Barb and I took a weekend trip to New York City so I could see the reunion concert of Our Native Daughters at Carnegie Hall. We had some other small adventures as well.
I learned over the summer of a reunion concert for Our Native Daughters, the group formed by Rhiannon Giddens, Allison Russell, Amythyst Kiah and Leyla McCalla, to be held November 4, 2022 at Carnegie Hall. It was the first time they had played together since 2019 and seemed to be the only time they would be together for the foreseeable future, so I couldn’t resist the urge to attend. I invited Barb to join me for a two-night weekend in Manhattan. I was willing to do the trip on my own but was delighted and a little surprised she agreed to come for a quick getaway, as long as she didn’t have to actually go to the show. On August 22, I bought a concert ticket as soon as they went on sale and wasted no time locking in the rest of our reservations.
I decided we would take the train up; it had been more than two decades since I last took a train to New York for work and 15 years since Barb and I had ridden anywhere together on Amtrak (our last trip had been on the AutoTrain to Florida in 2007). I figured it was worth another try. I wanted to try the Acela, Amtrak’s premier train which I’d never ridden, but was surprised there were not all that many times to choose from. We booked a Friday morning train, leaving BWI station at 9:11am — a little earlier than I would have liked — but there was no other Acela service that would safely get us into New York in time for dinner and the show. The return trip on Sunday would be on the more prosaic Northeast Regional because there were no good times for the Acela on weekends. Our two roundtrip tickets totaled under $300 which was roughly comparable to airfares, but we wouldn’t have to hassle with airports and transportation into town so it seemed a reasonably good deal.
I used TripAdvisor to hunt down a hotel in midtown, reasonably close to Carnegie Hall. I wanted to be within easy walking distance of the concert, restaurants and things to do for the weekend. I ended up finding a room on the Hilton Club floors of the Hilton on 6th Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) between 53rd and 54th Streets, within a few blocks of both Carnegie Hall and Rockefeller Center. I didn’t know what made the Hilton Club rooms any different but it seemed like a somewhat upgraded room at a decently exorbitant rate, around $500/night, which once upon a time would have stopped me in my tracks but now seemed par for the course in New York. By the end of the day on August 22 our little trip was mostly set.
I took a little more time to make reservations at restaurants for Friday and Saturday that I hoped Barb would like, and scout out things for us to do each day. Based on the NY Times 36 Hours article, I planned to go to the Museum of the City of New York on Saturday. I couldn’t interest Barb in going to a Broadway show but I was OK with that — there wasn’t anything I desperately wanted to see and it would save us hundreds of dollars anyway. We left the rest of the schedule open see what the Big Apple would bring.
Friday, November 4
We had to get up earlier than we usually do, but we got Barb off the computer and out of the house early enough to snag a McDonald’s breakfast ahead of getting to the BWI station. The train arrived on time and we found our way to our reserved seats which were nothing special, the whole train seemed a little long in the tooth. The ride north was bumpier than I expected, with Barb’s drinks rattling around on her tray. The Acela evoked none of the supposed glamor or efficiency of European high speed rail travel. The morning was very foggy so we didn’t see much out the window but it looked like we were riding through the cluttered back yards of the poorer parts of town most of the way up the Eastern seaboard. Still, we got to New York on time — a little before noon — and the ride was a lot easier than driving or taking a plane, so that’s a small win for Amtrak, I suppose.
We arrived at Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station. The newly opened hall is an improvement over cluttered old subterranean Penn Station, but we saw no signs for local transportation or a taxi stand. We ended up asking a policeman who looked at us like idiots and told us to go out the doors. Welcome to New York. We walked outside found ourselves on the corner of 8th Avenue and 31st Street seeing a lot of traffic, no taxi stand and no evident way to hail down a ride. Eventually we noticed a small taxi booth across the street and crossed over to what was evidently a taxi stand, but there was no one in the booth. The first people we encountered loaded our bags into a large SUV that turned out to be an Uber Black driver charging $35 for the 1.5-mile ride to our hotel. We said no thank you and they unloaded our bags without complaining but hinting that we were suckers for wanting a cab whose meter would be running. We went a few feet down the street and found a Yellow Cab. We got in and told the cabbie our hotel address.He seemed mostly clueless but he got us there. It took 20 minutes in traffic but cost $25 with tip. Bargain.
We dragged our bags into the busy lobby of the Hilton and eventually discovered that we needed to go to the 37th floor to check in for the Hilton Club. We noticed a number of people in logo-ed running attire and began to wonder whether the New York Marathon was this weekend. I had a vague recollection that it might be. Barb started to worry that we would have trouble getting back to Penn Station for our train on Sunday. She was constantly on the lookout for something to worry about. New York gave her anxiety.
