When I was young, Sunday was still considered to be a day of rest. Most businesses were closed. Traffic was light, except in the summer when there was a line of cars headed to the park or the beach. When I would visit my family in Massachusetts, where the blue laws were still strictly enforced, grocery stores could only sell eggs, milk, and juice on Sunday mornings. Most of the store was closed off and a narrow passage led to the refrigerator unit where those few legal items were found. I rather doubt that New York was ever this strict about Sundays, and there certainly is no lack of commerce on Sundays in Manhattan now. Still, somehow this Sunday managed to be for us an old-fashioned day of rest and reflection.
I started my day by going to Mass. Staying in Midtown we were not that far from Saint Patrick’s, but I have never much cared for the cathedral. It has always felt like a kind of gothic airplane hangar, and with tourists wandering about and chatting it is impossible to pay attention to the small figures in the front. I much prefer Church of Our Savior on Park Avenue in Murray Hill. The building is lovely; the liturgy reverent, but not fussy; the sermons thoughtful, but not too long; and the music is simply outstanding.
John was in bed watching television when I came back from church. We do not bounce back from late night adventures the way that we once did. He asked me to get him a coffee. I had noticed a TomNTom’s Coffee across the street, as well as a Paris Baguette at the end of the block. Both are big Korean chains, and each have many locations in Koreatown, our old neighborhood, and seeing them me oddly nostalgic for Los Angeles. The 37th Street TomNTom’s turned out to be a clothing store as well as a coffee shop, and its franchise owner was Dominican, not Korean. She and I had a wonderful talk about the area while she made me John his cappuccino. We laughed about how the New York television stations were so hysterical about a 4.7 earthquake, which would barely make the news on the West Coast.
After he had his coffee, John tossed some clothes on, and we went out for a walk. We talked about seeing another play but could not make any real decisions. There are quite a lot of the usual shows on Broadway, but we have either seen them before, sometimes more than once, or they are productions like A Beautiful Noise or Six that hold little interest for us. John had some interest in Appropriate, one of the few straight plays, but it seemed like just another dreary Southern family drama to me.
After walking for a while, John was feeling a little dizzy. He saw a pedicab, one of those rickshaws pulled by a bicycle and a ride appealed to him. The driver asked where he wanted to go, and John indicated he wanted to go to the World Trade Center memorial site. I did the math and knew it would be an astronomical fare, but John seemed to have his heart set on it, and I did not have the heart to tell him no. Besides, by this time I figured we were not going to make it to the theater district, so we were saving some money there.
It was a pleasant trip through Chelsea, SoHo, and Tribeca. Few cities have such clearly defined neighborhood, each with its own personality, as New York. Having spent time in each one of these over the past few decades, the change from one to another seemed like meeting an old acquaintance. The driver left us near the new tower and presented me with the bill. I winced – I have paid less for two tickets to the theater – but handed him my American Express card and thanked him for forty minutes of hard pedaling.
In late August 2001, John and I flew in a small plane for New York to Portland, Maine. It was early evening, and the Bombardier jet flew up the Hudson right past the Twin Towers. I had always thought the World Trade Center to be some of the ugliest architecture in Manhattan, but somehow in that golden light of a late summer sunset, they almost looked beautiful. Nobody had any idea that two weeks later they would be gone.
I have always wanted to find the September 11 memorial more affecting than I do. The two huge fountains are impressive enough but to me they fail to convey the extraordinary tragedy of that day. The chairs lined up in the park in Oklahoma City do a much better job of telling people that something terrible, truly terrible, once happened here.
The last time we were here, the Occulus, the transit hub for the subway lines and the PATH trains, was not quite finished. I was curious to see what it looked like now that it was done. From a distance, it looks impressive enough, though I cannot see the point of creating this huge superstructure that looks like the bleached bones of some enormous sea creature. I suppose it is a nod to the great train stations of the previous century, though again I never understood why the Detroit train station was supposed to look like the Baths of Caracalla. It is good for tourist pictures, though.
The Occulus was one of the most expensive public works projects in the history of New York. Sadly, I think they could have spent a little more. The interior spaces are covered in some kind of textured stucco painted white instead of sheathed in metal. Up close it is already starting to look a little dirty and institutional.
Since it was a Sunday afternoon in New York, John wanted to go to a gay bar. For those of you unfamiliar with the traditions, gay bars often had tea dances or happy hours on Sunday. We figured that if any place would be upholding the old ways it would be Julius’s on Tenth Street. Like the Stonewall Inn, this is a venerable spot for gay history. In 1963, New York law made it illegal for a bar to serve known homosexuals. The Mattachine Society, the oldest gay civil rights group, held a “sip in” in Julius’s to challenge this rule. A couple dozen gay men, all white, and all dressed in coat and tie, sat down at the bar, calmly announced that they were gay and ordered drinks.
The crowd at Julius’s is older, and there might still be one or two of the guys who sat at the bar in 1963 still sitting there now. It was crowded though we did manage to find a seat. I had a beer and we ordered some onion rings. We did not stay long, but it was nice to know that some things still stay the same in a city where things change all the time.
We pondered going to see a film in the evening, but most of the theaters were showing the same stuff we could see in Medford. There were a few small theaters with some foreign and independent offerings, but I knew all these films would show up in a couple weeks on Amazon Prime and frankly they would be just as good on the big TV in our bedroom at home. So, we went to a small Chinese restaurant around the corner. Decent Chinese food is something we cannot get at home, so we decided to enjoy some here in New York where it is so wonderfully abundant.
Traveling Johns 