10 Great Things

Manhattan User's Guide asked some of their favorite NYC bloggers to describe their ten favorite things about the city. My server's been having problems, so I think my questionnaire got lost somewhere along the way. Without further ado, then, my 10 Favorite Things about NYC.

1. Faces
How many faces does the average New Yorker see each day? My non-scientific estimate is about 1,247. In the street, I've seen ruddy CEOs leaving their sleek black cars and blinged-out hip-hoppers smiling through the windows of their stretch Hummers. On the subway, I once saw a sickly strung-out heroin addict's drool falling down to his chest as he nodded out, the drool bobbing with the movements of the train, and the face of a drunk man laughing his ass off as the druggie's head kept rising... and falling... and rising... and falling. And I've seen the face of Soupy Sales. New York exposes you to every variety of human expression, and every moment has a story.

2. Curry Row
There's something charming about walking down 6th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. Maybe it's seeing the thousands of blinking red hot pepper party lights strung inside the Indian restaurants. Maybe it's hearing the sitar players, or smelling the spices wafting out of the over a dozen restaurants. My favorite part is the men standing outside each restaurant holding the door open and shouting for you to come in as another man from another restaurant tries to outshout him as he holds his door open. If you go to one of the red pepper light places, the experience is positively psychedelic as Indian music blares from speakers and you realize all four walls are mirrored, reflecting the red lights to infinity as you realize why the Beatles went to India. The food ranges from very good (Calcutta) to very bad. But the experience is always delightful.

3. Morning Light
When I first moved to New York, the only way I could orient myself when I came up from the subway every morning was to look at the light, and see where it was coming from. During rush hour an amber and violet light hits Manhattan from the east, blessing the dark grids of midtown skyscrapers with a digital glow. The uneven spacing and height of the tall buildings creates a collage of light cleaving the space, lighting one corner on fire in yellow and blanketing another in shadowed darkness. Only in New York can you spend an entire morning walking through a stained glass window.

4. Local Sorta-Celebrity Sightings
Everyone can appreciate seeing Uma Thurman (walking down 23rd Street), Robin Williams (shoe shopping in Transit), or David Byrne (leaving a Chelsea art gallery). But my favorite is to spot local sorta-celebrities. I go to plays and see people's indie movies and hear people's bands, and it's great to see the great creative people out and about, like seeing public access TV host Ed Grant at the Winter Garden, or Eric Davis (aka The Red Bastard) at a movie theater. In a town where people are trying to express themselves, it's great to know that we're all part of the same community.

5. Delis
Where else can you get a four-inch tall stack of pastrami on a sandwich with a perfectly frothy egg cream? There are the usual classic places, but when I need a salt-cured meat sandwich delivered at 3am to soak up the alcohol, my favorite place is Sarge's. They're open 24-hours a day, seven days a week. In an age where it seems every restaurant is over-designed and every menu full of trans-continental fusion food, nothing beats an old-school deli for casual comfort.

6. Old Movies
New York is the only place is America where you can spend all day watching different classic movies on the big screen. Let's recite the roster of repertory theaters with pride: Film Forum, MoMA, AMMI, Lincoln Center, BAM, Anthology, the Thalia, the Pioneer. That's not to mention the theaters that have regular-but-not-often classic series, like Cinema Classics, Clearview Chelsea, Loews 34th, the Sunshine, and museums like the Japan Society or the Alliance Francaise. Only New York film culture could nourish the true cinemaniacs.

7. Quality Skyscrapers
Let's face it: New York is full of ugly buildings. The unholy marriage of avant-garde aethetics and corporate capital produced a baby and called it modernist architecture. I've seen the Seagram Building, and it sucks. Even though New York is full of depressing thousand-foot characterless boxes, there are also fantastic modern cathedrals where one wants to work and live. When I walk down my block, I look at the sleek and sensual Chrysler Building and the gothic majesty of the Empire State and realize that there's nothing wasteful about paying a big price for architecture you can live with. Living in NYC would be drab without the Woolworth, the Chanin, the Flatiron, the Met Life, and Grand Central.

8. Horse Racing
Going to watch the Belmont Stakes is one of those New York things that you've just got to do. You get on a train at Penn Station in the morning and people are already opening their coolers on the train and feeling good. The place is packed. Everyone's dressed like they're going to the yacht club and plastered like cheap sculpture. The horses are magnificent, the pageantry exquisite, and it feels good to win. When the time comes for the big race and you hear the sounds of "New York, New York," you'll join with the drunken crowd and feel like you're king of the hill.

9. Street Food
When you find that your $8 sandwich from Cafe Trend is flavorless, remember the food carts. Of course there are the old standbys of hotdog vendors, pretzel carts, and carts warming hot nuts, but I like the Halal carts that dot midtown during the lunch hour. For $3.50, you can get a heap of lamb or chicken or falafel on top of a bed of rice and a salad on the side. There's the Hallo Berlin's wurst pushcart, at 54th and 5th. And during the summer, Danny Meyer rolls his hotdog cart out to Madison Square Park and serves both New York and Chicago-style dogs.

10. The Turtle Pond
Yes, there is wildlife in New York other than pigeons, rats, and cockroaches. But the seemingly dozens of turtles sunning themselves and frolicking together in Central Park don't really belong there. People buy turtles as pets and at some point realize that these cute little critters can actually live over fifty years and decide to ditch their living novelties into the Turtle Pond. One day I watched from Belvedere Castle above as ten turtles formed a weird conga line as they swam through the water, following each other as the sun glistened off their charcoal shells. Where else can you watch naturally individualistic creatures thrown together and behaving in abnormal communal ways?