Drag me to Hell(‘s Kitchen)

For the past eight years or so, I’ve lived on the edge of Times Square. Technically, the neighborhood is “Clinton”, or, when I want to sound less like an asshole, Hell’s Kitchen. But, either way, it’s the border where the new, friendly, post-Giuliani New York City abuts against a two-century-old Irish and then Latino working class neighborhood.

On one side, excellent bars and ethnic restaurants abound – the city’s best Thai joints, Italian spots along Restaurant Row, the many new foodie-facing eateries on and around 9th Avenue in the 40’s and 50’s. On the other side, it’s neon-lit Applebee’s, Red Lobster, and the Olive Garden, as far as the eye can see.

At the end of this month, arguably a few years too late, Jess and I are headed uptown, to a quiet block in the low West ’70’s, a stone’s throw off Central Park. It’s pet friendly, so we can finally make Jess ecstatic by buying a dog. And, as it has a second bedroom and a small office that could eventually become another bedroom, we could stay there through starting a family, perhaps all the way up until the first kid hits elementary school, and we both give in to our suburban roots.

To be honest, we both would have preferred to head down, towards the West Village. But there’s way more space for the money uptown, so uptown it is. And, if nothing else, the Upper West Side is full of actual New Yorkers, rather than tourists from St. Louis, Sapporo and Berlin.

The impending move has led me to look more carefully at our current neighborhood, to think about why we might one day come back here. Certainly for Danji, the excellent Korean fusion spot (and the first Korean restaurant to earn a Michelin star) on 52nd St. Perhaps for Delta Grill – New Orleans good enough to win an official commendation from that city’s mayor. And plausibly, if it’s convenient, for Vice Versa (a nice Italian spot), Uncle Nick’s Ouzaria (fun Greek Tapas), or Russian Samovar (now under new, questionable, management, though a mainstay of my misbegotten NYC youth).

But, weirdly, it’s also made me think about the places I’d never go. Every day, for example, my two block walk to the subway takes me past an Applebee’s, a TGI Fridays, and a faux-50’s diner with singing waiters. All of which I’ve never even set foot inside. Perhaps that’s for good reason. Or, perhaps, it’s simply New York snobbery. Either way, it’s occurred to me that if I don’t find out now, I most likely never will, as if I’m not willing to stagger two blocks to Tad’s Broiled Steaks, I’m certainly not about to cab down to it.

So, to memorialize the end of my tenure in the neighborhood, and to reboot my blogging in 2012, I hereby officially kick off Drag me to Hell(‘s Kitchen): Exploring Midtown West’s Most Questionable Spots.

Wish me luck.

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January 17, 2012

10

On September 11, 2001, I came into my office early, to follow the market, to watch the tech bubble slowly implode on the monitors in our bullpen that perpetually played CNBC and CNNfn.

I can picture our small company that morning, gathered in twos and threes around those monitors, as video played and replayed the first plane crashing into the North Tower.

We were still gathered around those monitors when the second plane hit, as we slowly realized that neither strike had been a mistake.

We were still gathered around those monitors, an hour later, when the South Tower collapsed.

##

Shortly after the second plane hit, I called my parents’ house in California. My father picked up. “I’m okay,” I told him. “I just called to let you know I’m okay.”

“That’s great,” my father said, still asleep, not understanding why I was calling. “I’m okay, too,” he said, before hanging up.

##

We were evacuated from the office before the second tower came down. We were a half block from Grand Central Station, and police feared an attack on that similarly iconic target.

Still, after I made it downstairs, I stood on the street corner by our office for at least fifteen minutes, looking downtown, watching smoke billow. Gusts of wind brought an acrid smell, a fine coating of ash.

I worked the game theory in my head: my apartment, nearby, was across the street from the United Nations, clearly unsafe. Some of my office-mates were headed to an evacuation center the city had set up at a West Side high school. But any terrorist group sophisticated enough to mastermind this complex an attack would have also known where large groups of evacuees would be directed by city plan, where they would gather as sitting ducks.

I stayed away from my home and from the evacuation centers. I stayed away from crowds, from city landmarks. I headed west, then north. I stayed away from the tall buildings of Midtown, from the crowds of Times Square, from picturesque Columbus Circle and Central Park.

By quiet side streets, I headed up to Harlem. There, I wandered, dazed, from one block to the next, listening to the news with groups gathered around radios on old buildings’ front stoops.