The Hilton Club agent upstairs was friendly and able to immediately give us a room. Our 36th floor room was nice enough, a king bedroom with a little more space than the rooms below, evidently. We had a view of a lot of other midtown skyscrapers and could even glimpse a bit of a river, though I was disoriented and it took me a while to figure out it was the East River. Barb took a few minutes to unpack and do a few emails but fortunately we were both hungry enough that we escaped the room to search out food and wander a bit. I wanted to scout out our locations for dinner and Carnegie Hall.
I learned through Yelp that longtime David Letterman sidekick Rupert Jee was still running his Hello Deli at the side of Letterman’s – now Stephen Colbert’s – Ed Sullivan Theater. (I think that sentence may win a prize for this site’s Highest Number of Gratuitously Superfluous Links in One Sentence.) Yelpers even reported that Rupert himself was often behind the counter. As a longtime watcher of Letterman’s show and a low-level fan of Rupert’s, I went for a sandwich. Sure enough, there he was working the grill: older, mostly silent and with an unbecoming hair net. A more lively woman (Mrs. Jee? No, it was his business partner, May Chin) took orders, bagged up sandwiches and chatted with customers including regulars she seemed to know. I got a basic chicken salad on whole wheat with hot peppers. I wanted lettuce and tomato too, but that didn’t happen. While the sandwich was decent, the experience was a little melancholy. Why was this former celebrity — albeit minor — still here laboring day after day, looking pretty miserable while Dave lives on his ranch in Montana interviewing vacuous celebrities for millions of dollars on Netflix? A sad comment on economic justice in America, I suppose.
Meanwhile, Barb wanted to try a slice of New York pizza and found one with extra cheese from the place on the corner. We sat outside Rupert’s and chowed down, trying to ignore the somewhat creepy guy regaling another tourist couple about his years in a band or as a roadie or something. New York is an odd place, and we were fish out of water.
We tried to get our bearings by walking a few blocks to find our dinner destination, Patsy’s Italian Restaurant. I chosen it because it was close to Carnegie hall, had decent reviews (#29 out of 7,381 in NY) and a veal francaise on the menu. We then found our way to Carnegie Hall and sought out the poster for the sold out show. Photo op!
We went up two blocks to Central Park and saw some signs for the NY Marathon, confirming that it was this weekend on Sunday. There were some structures and people milling about at the south end of the Park. Later we learned that this was the finish line. Evidently there was also a parade and fireworks that day (we saw them on the evening news), but we had no idea where or when that was. I think we were only a block or two away from the parade. How does anyone know what’s going on in this city?
We walked to Columbus Circle, seeking out the mall of shops and famous restaurants to nose around in. I was hoping for a place to sit, get a drink and look out the windows to the park, but the only likely spot was given over to a Marathon-themed event. We ogled the expensive stores for a bit. It was also the location of Jazz at the Lincoln Center but we couldn’t go loiter in that space.
We wandered back in the general direction of our hotel. As we came through the lobby we were hailed down by salesperson for the Hilton Club who gave us a pitch to come see their pitch. He gave us a discount card for a few local restaurants and an offer of cash or Hilton points to come to a 90-minute pitch. He also said he would throw in a breakfast buffet in the hotel’s restaurant on Saturday or Sunday. We said we’d think about it.
We got to the room and Barb settled into emails and phone calls for an hour or so while I got a shower and researched the Hilton Club and other odds and ends. Barb didn’t like the lighting in the room so she scouted out the business center. Someone there said that the 4th floor with ballrooms was empty and there were some good spaces there to work.
After talking it over, Barb and I decided to take the offer for the Hilton Club sales pitch on Sunday morning. The offer of a free buffet breakfast did the trick. It was actually an easy sell.
Our dinner at Patsy’s was at 5:30pm to give us plenty of time for dinner, get Barb back to the hotel and me to the concert. Patsy’s was definitely an old school Italian restaurant with pictures of many (formerly) famous old folks, especially Frank Sinatra, on the wall. The waiters were actually surprisingly nice and attentive. Barb and I shared a caesar salad with authentic gloppy house-made dressing but Barb kicked herself when we saw the table next to us ask for extra anchovies. We didn’t know we could do that. Barb had her veal francaise which came with an unexpected sauce and strips of prosciutto; she like it but brought a lot back to the fridge in the hotel. I had a pork chop stuffed with goat cheese and slathered with peppers and vinegar. I didn’t need to finish it all, but I did. We contemplated dessert from the rolling table but passed. The meal was good and didn’t set us back an arm and a leg.
