This archival post was migrated from an old Facebook album, so please excuse the choppy writing and odd formatting.
We stayed at the Standard Hotel in the Meatpacking District. It opened in 2009 and is famous for its crazy architecture and painfully exclusive rooftop bar (which we studiously avoided). Staying here was a unique experience, but next time I think we’ll aim for something a bit more low key.
A view of Washington Street at Little West 12th St, along the base of the Standard Hotel, with the High Line park passing beneath.
The front entrance to our hotel lobby, with yellow revolving door in the middle, the “Biergarten” to the left, and High Line park passing above.
The Standard Hotel lobby. All the hotel common areas were dark, including the elevators.
Our hotel room: funky decor and a comfy seating area — I’d kill for a table like that in our condo. And yes, the tub/shower has a glass wall facing into the rest of the room. Privacy is passé in this era of Facebook, you know.
We had a north-west corner room with great big windows giving us views of both the Hudson River and central Manhattan.
Josie enjoys the HD TV featuring an all-weekend-long Harry Potter marathon and the Travel Network with pleasingly frequent airings of Bourdain’s “No Reservations”.
Part of our hotel window view of 10th Ave along the Hudson River. Sully Sullenberger landed his miracle plane a little further up the river to the right around 50th St, and it eventually drifted past here and was towed to dock near Battery Park, a dozen or so blocks out the left of this photo.
The hotel room wine list. I was totally going to order that $5500 bottle of “Dom Perignon Oenotheque Epernay, France, 69” until I realized there would also be a $4 delivery fee tacked on. Screw that! I enjoyed a delicious glass of water from the bathroom tap instead.
The view down from our hotel window onto a portion of the High Line, a recently opened park built on an old raised railway line that extends up the western edge of lower Manhattan. It’s a beautiful park and we regularly saw gardeners working away on the various plantings. Josie found a video about the High Line park narrated by none other than Ethan Hawke, who coincidentally was on our flight to Toronto. Very odd.
The view north from our hotel window into Midtown Manhattan. The tallest building is the Empire State, shrouded in fog.
On Sunday evening several huge cruise ships rolled down the Hudson past our hotel, taking us by surprise: the enormous scale of this thing is not clear in this photo until you look at the size of the people on the pier at the bottom. Imagine a 15-story building sliding quietly by your window for an idea of how shocked I was to glance out and see it. I just Googled this ship, the Norwegian Gem, and learned that it departs every Sunday from NYC on a 7-day round trip to Bermuda. I trust that a fun time was had by all aboard.
Another hotel view of the Hudson. The arch on the left of the photo is all that remains of Pier 54 where the RMS Carpathia docked in 1912 to unload the lucky passengers it had rescued from the Titanic lifeboats.
A nighttime hotel room view looking north.
This is some sort of monument on the edge of Central Park at East 70th and 5th Avenue.
The sidewalk along the edge of Central Park on 5th Avenue around East 70th St. New York has such nice, big trees compared to the little half-dead sticks we get in Toronto.
A view inside Central Park, looking south from around East 70th Street. In the distance you can see the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan peaking through the fog.
This is the garden of the Frick Collection gallery. This building was originally constructed as a private home, and the owner amassed such an art collection before he died that it is now a public gallery. Lots of Goya, El Greco, Van Dyck, Vermeer, and Bruegal. The special show in the basement featured sketches by Rembrandt and his students.
The main hall of Grand Central. It’s one of those immense spaces that really can’t be captured properly by a point-and-shoot camera. At least not by me.
Another view of the main hall of Grand Central.
A back passage leading from the subway into Grand Central terminal. Too dark for my camera. To the left is the famous Oyster Bar, where we were going to grab lunch until we realized it was closed on Sundays. Ah well, next time.
The main entrance of the New York Public Library branch in Bryant Park at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street East. This weekend was in fact the 100th anniversary of the building, and due to the celebrations and festivities there were lineups to get inside, so we passed on that planned activity.
The main entrance of the New York Public Library. As part of the 100th anniversary of the building, an artist had been commissioned to create Lego replicas of the famous stone lions seen in the previous photo. This library entrance and the lions also featured prominently in the opening scenes of Ghostbusters.
The 14th Street / 8 Ave subway stop near our hotel contained small bronze statues of funny little characters, created by an artist called Tom Otterness. They provided interest to an otherwise functional station. Josie’s sharp eye noticed that this same artist created a larger sculpture located outside a condo building near the foot of Yonge Street in Toronto: http://sculptedtoronto.blogspot.com/2010/06/sculpture-62-immigrant-family.html
The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Villlage, the site of the 1969 riot for gay rights, which has been recently refurbished and reopened as a gay tourist hot spot. And it seems to be doing quite well. (Apologies for the blurry photo, my camera hates the darkness.)
Just an old-school diner in Greenwich Village.
No, we didn’t eat here. Babbo is one of the most famous restaurants in Mario Batali’s arsenal of NYC eateries, and we came across it by accident whilst wandering Greenwich Village. The food here is supposed to be good, but then again, for those prices it better be!
MacDougal Street, one of the liveliest strips in Greenwich Village.
