Simon's Travels: NYC for New Year's

Christmas afternoon we drove to Portland, spent the evening at an almost deserted Radisson, and the next morning flew nonstop to Newark, an easy flight, caught the airtrain to Penn Station, and walked the cold ten blocks or so to the Metro Apartments. After checking in with the hotel and with the kids, we caught a gypsy cab to meet them at the White Horse Tavern.

It has not changed much in the 20 years since we were last there, or in the 50 years since I used to go there to drink 50 cent beers and eat 25 cent pickled eggs. The gas lights, long since converted to electricity, still light the place.

After we split up, Deb and I walked around the corner to 99 Perry Street. My apartment was one floor up, with two front windows at the left, $125 a month.

We caught a cab back to the Metro, then despite the rain and the late hour, walked the few blocks to Times Square to enjoy some of the city's ambiance. We got soaked.

The next day, we met the kids at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with tourists from around the world and more vacationing students and their parents than you would have imagined. Despite the packed galleries, we each found our favorite areas. Deb was taken by the antiquities,

especially jewelry,

Maren was most interested in the arms and armor,

I found old favorites and some new.

That evening, we took in another old favorite, which has changed some since we used to go there for lunch--two mugs of ale for 50 cents, Leiderkrantz and onion on saltines.

Women have been allowed in for years now, Leiderkrantz is no longer served, and two mugs are $5--but otherwise it seems much the same: sawdust on the floor, servers carry up to eight mugs in a hand, tables are shared.

We met drinkers from Ireland, England, Australia, as well as a bass player from Brooklyn and a New Jersey bartender on vacation.

The Museum of Natural History was next on our list. I confess to always wanting to visit but never having done so even when I lived only a few blocks away.

Lots of people, lots of fascinating dioramas (characterized as dead animal exhibits by some to-remain-nameless members of our family), lots of ethnographic displays. I was surprised to discover fish fossils from the Green River formation near Kemmerer, where we had just been fossil digging last summer.

Friday evening we went to the Gershwin to see Wicked, a delightful upsidedown Wizard of Oz,

in which the "wicked" witch Elphaba tries to expose the injustices of the current Oz regime and the "good" witch Glinda is a ditzy sorority queen who wants to maintain the status quo and her mindless reign.

We ate at the Carnegie Deli, crammed in with a lot of other gourmands, to eat some of the best, or at least the largest, sandwiches imaginable.

Deb and I wandered the Times Square area, enjoying the crowds. We managed to take in the test-drop of the New Year's Eve ball and tests of the confetti as well, a few pieces of which we snagged before the sweepers vacuumed them off the street.

I don't know what the day-to-day atmosphere is these days, but at this time of year, it definitely was a carnival:

mummers enticed tourists, hawkers peddled cut rate tickets, we found ourselves projected onto a giant composite TV screen.

We went to the Frick but cameras are not allowed so the only photographic record of my favorite New York museum is a shot of the snow falling across the street in Central Park.

We visited Obscura, an antiques and oddities shop on the Lower East Side that has been featured in a TV show. Definitely some oddities: stuffed two-headed calves, antique medical equipment, quirky stuff.

We wandered Rockefeller Center, and ate at Bombay Palace under carvings of illustrations from the Kama Sutra.

We visited St. Patrick's, undergoing renovations, during a service. Still an impressive edifice, and lovely inside as well.

We attended George Balanchine's production of The Nutcracker, a special treat for Matthew who performed in the Huntsville Ballet's production.

We got to MoMA--New York's Museum of Modern Art--when it opened, and the crowd was already waiting and got worse as the day went on--especially in front of special exhibits such as Edvard Munch's Der Schrei der Natur, on display from October 2012 to March 2013.

This is Munch's fourth version (pastel, 1895), which sold for $119,922,600 at Sotheby's on May 2, 2012, the highest price ever for a painting at auction. Viewers crowded in, took photos, then made way for more photographers, never really looking at the painting itself. I joined them, I confess. Nearby, ignored by many in the crowd, was one of the lithograph versions, equally interesting, I think.

MoMA has many other fascinating works, many of which were ignored by the crowds,

Starry Night,

Water Lilies, a Picasso goat.

New Year's eve, we jointed the Circle Line sightseeing cruise of the water front, from the West 42nd Street pier, down the Hudson by Liberty Island (closed to visitors until damages from the Sandy storm surge are repaired),

up the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge, then turn around and in the dark, back to 42nd Street.

The rest of the evening was Deb's party. Months before, she had purchased party passes to some ten venues in the Times Square area and about 8 p.m. we started to the first, Frames Lounge, an up-scale bowling alley and night club where bowlers wore coat and ties. Food and drink was all included, and it was excellent, but we moved on. Police had barricaded every crossing, and our spendy entry wristbands swayed no one--half the people in the crowd displayed them. The police said the crowd was already too big, they were letting no one in at that crossing, go north a block--which we did, and heard the same story. Finally, we slipped around a barricade, and headed east toward Seventh. A cop stopped us, asked how we had gotten in. I said, the cops back on Eighth had let us through. He shrugged, and we wound up at Chevys Fresh Mex on 42nd, which we had walked by every day on our way to Times Square, a two-floor night club with too-loud music spun by a d.j. The drinks were covered, including tequila shots, and everyone was happy and getting happier.

We gave up on the idea of fighting our way to see the ball drop--after all, we had seen the practice drop, it was cold out, and rest rooms were handy. At about 11:55, the bartenders lined up champagne glasses--plastic, of course--along the bar, poured the bubbly, and at the sounds of the horns, we toasted another year.

And a few minutes after 12, we braved the cold two blocks back to the Metro and fell into bed.

At 11:09 the next morning we walked into the Guggenheim to see a display of some 110 black-and-white works from 1904 to 1971 of Pablo Picasso, paintings, sculpture, and works on paper.

Except in the foyer, photography was not allowed as was announced in signs throughout the museum, although many in the crowd, art lovers though they might be, clearly could not read.

We took the elevator to the top, then walked down the spiral display area, seeing Picasso's development

from representational early work to later abstractions such as The Milliner's Workshop (1926).

In the afternoon, Deb and I went down to the Village to walk around the old neighborhood

and discovered we weren't the only ones looking for nuts.

That evening, we met the kids for another great meal. And then in the morning, we met everyone at Penn Station and Maren, Deb, and I took the airtrain back to Newark, Maren to fly to Alabama, Deb and I to Denver, then Portland and the drive back to the ranch. A good trip.