I took Barb back to the hotel for the evening while I went to the concert. She still wanted to do some work before trying to settle in with my computer to watch shows she had taped on Xfinity. The lighting in the room was still not good so we set her up in a deserted little board room on the 4th floor. I departed for the 8pm show.
I made it back to Carnegie Hall in plenty of time and thoroughly enjoyed the show. See my full report on Billzdaze and my YouTube playlist of the songs.
The show finished about 10:40pm and I got back to the hotel by 11pm. Barb was in bed with Friends on TV. The wifi in hotel was terrible, she reported; she barely got through 20 emails in an hour and had no luck watching Xfinity on my computer. Oh well. I thought about going downstairs for a nightcap but instead settled in with Friends and made some notes about the show.
Saturday, November 5
Barb went to the gym on the 5th floor at 8:30am to try to do her aerobics class over Zoom. I stayed in the room to work on notes. The wifi was indeed very sketchy, but after a while it seemed to work. You just had to have persistence. Barb had the same experience downstairs because she made it through the whole class, despite some freezes here and there.
I heard intermittent cheering from the street but couldn’t see anything from our room. I had a feeling some sort of pre-Marathon event was going on but I’m didn’t venture out to explore. It turned out to be a 5K for charity, but who would have known ahead of time?
While Barb was at aerobics, I received a call from our home security company. Evidently, Leslie, whom we’d enlisted to feed Manny and pick up our newspapers, set off the burglar alarm at our house. It took a couple of calls to get things sorted out but not before the police arrived and spoke with Leslie who convinced them she was not a burglar. Some excitement for the morning.
I’d originally planned for us to go to the Museum of the City of New York as our main activity for the day but a few days before got cold feet about traveling to Lower Harlem and looked into alternatives. I found the Treasures Room of the NY City Library. The London Library Treasures Room was one of our favorite spots in London and it seemed this relatively new addition to the NY City Library was similar. I reserved timed entry tickets for noon; the tickets were free — a rare New York bargain. I tried to also get tickets for a guided tour of the library building but they were already sold out for the weekend. The Library is next to Bryant Park which had started its Winter Carnival ice rink and 190 popup stands of food and kitsch. Armed with our 15% off discount thanks to the Hilton Club, I looked forward to a truffle cheese steak from The Truffleist.
We walked south in the direction of Bryant Park, stopping first at the new Singapore food hall, Urban Hawker. Barb and I were tempted by a number of stalls, but it was too early for a large meal. We agreed that Allie would love it, and we sent her a photo of the kaya toast place. Now she doesn’t have to travel all the way to Chattanooga to get some toast.
We made it to Bryant Park and scoped out some of the many stalls set up for their Winter Carnival. We hunted down the Truffliest stall and ordered a truffle cheese steak to share. It was gooey, messy and pretty good. Not really worth nearly $20, but then again, you know, there was the ambiance of sitting next to the carousel and watching highly privileged New York kids going round and round.
We headed into the library and got right into the Treasures Room at noon, our designated time. The room itself was smaller than I expected but it was well organized and not too crowded so you could actually look at the artifacts and read the descriptions. The Treasures Room has only been open since September 2021. We spent a half-hour getting oriented and looking at some of the items in the Beginnings section like Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten Declaration of Independence and the draft of the Bill of Rights with 12 proposed amendments (the first two were not ratified). At 12:30pm we gathered for a free tour led by one of the volunteer docents. Her tour lasted nearly an hour and touched on each of the nine themed areas within the room. I’ll forego my temptation to link to every area and artifact but the Treasures website does an admirable job of documenting each one. Even after the tour, we stayed at least another hour looking in more detail while I also listened to the audio guide for the room. It’s a very well done exhibit — not quite the equal of the Library of London’s Treasures but pretty close.
Barb asked me later which of the Treasures really stood out for me and I was hard-pressed to select just one or two. It’s a hodgepodge of random greatest hits covering centuries of interests and categories. Some of the ones that struck me were T.S. Eliot’s draft of The Wasteland with edits by Ezra Pound and Eliot’s wife Vivien (I wish I could really see and understand the edits…much less the final poem), the 1859 fish-eye view of New York by John Bachmann which shows such imagination for its time and presages Saul Steinberg’s 1976 New Yorker cover, and the beautifully illustrated 1686 Megillah: Scroll of the Book of Esther. I could easily lose several more hours wandering through the website. I won’t force it on you but encourage you to take a look.
