A Helluva Town

An ode to a great day in New York City.

January 1, 2005 was my daughter Norah’s 18^th birthday.   We asked her “Where would you like to spend it?”  And she said, “New York City.”

She had visited New York several times already.  My father, her grandfather, lived there for 30 years, until he retired out here to California near me.  We had visited him when he lived in Brooklyn Heights and worked on Wall Street.  We had been to museums and shows and the top of the Empire State Building. 

My husband is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister and over the years we had found a relatively cheap place to stay in NYC, a sort of funky bed and breakfast that the midtown UU church runs.  They converted a turn of the century brownstone into apartments with high ceilings and big windows overlooking 35^th and Park.  The flats are named after famous Unitarians or wishful thinking Unitarians; one earlier year we stayed in the Beatrix Potter apartment; lots of stuffed bunnies.  The place is near the Empire State Building, which is great when traveling with jet lagged little kids up at midnight – the ESB is open then too.

In 2004, having secured the Walt Whitman apartment, the next question was tickets to a show.  Even from distant California we had heard of “Avenue Q”, the iconoclastic Sesame Street knockoff with full frontal puppet nudity and songs like “It Sucks to Be Me.”  Cool mother that I am I suggested that. (One summer in college I lived in a horrible 5^th floor walk-up, Lower East Side cockroached apartment on Avenue D.  Only in that part of town are there lettered streets, and D is as far as it goes.  That’s part of the joke – Avenue Q.)

My husband was uninterested in gay puppets seeking their life purpose, so he got a ticket to a revival of “Wonderful Town,” the Leonard Bernstein, Comden and Green 1953 hit, originally starring Rosalind Russell.  This time around it was Brooke Shields as one of the sisters who come from Ohio to find their fortune in New York.  (I just now asked him if I remembered right; he said yes, wistfully, such a great seat….) 

The particular great day in New York I have in mind is Dec. 31, 2004, the day before her birthday.  Being born on New Year’s Day means your birthday is often part of New Year’s Eve celebrations, or in the US, every one wants to watch American football games and the Rose Bowl parade on TV. 

New York has, of course, a great New Year’s Eve tradition, the lighted crystal ball dropping in Times Square; a million people gather each year to drink and wait in the cold for the countdown to New Year’s on the midtown streets where all the Broadway theaters are.  One previous New Years’ Eve we all went to see “Lion King” and could barely get out of the theater at 11:30, the streets were so packed with drunken revelers.

So I think they outlawed New Year’s Eve evening Broadway shows, but kept the matinees.  All three of us loved our shows about this very city, New York. (Slightly different take, Wonderful Town and Avenue Q, but great music.  New York inspires great music.)

We met up about 5, just getting dark and crowds already gathering.  We happily walked and sang back to the Unitarians, following the illuminated Empire State Building landmark in the sky.  The “people may ride in a hole in the ground” but that day too many people were riding the subway IN to Times Square to get into that underground craziness.   We had other plans – we’d done the Times Square thing that earlier Lion King vacation.  No, we’d read they had fireworks at the foot of Manhattan, over the Statue of Liberty.

A cake!  It was her birthday the next day.  The apartment had a kitchen, but look, here’s a bakery, still open New Year’s Eve.  On a sterile, business type block near Penn Station, a Puerto Rican bakery, almost industrial, no little tables or lattes, just folks baking away, for New Year’s parties? On the kind of whim you really only have on vacation we went it, asked if they could write Happy Birthday Norah on the cake in the window and Ay Caramba! we took it home.

But it was only 7 or so now, that horrible wait for midnight thing of New Year’s Eve.  We had a sort of dreary expensive dinner at a famous NY Restaurant, some chef we had heard of, we were all tired and a little sullen.  Oh well, that’s New York too, tired and sullen and expensive sometimes.

So odd to get into a Wall Street bound train at 10:30 PM, not jammed with stock brokers, just happy dates going to parties or the fireworks.  It actually was a warm clear evening.  We walked through the empty downtown streets, so quiet and dark after the Times Square madness. 

We hadn’t been to this part of the city since the terrorist attacks of 911.  Even in the dark we could feel the absent twin towers.  We came upon a memorial, a huge piece of granite from one of the towers that had been blasted from the explosion and landed on this street and stood there in its stark memory.

We weren’t quite sure where the fireworks would be, but we just kept walking south through the deserted financial district, looking for people.  Finally we got to Battery Park (“The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down”) and there were maybe 300 people, happily sprawled on the benches by old Civil War Fort Cinton, looking out to the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn, Staten Island, New Jersey.  Other folks were in boats in the harbor.  We waited.

Soon the fireworks started.  Fantastic.  They went on and on and on.  I’m the kind of person, at the end of a fireworks show, I usually say – that’s it?  That night it felt like they would never end. 

I’m not a big rah-rah patriot, but seeing all those colors and lights, those rockets red glare, framing the statue that symbolizes something about our country, a goddess of hope that is the first thing many immigrants have seen, her lamp lifted beside the golden door, thinking about my very New York day – I was happy, maybe a little proud, to be an American.

We took the subway back to our place and ate the cake – it was now her birthday.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter