More NYC

Wednesday morning, the four of us headed to the Lower East Side, with a loose goal of seeing Chinatown and Little Italy and a plan to get our admission time for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The subway stop was in Chinatown, so we got a bit of a look as we walked to the Museum's headquarters, a storefront. We got tickets for a tour about 90 minutes off, so we had some time for lunch.

The Museum includes on its Website a list of restaurants and stores in its area, and we agreed to try one before the tour and one or more after, and to taste several things. Our pre-tour lunch was at El Castillo del Jagua, a couple of blocks away. This Cuban/Dominican/etc. restaurant served up a garlicky fried pork chop, and a dish including fried pork pieces, both with one or another form of rice and beans, a good Cubano sandwich, and Presidente beer, the all-inclusive resort staple from the Dominican Republic. Wendy sampled her way through the plates of the rest of us. All very good, and quite reasonably priced. This was probably my favorite meal of the trip, and I would happily go there again, except that there are probably thousands of other places to try.

The Tenement Museum offers a fun little gift shop, a small room that shows various videos relating to the tenement experience, rest rooms and water for sale. Its treasure, and the place where most of its tours go, is a five-story brick tenement building down the street, which was found in the 1980's in its 1930's worn condition. I mean worn: metal ceilings and soot-darkened wallpaper hanging, windows broken, etc. Nobody had lived in the building for 50 years, although the first-floor storefronts had been in use. The Museum has restored several of the apartments to display the stories of the actual tenant families; our tour looked at the 1870's rooms of the German Jewish family, and we learned the story of those hard times, and the 1930's apartment of one of the last families to live there, an Italian family. The Museum lucked into a wonderful situation: a woman coming through the neighborhood asked "what are you doing to my building?" and they discovered that she had lived there as a child. She gave them details for setting the exhibit of "her" apartment, some excellent recorded oral history, and even gave tours for a few years prior to her death. The tour was called "Getting By," and indeed some attention was given to how the families struggled to find jobs and struggled even more when the jobs weren't there. But the building, and the settings, were the star, as the small rooms , worn hallways, and the closeness of the day made the living conditions seem more real.

TIP: this is an excellent set of tours and exhibits. It's small, but well worth finding and visiting. And check the Website for more restaurants and stores.

After the tour, we went to Vanessa's Dumpling House and ordered a sampling of their wares. We had one type of dumpling, some fried balls stuffed with meat, and a sesame pancake, also filled with meat. All excellent, and all cheap! The fellow at the table next to us had his dumplings in soup, and the low price for the large container made it clear that you could eat there often without breaking the bank. It looked as good as our food was.

On the way to the subway stop (a different one), we walked past Katz's Deli and stepped inside for a peek. If you recall the scene from "When Harry Met Sally" in which Meg Ryan fakes the orgasm and the other lady says, "I'll have what she's having," Katz's is where that was filmed.
We got on the train and returned to the hotel for a breather and a change. We never did get to Little Italy, so there's something for the next visit.

Then through Times Square, through as much foot traffic and hubbub as we saw anywhere, to the 7 train out to Queens, Shea Stadium and a Mets' game. Once under the East River, this train also runs above ground, and we got looks at the Manhattan skyline, industry and warehouse areas, and the neighborhoods of Queens that are near the line. The stop puts you right at Shea on one side, and at the tennis complex for the US Open on the other. Both Yankee Stadium and Shea are in their last year of use; both new stadiums are nearly done; Citi Field is just over the center field fence of Shea. This was a much nicer place to see a ball game, as it's only 45 years old, not 85, and the general feel of the crowd also seemed more lively and attuned to not only the game but each other. And the beers were $1 to $2 cheaper! The Mets won.

The rains came about 30 seconds after we boarded the train to back to Manhattan. They must have covered much of the city, as it was still pouring when we emerged at Times Square and had five blocks to go back to the hotel. Thousands of people were still out, and umbrella usage is higher in New York than in Menomonie, but I tried to rely on my hat and I got thoroughly drenched. The rest of us did a little better. As long as I was wet, I ran (all right, with my knees I haven't run a single step in ten years) over to the deli grocery for a little something for our last night; we all promptly fell asleep.