##

Late in the evening, I headed back towards my apartment, showing my ID to dozens of policemen as I inched closer to the UN.

Along the way, I reached my parents again briefly. Now, understanding, they were effusive in their relief.

Once home, I fell asleep nearly before my head hit my pillow. I slept badly, fitfully. And briefly: we were evacuated from the building early the next morning.

I headed to work, but after an hour, we were evacuated from there, too.

For days in a row, I was evacuated from one, and then the other. Unsure of what to do, I wandered the streets, still dazed. I considered heading out to relatives in New Jersey or on Long Island, but transportation was a mess. Besides, though I had only been here for three months, I already knew that New York was my city. I couldn’t simply leave it behind.

##

Months later, I was asked to contribute photos for a gallery showing of young New York photographers reflecting on the city in the wake of 9/11.

I thought about that week wandering, about how little I remembered of it. Where had I gone all day? What had I thought about?

I made two images for the show.

##

I visited my brother, a freshman at the University of Denver.

A woman who checked my ID there saw I was from New York and asked if I had been in the city during the attacks. I had, I told her.

“Even if we weren’t there, all of us were New Yorkers that day,” she said.

##

On the first anniversary of 9/11, I headed to the roof with my trumpet and played Taps facing downtown. I read the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer of remembrance.

I did that each year, until the fifth anniversary.

On the sixth, I didn’t.

##

In the wake of 9/11, we came together in a way that still awes me: with heroism, generosity, and community. We love our country. And, even if we don’t always show it, we love each other.

Yet much of what has come after 9/11, of what has been done in its name, has troubled me deeply: from the security theater of the TSA and the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security, to the serious violation of citizens’ civil rights by programs like the CIA’s warrantless wiretapping and the even more serious violation of others’ human rights at Guantanamo and through programs like extraordinary rendition.

We’ve slid slowly towards a security state, yet we remain ultimately insecure. We’ve run afoul of framer Benjamin Franklin’s cutting remark: that “they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

We’re now permanently at war. We piss away lives and hundreds of billions of dollars yearly, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and elsewhere. We have no clear objectives there. We have no clear exit criteria.

Like Britain during the Boer War a century before, we’ve spread ourselves too thin, have begun to underfund crucial long-term investments at home, like education, infrastructure, and scientific research, in favor of fleeting yet ever-expanding pursuits abroad.

Historians often argue it was the Boer War that ultimately ended the British Empire; I wonder if, a hundred years from now, historians will reflect similarly on our War on Terror.

##

A few weeks ago, Air Force pilot Chris Pace contacted me about a 9/11 fundraiser bike/run he was doing to benefit the Disposable Heroes Project, a nonprofit that supports wounded veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq, where he had done four tours of duty.

His plan was simple, albeit vaguely insane: leave Arlington Cemetery by bike on the evening of Friday, September 9th, bike 150 miles, then dismount in New Jersey and run 100 miles, all without stopping to eat or sleep, to arrive in New York City on the morning of September 11th.

He had been training for this simply by doing CrossFit workouts. So, he wanted to know, would it be okay if he used my gym, CrossFit NYC, as the endpoint of his run?

Obviously, I said yes. But I also thought about the patriotism and generosity and welcoming sense of community, that feeling of being in it together, that had made me proudest in the wake of September 11th.

So, this morning, I woke up at 4:30am, and met Chris (and his support crew) as he crossed the Verrazano Bridge into Brooklyn, to welcome him to New York, and to show him our support, by running with him for the final 12 miles.

##

After we made it to the gym, after we hooked Chris into an IV to rehydrate him, then packed him into a car to his hotel so that he and his crew could get some much-needed sleep, I hailed a cab home.

The driver asked what I had done that morning, so I told him. I told him about Chris’ 250 mile, about my joining him for the last New York stretch.

“Your friend,” said the driver admiringly. “He is very strong.”

Yes, I agreed.

“Not just body strong,” said the driver. “Strong in heart.”

The driver told me he was from Mauritania. And that, back there, ten years ago, his brother had similarly biked a 150 mile round trip, to and back from the capital. But there, he said, nobody had been proud; instead, they had been angry.

“We thought it was embarrassment!” he laughed. “We say, who bike 150 miles? Only poor people who have no car!”

