Yesterday I moved to a new sublet apartment in Manhattan’s East Village. I’m just a few blocks away from the last place I was living, but what a difference it makes. I’m no longer right by an NYU dorm, and am now free from the ritual of drunk NYU students screaming on the sidewalk outside my window from 2-5am — every … single … night. That experience has galvanized my sympathies for the Save the Village movement. 

The entire move took just 45 minutes. That includes everything — moving out of the old place, and moving in to the new place. Remarkable, no? The past few years I’ve shed possessions down to the bare minimum, giving away furniture to my younger sisters and clothes to Goodwill stores. So these days I live as a sublet-hopping urban nomad. They say it’s hard to find an apartment in NYC, but temporary furnished sublets — with everything provided, including wifi — are, in my experience, very easy to find via craigslist. My last sublet was very temporary (just six weeks); I’m in my current place for three months with an option to extend.

This is the tree-lined, New Yorky street I now call home:

And here’s my building. I’m extremely curious about the story behind that rather unsettling bearded face atop the door. All I know is that the building dates back to 1910 or so. I emailed the primary tenant about the face and if I learn anything interesting, I’ll update this post.  
10/17 update: I heard back from the tenant; he said this: “I‘m sure there is an interesting story behind it but I don’t know it. Most people never look up. However, I can tell you that it was pretty recently that the eyes were painted. Weird.”

 A closer look at the face. Welcome home, Jonathan — mwa ha ha ha.

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On the flight back from a trip to Seattle a few days ago, I finished The First Tycoon, a biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt. For much of his life, he lived on West Fourth St, where NYU is now located. In one passage, the book describes his route up into the area of Manhattan that used to be rural farmland. When I was on my Manhattan Hike the weekend before last, I walked some of the same route, and took the photos below at the same spots described in the book.

“This week, like most weeks, Vanderbilt ordered a pair of his fastet horses harnessed to a light, open-air racing rig, then climbed aboard, took the reins in hand, and smartly whipped his team down the cobblestone passage into West Fourth Street. A left turn, then another left onto Broadway…”

“…and uptown he went, past aristocratic Grace Church…”

“…past Union Square, out of the city to where Broadway became Bloomingdale road.”

Over the latter half of the 19th century, Bloomingdale Road gradually morphed into Broadway (midtown and uptown sections) as development in Manhattan spread northward.

One more note: since walking much of Manhattan during the early morning hours on Sunday, I’ve been struck by how few people were really out and about at that time. For example — 18th and Broadway. I took the photo on the left at 8am Sunday. The photo on the right, at roughly the same spot, I took at 5:15pm the following Wednesday:

I walked the length of Manhattan today. Much to my legs’ chagrin, the journey was 15+ miles from the southern tip of Manhattan (Battery Park) to the northern tip (Broadway Bridge over the Harlem River). I recorded my route here: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=5688027. For a good chunk of the trip, I walked along Broadway — originally the Wickquasgeck Trail of Manhattan’s original inhabitants, this thoroughfare has a history that predates the Dutch settlers who arrived in the 17th century. From 120th through 155th St, I veered east off Broadway to walk through Harlem.

I started the walk at 7:12am this morning at Battery Park — ordinarily filled with tourists, the park was quiet at this time, just a sailboat and the Statue of Liberty across the water.

Turning north, I started my walk. Castle Clinton straight ahead, and 4 WTC under construction a bit to the north. 

7:20am, Trinity Church:  A small contingent of Occupy protestors sleeping out front. This area is usually filled with people, but at this time of day, the streets are very empty and quiet. It’s surreal.

7:33am, looking north from Leonard and Broadway:

8:06am, facing north at 23rd street:

Looking south at the Flatiron building (around 26th) in the morning light:

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I was a geeky kid in the 1980s; I owned (and loved) a calculator watch. I don’t ever see those anymore; they seem to have fallen out of fashion. Not that they ever *were* in fashion, of course. I also had a Frogger Watch at some point in my childhood; I was obsessed with it.

