Five (Wrinkly) Finger Discount

At the dog run with Gemelli this morning, I caught the end of a story that a woman in her mid-80’s was telling the group.

She was at Home Depot recently, she explained, looking to buy a toilet. So she headed to the plumbing section, and waited for an employee to pass by to help. After ten minutes of waiting, she managed to flag someone down. Unfortunately, he worked in the paint department, and didn’t know much about toilets.

After a few minutes more of waiting, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She found a palette, rolled it back to the plumbing section, and started taking a boxed toilet down from the shelf herself. Another employee saw her, and came to her aid, helping her get the toilet down and onto the palette.

She thanked him, rolled the palette up front, and then rolled it right out the door. A cabbie helped her load the toilet into the back of his van. She got in. And then she told him to floor it.

So, wait, we said. You stole the toilet?

Yes. She stole the toilet. And then, a month or so later, she stole a sink pan. And a month after that, she stole a shower rod.

As in, she just walked out without paying?

Oh yes, she said.

We must have looked shocked, as she told us that, if we thought that was bad, we should meet her sister, who this fall traveled through Italy and France with an extra suitcase to carry all the fixtures she stole from her hotels’ furniture.

Fare Enough

As Ben Franklin once observed, “human felicity is produc’d not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.”

Which is why I’m so enthused by the [Way2Ride app](https://www.way2ride.com). It’s stupidly simple: if you’re in a Way2Ride-enabled Taxi, you can ‘check in’ to the ride on your phone; when you arrive at the end of your trip, the app instantly auto-pays (using your pre-selected card and tip amount), no tapping and swiping (or cash hand-offing) required.

While it doesn’t seem like much, dropping the flustered payment scramble at ride’s end turns out to make a huge experiential difference – enough so that I’m actually annoyed by cabs that haven’t yet taken up Way2Ride.

Hot Spot

The old saw is, it takes seven years to become a New Yorker. More accurately, I’ve heard it said that you’re a real New Yorker when you don’t just know where everything is, you know what used to be there, too. New York City real estate turns over at a remarkable clip, with stores, restaurants, galleries and bars opening and closing literally every day. So a block you know one year like the back of your hand might indeed be nearly unrecognizable a few years down the line.

When we opened CFNYC’s 26th St location, five years back, we were more than a bit worried about taking space in that neighborhood. Sure, it was a half block from Madison Square Park, central and subway accessible. But it was also kind of an armpit. Would our members feel safe, we wondered, leaving the gym at night after class?

Just after we moved in, Hill Country, a pretty good but very popular BBQ joint, opened across the street. That gave us a navigational landmark nearby. And it lent us a critical mass of people on the street early evening. But otherwise, the block – and the whole neighborhood – remained largely a mess of hair extension boutiques, wholesale import/exporters, and abandoned buildings for the next couple of years.

In the last year or two, though, the whole neighborhood turned. The Ace and NoMad hotels opened around the corner one way; Eataly popped up around the corner the other way. And about six months back, the single block of 26th we’re on suddenly became the epicenter of hot.

In the last half year, we’ve seen the openings of a jazz club (Toshi’s), a whiskey bar (Maysville), a jazz club whiskey bar (Flatiron Lounge), a high end sports bar (Greybar), a gourmet grilled cheese joint (Melt), and the downtown sister of a restaurant – Danji – that has long been one of Jess and my favorites (Hanjan). Literally all within two hundred feet of the gym’s front door.

Of course, as fast as things come together, they also fall back apart. Having lived through the rise and decline of Hell’s Kitchen – moving in just as bars and restaurants were opening up, and departing as Times Square and Phantom of Broadway gift shops engulfed the entire neighborhood – I’m well aware of how tenuous cool can be.

Still, for the moment, I’m more than thrilled. Especially given that the rest of NYC is slowly turning into corner-to-corner bank branches, I’m gladdened by anything else opening up in these days before peak ATM. Especially so if it just happens to be on a block where I spend several afternoons a week.

Full House

It appears we moved uptown just in time, as our Upper West Side apartment survived Sandy with electricity intact. (We did, however, watch a gust of wind take out a row of trees outside our window, smashing a couple of parked cars in the process.)

This evening, we’re playing hotel for family that wasn’t so lucky: my 90-year-old grandmother is up from downton, where last night cars floated down her street, and today her apartment is still without electricity; my brother-in-law is down from Columbia University Medical Center in upper Manhattan, where he just finished a 48-hour hurricane shift in the ICU; and his wife is in from Fort Lee, NJ, where she was stuck at home in the dark on her own day off from the hospital, unable to cross the GW bridge.