But now, this driver told me, he thought about that differently. He thought about a lot differently. For ten years in the US, he had been able to consider his country from a distance. And he’d been able to consider this one with an outsider’s eye. He told me that each had good and bad. And that, for those ten years, he had thought carefully about where there was more bad, where there was more good. And, earlier this year, he had become a citizen of the United States.

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September 11, 2011

Crossing Over

I used to read about Boy Scouts helping old ladies cross the street, and wonder. Where did they find these old ladies? Could the old ladies not cross on their own?

Apparently, though, the old ladies find you. And, no, they can’t make it across solo – or, at least, they’re worried the light will turn on them before they do.

I’ve deduced as much over the past few months, during which time I’ve become a magnet for street-crossing old ladies.

“Young man!” one will exclaim as I pass by. “Can you help me across?”

Indeed I can. Looped arm in arm, we’ll slowly head from one corner to the other, making small talk along the way. This afternoon, crossing Irving at 14th St., a lovely woman and I discussed the weather, how much the city changes each year, her grandchildren here in NYC, and my own grandmother (hi Grammy!), who lives not too far off from that very intersection. Amazing what you can fit into a single street-width of conversation if you shuffle across in sufficiently small steps.

I seem to be averaging about a crossing a week at this point. And I’d be happy to do it more often if asked. Though, between this and my attempts to direct lost tourists, I’m pretty sure Mayor Bloomberg at least owes me a merit badge.

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April 24, 2011

Subway UI

Why do the turnstiles of the New York City subway system display the remaining balance on a regular MetroCard, but not the expiration date of an unlimited one?

As it stands, I’m caught off guard each month when my 30 days expire.

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April 19, 2011

Tourist Trapper

[Advance apologies: Jess maintains I already wrote some version of this post at some prior point, and she’s usually right. I’m posting anyway, on the chance that it really is new, or, at least, is new to you.]

Years ago, I had drinks with a high school friend, shortly after he had moved to New York City.

“I’m happy to be here,” he told me. “But I’m not going to let this place change me. I’ll always be a laid-back Californian at heart.”

A few weeks later, we met for drinks again, and he told me he had just nearly shoved an old woman. He had headed down into the subway station on his way to meet me, as the train was pulling in to the stop. At the turnstile, in front of him, an elderly lady was fumbling with her MetroCard.

“Seriously, I was trying to avoid yelling, ‘move it, bitch!'” he admitted. “I actually had to hold myself back from physically throwing her out of the way.”

So, perhaps, New York City life takes it toll on the minds and manners of us who live here. But, really, on balance, we’re actually a pretty sweet group.

Our broader reputation, however, still clearly runs to the contrary.

Every day, on my way to work, I walk through Times’ Square. And, several times a week, I’ll see a family, looking lost, crowded around a giant, unfolded street map.

“You look lost,” I’ll say to them. “Can I point you guys towards anywhere in particular?” At which, they jump, startled, and back away slowly with hands on their purses and wallets.

And that isn’t hyperbole. I mean, literally, the majority of people to whom I offer help seem more or less terrified of me. And I’m a 5’6″ Jewish guy with glasses and a J Crew tie and sweater. Which is to say, I don’t think I’d similarly clear a path at a biker bar.

After months and years of this, however, I’ve started to wonder. Should I be trying to live up to the tourists’ fears, to this city’s reputation? Would the story they’d bring back to Spain or South Dakota be better if I looked them in the eye, and then spat on their feet? Or perhaps, like I sometimes fantasize about doing when I see a group taking pictures of each other in front of the Times Square neon, I could offer to take a picture of all of them together, get them to say cheese, and then, with their camera still clutched in hand, take off running down the street.

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January 3, 2011

When in Rome

I grew up in Silicon Valley, at the very beginning of the personal computer revolution and its attendant startup boom. So perhaps it was inevitable that I’d start some tech companies, or spend my life in various entrepreneurial pursuits.

But I grew up in Silicon Valley also largely by chance. My parents, born and bred New Yorkers, headed out West only after my father matched post-med-school at Stanford’s residency program. Just as easily, he could have ended up at a hospital here in New York, or in Boston, or down in DC. And I always wonder, had I been born in any of those places, might I have been more likely to follow a different path?