From age 11 to 13, I kept a dream journal, and many of the dreams referenced gadgets with amazing powers, like this one from Feb. 11, 1987:

The “I” and “S” at the top of the page derive from the categorization system for the journal that I developed on Nov 1, 1985:

• Put N if nightmare! The more scarier the nightmare was (at the time) the more !’s there will be.
• Put I if interesting (at time)
• Put G if good (at time)
• Put S if strange (at time)

Ever the archivist, I loved to categorize and classify as a kid.

New York City is filled with quickly-moving people who are eating quickly. Halal Carts can be found throughout the city; these are a prime source for a meal on the go. I stopped at one the other day, just off Greeley Square on 33rd. Like most carts, this one has a heavenly savory smell suffusing the sidewalk around it, drawing people in. I bought a falafel sandwich with hot sauce ($4) — delicious and filling. Ate it on a bench in Greeley Square park, surrounded by people talking, eating, reading.

The iconic on-the-go meal here is the pizza slice, as memorialized on the show Louie. I remember seeing the show’s opening sequence before I moved to NYC and feeling surprised at how Louie stands there in the middle of the shop, unceremoniously polishing off his slice. But that is the norm here.

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I just encountered this (mandatory) question in an online job application:

Self-guided audio tours are a great way to see New York — or any other walkable urban core, for that matter. In the three weeks that I’ve been living here in NYC, audio tours have helped familiarize me with sections of the city. Surprisingly, I haven’t found a good consolidated list out there of NYC audio tours, so I am going to attempt my own right here! If I’ve missed any, please feel free to augment my list via a comment.

• New York Times audio tours — quite a treasure trove of free audio tour content, with a number of short audio clips organized by neighborhood. Hell’s Kitchen is great — at one point, you’re standing in front of a bar, and the narrator explains how when the bar was under previous ownership in the 70s, it was a hangout for The Westies. They killed and dismembered their enemies in the bar, and supposedly a severed head once rolled down the bar. Not to worry, however; the bar is under new ownership and weekly karaoke nights keep the ghosts at bay.
• New Yorker Goings On app (iOS / Andriod)  —  in the app, select “Critics’ Picks” and then “Audio Tours.”  Currently five tours are available; I’ve only done the one covering the High Line. It’s an excellent tour; you learn a lot about new architecture along the way, and other details of the High Line that I hadn’t noticed on previous visits. An interesting aspect of this tour is the narrator is walking along the path himself, so you hear all the ambient noise (people laughing, kids playing) of whenever he recorded it, at some point in 2011. So there’s this interesting phenomenon of taking a walk with someone else, but you’re doing it at different points in time.
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I moved to NYC a few weeks ago, and I’m currently in an acclimation period. Here are a few initial observations:

• The new World Trade Center tower, 1 WTC, is stunning. Here’s a photo of me a few blocks away, with 1 WTC looking ghostly and surreal in the background.
  
• Bryant Park — I’ve been here a few times, and I plan many more visits. It’s a people-watcher’s paradise. You see random things such as this guy with a typewriter, experiencing public writer’s block:
  

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When you walk through the wooded streets of Washington DC in August, you hear cicadas. In a park, such as Fort Reno Park, the sound comes at you from every direction, from every tree. This scratching pulse of the cicadas gradually ebbs and flows, but never stops. The onomatopoeic modern Greek term, tzizikas, says it all. It reminds me of 90s electronic music. There was this goal then, to digitally mimic the sounds of nature. I heard the mimicking first and now I’m hearing the real thing.

I was on a long urban hike through Rock Creek Park the other day, wandering through a creek bed where six yellow butterflies joined me momentarily. As I walked up Park Road, up towards my home in Columbia Heights, there was a loud crackling sound on the sidewalk behind me. I turned around. A mother and her young son and daughter, walking the other direction behind me, stopped and turned around as well. On the sidewalk, in between us all, a cicada lay dying, scratching out its final tones. Its wings glinted blue as it flipped itself over on its abdomen. Slowly approaching the cicada, the children sported twin frowns of empathy, and they said “pobre” to the cicada, again and again. Their mom smiled at me as she told her kids “say goodbye to the cicada” and they walked on.

Cartographical cartouches have gone out of fashion. This is unfortunate. Maps of today are too focused on function — where is the artistry? I want to see a cartouche layer added in to Google Maps. It could be crowd-sourced: cartouches for different regions. 

And in ocean areas, I want to see sea monsters.