We exited the Library through the gift shop but not without snagging a few items for friends…and a jigsaw puzzle for Barb. I was intrigued by a postcard of the underground stacks of the Library. It looks quite amazing and gives me an incentive to come back for an actual tour of the Library someday.
Fully Treasured, we left the library, took a photo op by the famous lions, and went back to Bryant Park to see the rest of the popup kiosks and grab a snack. We decided to share a ham and cheese crepe which hit the spot for both of us while we watched the skaters slushing about on this 75-degree day.
We walked back to our hotel, electing to go up 7th Avenue through Times Square for a different route. This was not a great decision. Times Square on a Saturday is largely blocked off for pedestrians but is also a zoo of people, quite a few of whom seem to be scammers or potential pickpockets ready to prey on unsuspecting tourists. I kept my hands in my pockets and Barb clutched her purse as we weaved through the crush of people. I was somewhat tempted to stop and marvel at the kaleidoscope of oddball life that inhabited the square but Barb pressed ahead, spider-senses on high alert, clearly desperate to get out of the crowd. We were very glad to get back to the hotel for a short rest and to get ready for dinner.
In planning this trip, I had looked for the New York outpost of L’Entrecote or L’Relais de Venise for steak frites but the only one has evidently remained closed since Covid, despite the L’Relais de Venise website saying it would reopen in mid-2022. I made a reservation at one of the highest rated alternatives for steak frites, La Grande Boucherie (the #6 restaurant in all of New York), which happened to be just a block from our hotel. We found it in the upscale alleyway called 6-1/2 Avenue, a pedestrian passageway that runs for six blocks between 6th and 7th Avenues from 51st Street to 57th Street. The restaurant itself ran along the pedestrian sidewalk so it looked like one long cafe but it was actually quite deep and enormous. We were ushered to our seat amid a rush of waitstaff and guest traffic that felt like something between a Cheesecake Factory and the faux-French chain Mon Ami Gabi…which is not a compliment.
Barb and I decided to get our own appetizers — escargots for her and grilled octopus for me — and then share a caesar salad and a steak frites between us. The appetizers were good and generously sized but not exceptional; the caesar salad was a caesar salad and frankly not as good as the one we had the night before at Patsy’s. The steak came while we were still eating our salad; it was tasty with a hefty dab of herbed butter rather than a sauce. The fries were acceptable to Barb, our connoisseur, but they didn’t get exceptional marks either. It was a good decision to simply share one steak as we were satiated but not stuffed after finishing the meal. Barb had seen some profiteroles go by and we decided to splurge on the dessert. They were good but just made us reminisce about Ah Chen and all the good meals he cooked. This one paled in comparison. In all, the meal was competently good and the service efficiently attentive but for the prices and reputation of the restaurant our expectations were raised. I’m not in a big hurry to go back.
Now that I’m home and doing more research, I’m not entirely convinced the midtown L’Relais de Venise is closed — we should have at least walked by the location. And I find there is another alternative, Skirt Steak, in Chelsea that looks pretty good…or at least more or less like Medium Rare around home. Maybe next time we’re in the Big Apple, whenever that may be.
After the meal, and with the weather still mild. we decided to take a walk around Rockefeller Center. We thought maybe the Christmas tree and holiday decorations would be up. It turns out they weren’t yet; we were a week or two early. But it wasn’t very crowded and was a nice evening for a stroll. I tried out my new iPhone camera for some night shots. Tourist time in the big city.
Adventurous night owls we are not, so we rounded a few more blocks and ended up right back at our hotel. Barb was happy to hunker down for the night and I agreed it was the safest and wisest thing to do. We watched something or other on TV until the late news and Saturday Night Live came on…live from just a couple of blocks away with Amy Schumer hosting.
Sunday, November 6
We got up early, having fallen back from daylight savings time, and eagerly made our way downstairs for our free breakfast buffet. The buffet normally costs $40 or so per person and we never would have gotten it, but armed with our vouchers we plunged right in. The selection was fairly standard breakfast items: omelettes to order, bacon and sausage, smoked salmon and bagels, fruits, breads, pastries, etc. We paced ourselves and did a pretty good job getting our free money’s worth over the course of an hour or so. Our waiter was quite nice and made sure our plates were cleared and waters refilled regularly. He asked where we were from and after discussing Maryland for a bit, Barb returned the question. He was from Jamaica, but had been in the States for decades, working first at the Williamsburg Inn, then Mackinac Island in Michigan before coming to New York.