Would a childhood in DC have pulled me into politics? Would Boston have kept me in the world of medicine? Here in New York, would I have leaned towards banking and the public markets?

My best guess: definitely.

As Malcom Gladwell points out in his (admittedly less than stellar) Outliers, it’s all too easy to overlook the power of place. Which is something I’ve been thinking about of late, as Jess and I still, slowly, mull over where we’d like to live, in both the short and long term.

In theory, with technology of all kinds flattening distances, physical location should matter less and less. But, in practice, that hardly seems to be the case. In just the past few days, I’ve met a dozen or so people at events around the city, all of whom intersect in some interesting way with my work at Cyan, or Jess’ work in the fashion world, or with CrossFit NYC, or with something else somehow relevant to our life. And, indeed, those serendipitous meetings, the building of new weak ties, is exactly what you lose in absenting yourself from a physical community.

The problem is, those communities are also quite specific. So far as I can see, the only place where substantial pockets of fashion, film, and finance people intersect is right here in New York City. So, toy as we might with fantasies of complete escape, Portland, Maine becomes practical only if I’m ready to switch careers to lobstering.

Still, there’s an upside to this line of thought. After a decade of life in Manhattan, and as a relative newlywed, it’s all too easy to lapse into eating lunch in the office, into spending the evening at home with Jess on the couch. So it’s good to be occasionally reminded that the only way we can justify the crazy rents, small footprints, and booming street noise of our New York offices and apartment is to get out of them, and to meet the slew of smart, interesting people all around this city.

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November 2, 2010

Bring Out Your Dead

Union Square was full of zombies this morning.

Not real ones, admittedly, but actors dressed in torn, bloodied clothing, with white painted faces spattered in blood.

They were part of a brilliant guerilla campaign for AMC’s new show, Walking Dead, which sent zombies out on the town in 26 cities around the country – a relatively low cost way to drive buzz for the series across the news world and the blogosphere.

In Union Square, the zombies drew quite a crowd: onlookers laughing, tweeting, shooting the scene with phone-cams.

But, weirdly enough, the Zombies and I also rode the subway together, starting up at 49th St., when a dozen of them and I both boarded the same car of a downtown R train.

The zombies stayed in character for the whole ride, staggering around, drooling, making odd noises. But in the train, they pulled a totally different reaction. By and large, the riders completely ignored them.

Problem is, staggering, drooling, and odd noises don’t stand out much on a New York subway, where mentally ill homeless are a too common part of the morning commute.

Perhaps it’s a sign of the terrible desensitization – even dehumanization – inherent in city life. But zombies and the homeless apparently fall in the same category for most New Yorkers – something we don’t want to think about, at least when trapped together awkwardly in the enclosed space of a subway car.

On a train, we don’t have the luxury of physical distance, so we create it psychologically – we avoid eye contact, make overly casual displays of looking around everywhere else. If we all collectively ignore someone, we seem to think, it almost means they don’t even exist.

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October 26, 2010

Burbs

For the past four years we’ve been living together, Jess and I have been in the apartment she rightly calls my former bachelor pad. So we’ve been looking, for a while, for a next place to live.

As of now, we don’t have kids. But, in the next few years, we’re likely to pop out a first. Which adds a whole new level of complication to the search. Ideally, we’d find a two bedroom. But if we’re looking to buy, rather than rent, here in Manhattan, nice two bedroom / two baths easily creep up to the $2m mark. Which is, obviously, ridiculous. And while Brooklyn is cheaper, it isn’t hugely so.

Plus, of course, there’s the issue of schools – New York being a place where parents unblinkingly spend $30k a year to send their child to pre-school, though only after having pulled strings and competed for slots in the “right” ones.

In the rest of the country, this is the prime argument for the suburbs. And, indeed, 25 years ago, someone with kids in Manhattan (aside from multi-generationally wealthy New York families who send their kids as legacies to Chapin) would have already moved out. Staying in the city meant having essentially failed; the nice house in the suburbs was the overt goal.

Amongst my peers, however, the equation has flipped. We apparently all want to stay. Moving to the suburbs is, it seems, an admission of defeat, a sign you couldn’t make it in the city.

Unfortunately, the math doesn’t work in this new world order. While more and more of us want in rather than out, the number of two and three bedroom apartments, and the number of slots in good schools, has remained largely the same.

