I continued to listen I realised that all the songs were sweetie-related. Awesome! I ended up buying ten (count ’em, TEN) chocolate bars that day… I tried not to eat them all at once, even though it was damn hard! Their selection includes all kinds of interesting flavours, but in the end I went for the following: Brownie Batter, Caramel, S’mores, Toffee Crunch, Dark Raspberry, Banana Cream Pie and… oh my god, I’ve eaten them all and now I can’t remember what I had!!!! *sugar hangover*
After spending most of my budget for the day on sugar, I realised that it was time to eat some real food… or at least, some semblance thereof. To that end, I got on the subway at the diseased Lexington Ave./59th Street station, which honestly looked like it had the plague. The walls were dripping, there was wierd green, yellow and brown ooze everywhere… I couldn’t wait for the subway to arrive, and I just tried not to breathe too deeply! Of course all subway stations have their varying levels of grossness, but I actually felt like I could catch consumption in there just by looking at it!
I got off at 7th Avenue station and walked to 854 Seventh Avenue: home of the Carnegie Deli. I figured this was about as close as I was going to get to Carnegie Hall (I’m not a huge classical music fan and that’s all they seemed to be playing there at the time), and it is a bit of a legendary establishment… a bit like Katz’s in the Lower East Side, running since ‘the good old days’ and servicing old-timers, theatre stars and new bubble-gum pop celebs alike. I went in and was shown to a table at the back, near the toilets, next to the only other lone diner in the place. We gave each other a commiserating glance as I sat down: the ol’ “stick ’em by the bogs” routine, hiding the undesireables, how lovely. I know I should have ordered one of their smoked-meat or pastrami sandwiches (they’re famous for it, and it would have given me a chance to size them up against Katz’s), but after much deliberation I just went for bacon and eggs for dinner! As my food arrived, my neighbour decided to launch into conversation with me… and really, I didn’t mind. We got round to talking about what we’re doing in New York, and he casually mentions that he’s here for a meeting with some network executives. I thought, “Oh dear god, not some wannabe TV actor,” and I skirted around it. Then later we got to talking about what we do for a living; I told him I was an English teacher and asked him what he did. He gave me an odd look as if to say, ‘You don’t already know?” He then said that he had a TV show, but when I asked the name, he said not to worry, that it was really crap and that I would lose IQ points just watching it…! Turns out he’s the host of Storage Hunters, or Storage Wars, something like that. It’s a TV show where they open storage boxes and auction off the goods… I think! I had only heard of it because my cousin in Vegas had seen an ad for it while I was there, and incredulously asked, “They made a TV SHOW out of THAT?!?” I didn’t tell my companion that, of course! His name was Sean Kelly, and he was a very, very nice man. He spent some time in Europe while growing up, travelled a lot, spoke fluent German, and really had a healthy view of who he was and what he was doing. I have this image in my head that all reality TV stars buy into their own bullshit and are generally airheaded, self-centred asses, but this guy proved me wrong. He was proud, but not a shit about it, and humble to boot. It was good fun to have some interesting company over dinner… even if we were right next to the toilets, ha ha ha! I googled him later and found out that he spent some time working for the US military as a translator in Iraq, and that he does a lot of charity work. Pretty cool for a chance encounter!
After polishing off my ‘breakfast’, I decided to give the cheesecake a try. The Carnegie Deli is reputed to have some of the best in New York, so I figured I’d give it a whirl and see if it held up to other competition I had yet to come across. The slice was MASSIVE, but the base was nice and crunchy and the cheese part was creamy, if a bit dry. It was so big, actually, that I had to get more than half of it to take away, to be squirrelled away in my fridge and eaten later. I hadn’t tried the other famous cheesecakes of New York at this point, but I reckon there’s got to be something out there that’ll beat this one, as good as it was.
By this point it was about 9:30pm, and time to move on. Sean and I said goodbye, never to meet again, and I walked down 7th Avenue towards Times Square, which was even shinier than usual with the fog diffusing all the light far and wide. I walked past Ellen’s Stardust Diner, a 50s-style burger joint that looked full of life, and got the subway down to 23rd Street. I still wasn’t ready to go home, though, so I had a peep at the schedule in the window at the cinema at West 23rd Street and 8th Avenue, and found that a screening of Dark Shadows, the latest Johnny Depp offering, was due to start at 11pm. I figured, “Well, it’s 11pm on a Tuesday so I’ll probably be the only sad-sack in there, but it’ll be fun.”
I bought my ticket and walked upstairs, and was shocked to find the place was thrumming with activity, even that late on a weeknight. Ah, New York. The theatre I was in was chockablock, and I was lucky to find a lone seat at the end of a row. The lights went down and the trailers came on, and then just before the movie started one of the young guys working there came out, introduced himself and, in person, reminded us to please switch off our mobile phones. He then said that he hoped that we enjoyed the movie, before making a swift departure. I thought that was actually a really nice 50s-style touch, if not for the anachronistic mobile phone reference! I settled in and watched the movie, which was a good ol’ fashioned piece of mindless comedy fluff, with a few standout jokes. Johnny Depp is never a waste of time! 🙂
After the movie was over, I walked the measly three blocks to my place in about 5 minutes, and again gloated to myself about the incredible, wonderful location of the apartment; I was still so excited to be where I was, and I loved living so close to everything. Little moments of triumph! I snuggled into bed a happy woman.
Thanks for stopping by,
Tara.
Born in Hong Kong and raised all over the world, I've been tootling around for 33 years now. A Spanish friend of mine once said that "the smallest pot has the finest marmalade"... I have to agree with her! I'm small but I can still make 6-foot Brazilian bodybuilders cry if the need arises. And I never need to whinge about legroom on a plane!
little tara 