We hit upon the idea of sneaking out some small sandwiches for the train ride home. Barb didn’t have her baggies with her that she usually thinks ahead to bring to buffets — we’re out of practice — and she worried that we didn’t have any paper napkins. I figured we could just wrap them in a cloth napkin and she said that I would have to carry it in that case. When we finally decided to leave, I carried the napkin bundle out a little too conspicuously and the waiter said “Hey, that’s my napkin” but was kind of smiling so I smiled, waved back and kept walking. Barb said I failed adequate stealthiness in sandwich stealing etiquette.
We got our ill-gotten bundle of sandwiches to the room, transferred them to a baggie, and headed upstairs to the 45th floor for our Hilton Grand Vacation sales pitch. There was a lovely view of Central Park from the two-level penthouse that they said used to belong to the Rockefellers but was now a bustling Hilton sales office. We were ushered into a personalized sales pitch from Tiffany Lewis, an enthusiastic and personable woman with bit of a Jennifer Lopez vibe. We walked in having no interest in a time share vacation package but she made a good pitch that this Hilton Grand Vacation Club was different. By the end of an hour we were actually tempted. Tiffany and her manager pushed hard for a decision on the spot but we were adamant that we needed time to decide and had a train to catch. We did agree to put down a deposit, which rather shocked me that we even went that far, and said we would decide within a few weeks. Barb thought that her friend Sheila was a user of the club and wanted to talk to her about it; fortunately they had a lunch already lined up for the following Sunday.
We were worried that the New York Marathon would disrupt traffic and make it hard to get to Penn Station for our train. We were prepared to walk the 1.5 miles, rolling our suitcases, but we were a little pressed for time once we finished the HGV pitch. Fortunately, it was easy to get a cab right from the hotel. The marathon was not an issue; if anything, traffic was lighter than normal.
We rode back in business class on the Northeast Express. There was a problem with our reserved seats — really with the seats in front of us which were turned around to face ours. After some worrying, fiddling with the seats and consultation with the train conductor and an engineer, the two people in those seats found someplace else to sit. Problem somewhat resolved. The train ride back south was almost identical to the Acela, with a couple more stops thrown in making the ride about 20 minutes longer. It’s hard to see much differentiation to support the Acela’s higher price.
While on the ride, I started researching Hilton Grand Vacations and found overwhelmingly negative comments. It became shockingly obvious it was a bad choice to become buy into this club, mostly due to high competition for prime locations in prime times, endlessly increasing annual costs, and ownership costs and obligations that would pass down to Allie after our deaths. Will decided to wait until Barb talked to Sheila the next weekend to make our final decision but my mind was mostly made up. Spoiler alert: the next weekend Sheila confirmed that, while they had enjoyed the club for about a decade while they were actively traveling, they were looking to sell their membership and having a heard time getting anything more than pennies for their dollars invested. We cancelled our deposit and dodged that bullet.
We made it home to find Manny still alive, no worse for the terror of having survived the burglar alarm. He was happy to see us and we were glad to be home.
It had been six years since I was last in New York with Allie and Laurie for Maggie’s Gaza Kitchen event at the Met. It was even longer for Barb who had been up for some day trips with friends in Allie’s youth. We’ve never really felt at home in New York but I was reminded this time that you can quickly advance from being completely overwhelmed by the intensity and bustle of the city to reach a point within a day or so where the chaos at least seems manageable. Our first hour or two of wandering on Friday was in overwhelmed mode but by Saturday I felt I at least knew what direction I was walking and had as much right as anyone to be jostling through the streets. Then again, neither of us were ready to tackle the subway. That would have taken at least another day or two of acclimation.
I’ve very glad and grateful I got the chance to see Our Native Daughters perform at Carnegie Hall. That was a bucket list item in my life for multiple reasons and I’m very glad things worked out to make it easy and enjoyable to attend. The rest of the weekend was fun and I think was a good break for Barb. I can’t say we took advantage of very many of the opportunities available to us in the big city, but we had a good time and nothing bad happened so I’ll take that as a win.
The best and worst of the world congregate in New York. I am neither of those, preferring to live my life somewhere in the middle, but it’s worth being reminded from time to time of the scope of possibilities that exist in this world. It is possible to gear up and live at a faster, more intense pace — like a jet plane or rocket burning fuel at a higher rate to achieve greater speed or altitude — but it feels to me much more comfortable and sustainable to operate at a more moderate pace. I’m willing to trade pushing the boundaries of life’s finest things for less wear and tear on the psyche and soul.
So, it may be a while before we venture back to New York. But if we do, at least there’s a steak frites place we can aim to try. And I’d like to try the Asian food at Urban Hawker. No doubt there will be some other show or concert I’d want to see, eventually. And someday I’d like to explore Brooklyn which would be as exotic for me as venturing anywhere in Europe. Maybe someday.
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