Plus we have Gemelli, who’s weathered the storm completely unfazed. (Though, as Jess pointed out, he’s young enough and a recent enough transplant to simply assume we have howling winds like this every week here in NYC). It’s a lot of people all at once for a puppy, especially for a puppy who’d already started to go a bit stir-crazy in the apartment during the hurricane lockdown. (He terrorized Jess this morning with manic misbehavior while I was out opening and inspecting [the gym](http://www.crossfitnyc.com).)

I’m happy to have them all here, in part because it’s nice to spend time with family, and in part because I feel like I’m helping out with storm recovery in some small way. But also because, like [the man in the old Jewish parable who’s rabbi instructs him to bring all his chickens into the house](http://www.beliefnet.com/Love-Family/Parenting/2000/10/Teaching-Tales-The-Way-You-Like-It.aspx), I’m sure things will feel awfully quiet and spacious when we’re *only* dealing with one crazy little dog, rather than an entire house full of guests.

Three Weeks

Most of the year, I wonder why I live in New York City. During summer months, the air weighs down, hot and humid; clothing sticks to skin, garbage piles up fetid in the streets. During winter months, it’s rain, snow, sleet; cold bites numb hands and toes, makes even eardrums ache. And through it all I think, “why did I possibly leave San Francisco?”

But then, for three weeks in the fall, and three weeks again in spring, New York is the most beautiful place in the world. The air is crisp, the city clean, everything full of possibility.

Right now, we’ve hit those three weeks. The afternoon sunlight is golden out my window, autumn leaves just starting to turn. Sadly, I know it won’t last. But while it does, there’s no place I’d rather be. I’m off for a walk.

Wave Hill

A few months ago, scouting locations for a Dobbin photo shoot, Jess and I headed up to Wave Hill, a public garden in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx. It wasn’t quite right for the shoot. But, we discovered, it’s just perfect for an afternoon escape from Manhattan life.

We went back yesterday, to remind ourselves what trees look like, and how excellent it feels to spend a few hours on a sunlit bench, doing absolutely nothing at all.

Unmoved

Apologies for the radio silence; it’s been a hell of a month.

Twenty-four hours before we were set to move to the aforementioned new apartment, we discovered that, despite our signed lease, the landlord had given the apartment to someone else.

So we’ve spent the last month living surrounded by boxes, madly scrambling to find a replacement apartment.

On top of that, I’ve been neck-deep in closing the last of Cyan (so that all the investors are made whole before we close down shop completely), getting Outlier up and running (and making its first portfolio company investment), helping Jess launch a company herself, and managing CrossFit NYC’s build out of and move to its new, much larger location.

Life is never dull.

As a follow-up to “Drag me to Hell(‘s Kitchen): Applebee’s“, an email I received from old friend Krissa “Le Petit Hiboux” Cavouras:

In honor of your brave chicken fiesta, here is my favorite story about that Applebee’s, having worked one block from it for five years (though never having been so brave as to EAT there).

During Fleet Week one year, [her husband] Stuart and I are walking from my building to the subway, and we pass a young sailor on the phone with a friend, both clearly trying to locate each other in Times Square.

Young sailor: “Where the fuck am I? I’m in front of the biggest motherfucking Applebee’s on the planet, where the fuck are YOU.”

Congratulations for eating at the biggest motherfucking Applebee’s on the planet.

Drag me to Hell(‘s Kitchen): Applebee’s

I have a business lunch planned; I’m coming from Chelsea, my lunchmate from East Midtown, so he kindly suggests West Midtown as an easy spot for us both.

“Do you have any ideas for a restaurant?” he asks.

“How about Applebee’s?” I say.

“Applebee’s?”

Silence.

Applebee’s it is.

++

“Where are you visiting us from?” asks the waitress.

“Two blocks that way,” I say.

“Two blocks that way?” she asks, confused.

“I live in that building,” I say, gesturing out the restaurant window.

“So why are you eating here?” she blurts, then covers her mouth.

++

I haven’t been to an Applebee’s in a while, I tell her. Can she recommend something?

The fiesta chicken.

“I’ll bring extra salsa.” She says “And some tabasco sauce.”

The chicken itself is fine enough – soft from chemical brining, the sauce salty and thick. The salsa tastes like it’s from a jar, but my waitress is right: it’s bright enough to make the meal work, at least with a good shot or two of tabasco.

It’s not so bad, this Applebee’s, I think.

++

Back at my desk, I reconsider, as all afternoon the chicken fiestas in my stomach.

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.