But the suburbs of New York are equally problematic. Most, for example, are a surprisingly long commute away. Unlike other US metros, that are now populating their first wave of suburbs, New York is working on it’s second or third. It could be argued that New York, in fact, largely invented the suburb, with families initially moving on up to outer Queens and Brooklyn, upper Bronx, or Staten Island.

By now, however, Sunnyside or Yonkers have long since reached their peak, and starkly declined. So the real estate that would elsewhere hold prime post-city living has instead become no-mans-land, thirty minutes of commute to be passed through. (Though perhaps this isn’t entirely new, but simply enlarged, since Fitzgerald trained past the ‘valley of ashes’, en route to the ‘East Egg’ of Great Neck eighty years back.)

As a result, even New York hedge fund partners pay good money to commute to lower Connecticut, as much as an hour and a half each way.

And with most of those suburbs, there’s the issue of what you find when you get there. I grew up in Palo Alto, CA; Jess in Newton, MA. While both are ostensibly suburbs, they’re more accurately small cities that just happen to be near larger cities (San Francisco and Boston, respectively). Whereas many suburbs of New York are really suburbs. The two restaurants they have close at 9:00. On the plus side, they don’t have a Starbucks; and, on the downside, they don’t have a Starbucks.

All of which leaves Jess and me without much of a clue what to do next. We’re busy looking, weighing the advantages of a grocery store down the block against not finding somebody else’s underwear somehow mixed in with your laundry after a trip to the building’s ill-maintained laundry facility.
Fortunately, as demand and property taxes are working against us no matter what we choose, at least we’ll find a way to pay more than it’s worth for a solution that’s less optimal than it would be anywhere else. God bless New York.

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October 17, 2010

Cheers, Count ‘Em

Last night, I attended my friend Nic Rad’s gallery opening for his awesome PeopleMatter series of blogger and media personality portraits.

Then, once the gallery kicked us out, a slew of us headed down to The Half King for drinks.

We started out with a dozen people at the table, and as folks bid the crowd adieu, they left cash on the table to cover their drinks and tips.

Eventually, the bill came, and everyone tossed dollars into the pile. And I said to Nic, “I bet we have $90 of cash here.”

I was close. We had $92. Which, including tip, was slightly less than half of the $190 bill.

My guess wasn’t based on eyeballing the money pile. It was, instead, based on the First Law of Large Groups going Dutch: even when all the people there believe they’ve put in more than their share of the bill, the total falls $100 short.

And, of course, the corollary: the person who counts the money somehow gets stuck covering the shortfall.

In this case, Nic and I split it. But, really, I’m not entirely sure why this always happens. Do people not factor in tax and tip? Do they just suck at math?

Or, perhaps, have they caught on to a cheap living secret I never did? That if you stiff the group a bit, and then pretend you can’t count well enough to collect the dollars, some sucker like me will essentially pick up your first round.

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April 4, 2010

Annualized

As a San Francisco kid, borne of moderate temperatures and low humidity, I spend New York winters shivering violently, wishing for summer to arrive, and New York summers sweating through the sweltering heat, wishing for the return of winter cold.

But, for about a month of spring, and a month of fall, the weather is perfect, absolutely beautiful. During that month of fall I think, there’s no better place in the world to live than right here. And then during that month of spring I think, holy shit my eyes and ears and nose are itching so much that I should probably just shoot myself in the head.

I’m not sure what personally hugely allergenic tree, grass, or shrub it is that exists here on the East Coast yet remains blissfully absent on the West. But, whatever it is, I grew up without it, and therefore without any real seasonal allergies.

So, each year, at the start of April, as the pollen count climbs, hay fever catches me completely and totally off guard. Even this year, when I bought NasalCrom months in advance, and swore to start actually taking it a few weeks in advance of allergy season as the box presribes, I wasn’t ready. Because, this weekend, as my eyes started to redden, my nose began to itch and run, it still took me a few days to realize that, wait, I’ve seen these symptoms before!

So, NasalCrom it is. Plus whatever left-over allergy pills I can dig up from the back of our medicine cabinet. And maybe some of those anti-histamine eye-drops because, let’s face it, I’m a total pansy about all of this, and will drive everyone nuts with the complaining otherwise.

Wish me luck. And, if you have any drug recommendations, lifestyle tips, or other thoughts for a still relative allergy retard, certainly send them my way.

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March 30, 2009