They say life’s what happens when you’re busy making other plans. But sometimes in New York, life is what happens when you’re waiting for a table. — Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw
Sabrett's on Fifth
Sabrett's on Fifth
For those who don’t know, I’m a native New Yorker. Father born and raised in Brooklyn. Maternal grandmother born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen. I grew up about 30 minutes away in the suburbs, but always in the shadow of the Big Apple. We went there as a family for theatre, for dinners, for new movies. We went to visit the relatives in Brooklyn and Queens and sometimes venture up to the Bronx Zoo. As a teenager and young adult, I took the LIRR as much as possible to experience Greenwich Village, the Fillmore East, Broadway and Off-Broadway.
Home of the Rockettes
I had moved upstate for college, but when I graduated, I moved right back. First to Park Slope when it was still shaking off the SROs from the end of WWII and before it was the high rent district it is today. Then I made it across the bridge to what I called “the real city.” I stayed for more than a dozen years and then decided that I had to move to Vermont. Change of pace, that sort of thing. Hug trees. Find a more affordable lifestyle. Maybe meet a college English professor, get married and grow my hair along with the organic vegetables. Well, that part didn’t happen, but I did meet my husband because of Vermont. It’s a long story. Irony? We met at the New York Hilton Hotel, both attending an event put on by the Harvard Business School Club. Neither of us had attended Harvard; it was just fate.
Just below 30 Rock
But I digress.
I recently spent four days back in New York to attend the NY Times Travel Show. Good to be surrounded by other travel nuts and especially good to meet some of my Italophile friends who I’d been getting to know on Facebook and Twitter over the last two years. Sure, New York has changed. Restaurants come and go and there’s as much Italian signage on Madison Avenue now as there is on Via della Spiga. But New York is still New York: exciting, industrious, raunchy, artsy, overpriced, entrepreneurial, historic, trendy, neighborhoody, welcoming, dangerous, surprising, familiar, smelly, exhilarating — everything all at once.
Graybar/GCT rats!
I took some pictures this time and am sharing them here with you. Some iconic ones — Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center, a Sabrett’s hot dog stand. Some that just tickled me. And a favorite that many New Yorkers miss as they rush into and out of Grand Central Station each day: the three metal rats climbing up the metal ropes just below the rat guards of the Graybar Building at 43rd and Lex. Then there’s a shot I ran out of my favorite breakfast place in town (Café Un Deux Trois) to take: a seafood catering truck for a company called Meat Without Feet. Part of the Citarella food mecca, it’s one of the biggest players in the Fulton Fish Market scene and it just made me smile.
Meat Without Feet made me smile
Hope you enjoy these little images of my New York. God, I miss this place!
Buttons at Mood. Thank you, Mood!
Buon viaggio!
Linda Dini Jenkins is a card-carrying Italophile, travel planner, freelance writer, and amateur photographer. Travel is her passion, so writing about her travels just comes naturally. She hopes all her travelers find a way to express their joys, surprises, and fears as they travel and gives every traveler a nifty journal to help smooth the way. Learn more…