Cafe Wha? is one of the most famous cafes from the 1960’s-era Greenwich, and one of the few that still remains in its original location and still hosts live music, though it’s now mostly a tourist haunt. I recently re-read Bob Dylan’s autobiography and was inspired to go past here after reading his description of the very first day he arrived in New York from Minnesota in January of 1961:
“The Cafe Wha? was a club on MacDougal Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. The place was a subterranean cavern, liquorless, ill lit, low ceiling, like a wide dining hall with chairs and tables — opened at noon, closed at four in the morning. Somebody had told me to go there and ask for a singer named Freddy Neil who ran the daytime show at the Wha?” “I found the place and was told that Freddy was downstairs in the basement where the coats and hats were checked and that’s where I met him. Neil was the MC of the room and the maestro in charge of all the entertainers. He couldn’t haven’t been nicer. He asked me what I did and I told him I sang, played guitar and harmonica. He asked me to play something. After about a minute, he said I could play harmonica with him during his sets. I was ecstatic. At least it was a place to stay out of the cold. This was good.”
Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Springsteen also played here, along with many others.
The famous arch in Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Nicely lit at night, though perhaps not the safest place to lurk in the dark as an obvious tourist.
We came across this museum, aptly called the New Museum, which has popped up very recently on the Bowery. I stayed at a hostel very near here on my first visit to NYC in 2002 and I remember the area being very gritty and there was certainly nothing like this anywhere nearby. It’s amazing how fast things are changing.
We took an excellent guided tour at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. This tour took place in a rickety old rowhouse dating to the mid 1800’s, which until a few decades ago had housed generations of immigrant families in multiple units. The building remains essentially as it was then, with old fixtures, wallpapers, plumbing, plaster and furniture selectively exposed and restored.
Our guide Dave was an enthusiastic and unusual character from New Jersey. I highly recommend the Getting By tour. Photos were not allowed inside the tenement building, but after we exited out the rear I snapped a single shot of these newly constructed outhouses in the back yard, built to accurately recreate the ones used by the original inhabitants until indoor plumbing was added in the early 1900s.
A Shiba Inu on 14th Street! This is Josie’s favourite type of dog, a breed that comes from Japan. Incredibly cute, though apparently they are extremely smart and energetic, which can be bad news if they are not trained extremely well and kept constructively occupied.
A variety of transportation methods are available to help you traverse the cobblestone streets of the Meatpacking District.
The Meatpacking District is an odd mix of urban decay and trendy gentrification. This building appears at first glance to be the former, until you see the fancy club door and realize it is the latter.
A Food TV Top Chef event was underway in the Meatpacking District on Saturday. We don’t watch that particular show, so I’m not sure what this was all about.
An FDNY truck speeds through the Meatpacking District.
This time we made a few repeat visits to places we liked on our last trip, and this one — April Bloomfield’s Spotted Pig in the West Village — was at the top of our list. Another great visit. We sat at the bar again for a few drinks and snacks from the late afternoon bar menu, which allowed us to sample some amazing food cheap without the hassle of trying to book a table there for dinner.
We enjoyed (again) the addictive deviled eggs and the roll mops (herring wrapped around pickled onions). Both were delicious, as was Josie’s expertly made dirty martini (made purple only by the olives) and my two cask ales.
Half pints at the Spotted Pig come in perfectly scaled-down smaller beer steins. This one briefly contained a wonderful Six Points Chocolate Rye Porter. Just previous to this, a full pint of equally delicious Spotted Pig Bitter had been enjoyed by me.
El Faro is a family-run Spanish tapas restaurant in the West Village. It’s been around since 1927 and has a retro interior that has barely changed in decades. We’d eaten there the night before and then took this daylight photo the next day when we passed by again.
The food was great: we tried the tortilla al Espanola (potato and onion), croquetas (fried breaded things with creamy spinach or fish inside) and jamon (cured ham) with olives. It also came with delicious rice. Yet, as with all food in New York, the portions were enormous. Clearly the normal small-plates meaning of “tapas” has been lost. But still, El Faro is well worth a visit! It was a refreshing contrast to all the new trendy places nearby.
Would-be clubbers line up for bouncer judgement in the Meatpacking District.
A warehouse in the Meatpacking District. It’s hard to tell which buildings are actually abandoned and which are used as clubs and galleries at different days or times.
A few non-gentrified businesses survive in the Meatpacking District, including this little diner tucked under the High Line. Around it are the stalls for a few remaining butchers and meat packing companies.
The Hog & Heifers Saloon was a dive bar directly across from our hotel. At first I thought it was original to the neighbourhood and had survived the surrounding gentrification; but Google tells me this is only sorta true, as it was founded in 1992 and has a sister location in Las Vegas.
On our last night we grabbed a late dinner at a Mexican restaurant in the West Village called Móle. We sat at the bar. The drinks were great, the food was pretty decent (but again with the requisite crazy huge portions) and the place was cozy.
We stopped to buy a beverage at a little bodega that had this cat sleeping inside. It totally ignored us. The guy behind the counter complained, “So lazy, that cat! All he does is sleep!” We were reminded of a short-lived blog that was online for a while called “working class cats” that featured cats in NYC that lived in businesses and earned their keep by killing vermin.
This time I was prepared on the New Jersey Transit train out to Newark Airport and managed to snap a photo of the Prudential Center, home of the New Jersey Devils, along with its scenic parking lot surrounds.