Busy Times

Our last days in NYC were VERY busy. There is always so many new things to check out, neighborhoods to walk to see what has changed, new museums or exhibitions to visit, new restaurants to experience (that's the best part!!!) ... and, in between, it's a lot of train riding, waiting at subway stations and walking. From the southern tip of Manhattan to Harlem it's about a 30-minute train trip, to Brooklyn's Midwood section, where we visited our friends Paula & Gail on Tuesday, it was almost an hour one way. Distances are immense and it always takes a lot of time, even more by bus than by train, to get from A to B. The weather was mixed most of the time, not good for picture taking, but at least it was not raining and not terribly cold.

On Monday we walked from Harlem over the bridge across the Harlem River to the Bronx, or, rather to the Yankee Stadium, which took us less time than to take the subway, not quite half an hour. We met with Olga, our friend from the Bronx Tourism Council in the Courthouse Building to get an update about this borough and then explored downtown, the Grand Concourse and Arthur Street (the Italian neighborhood with an excellent market hall, see pics further below) and had great pizza for lunch. The Bronx is also famous for its many murals:

Back to Manhattan, we noticed how small and touristic in comparison to Arthur Street the Little Italy on Manhattan is (pic). Adjacent Chinatown (one of the shops on the picture) is much larger and more authentic, but also pretty run-down and dirty, whereas the Lower East Side is getting hipper and hipper. Formerly a poor neighborhood of Jews and immigrants, it has become a rather fancy neighborhood now.

In the evening we were invited to a fancy bar in the West Village ("Analogue"), for their third anniversary. Fortunately, our friends Magdalena & Michael introduced us to the "Art of Mixology", because considering the cocktail menu (several pages) we were just overwhelmed. We tried quite a few different cocktails (without eating a whole lot) and I slept on the subway back "home" to Harlem and had a little hang-over the next day. Nevertheless we got up early, as usually, to visit some museums.

The newly opened MetBreuer (pic) - the Metropolitan Museum took over the old Whitney Museum for its contemporary arts program - was showing an interesting exhibition about the afro-american painter Kerry James Marshall, but for the rest, it's barely noticeable, that it's not the Whitney anymore. Same interior, lobby, café, shop - nothing new. The New-York Historical Society museum (pic) was our next stop and they showed a new film and an interesting exhibition about the Battle of Brooklyn during the Revolutionary War. On the way back to Harlem we visited the campus of the prestigious Columbia University and in the late afternoon went on the looong train ride to Brooklyn to visit Paula and Gail for a great dinner and to meet their new dog, Benny.