What do you do when you're in New York City for a week and have to be out of the house by 8am and back after 8pm each day? You become a tourist. I became a New York City tourist for the first time when I visited my friend Lissu in October. My trip coincided with a busy work week at the UN, which meant that I was left to fend for myself on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan for 14 to 16 hours, Monday through Friday.
I've traveled to New York regularly since 1996, when I spent a month in a pre-college program at Barnard and felt like Manhattan was a teeming urban playground for a high school "rebel." I remember smoking cigarettes out on the dorm patio, sneaking into bars with my city friends, watching salacious videos at my friend Blake's apartment, and going to see
Trainspotting in theaters three times. Then there was the sampling of goods at Washington Square Park, which saw our group of three giggle uncontrollably either because we were high or because we thought that's what we should be doing. I even tried my hand at DJing for Barnard's college radio station. It was a pretty awesome summer; by the end of it, I flew back to Hawaii with a suitcase overflowing with books from the Strand and CDs from shops in the Village.
In the decade since my first trip to New York, I've been back countless times to visit friends and their families. With the exception of an eighteenth-century studies conference at CUNY in my second year of graduate school, I went to the city to hang out with people who effectively grew up in and around New York. Whenever I hung out with these people, we tended to avoid the obvious "touristy" activities.
Not so this time around. What follows is a glimpse into the world of "sights" and "attractions" I discovered on my recent trip to New York. I walked the city streets alone, laptop on my back, hopped up on coffee (from the essential Think Cafe -- thanks, Bettina!), and with iPod nestled in my pocket. I did not make it to Washington Square.
MondayConsider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you; / Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current...
The view from Brooklyn's Esplanade, facing Manhattan
I sat here for a good two hours, watching the sun set
And the sun did set on Whitman's Brooklyn Bridge
TuesdayBirth of a Nation?
Allegoresis: dark skies over the Statue of Liberty
Photo-synthesis: suits with a view
Isle of Ellis: way station for immigrants
Catachresis: a piece of the World Trade Center finds its way to Battery Park
WednesdayHarlem U.S.A.
The black press
It's showtime
Adam Clayton Powell stands watch
Gutted...
...and reborn as a movie set
Sylvia's taste of the South: ribs, mac 'n cheese, candied yams, cornbread
Crossings
I too lived--Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine;
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it;
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.
