Wine, Pizza, Bad Hotdogs

AKA 36 hours of wine- and pizza-sauced lips in Brooklyn and a terrible hotdog in Manhattan. Some notes:

Brooklyn and Manhattan might as well be different planets (at one point they were actually different cities). This makes sense as their residents view each other as aliens.
Many New Yorkers exist entirely within 16-block radii of their apartments. I spoke with more than a few who had never ventured to adjacent neighbourhoods, and wondered about them with bemused curiosity, as if they were hundreds of miles away and required visas to enter.
The density of NYC is staggering. Simply walking around Manhattan, one gets the sense of being in an enormous beehive or anthill.
Streets, building windows, tenements halls, yards, gardens, porches, stairs, alleys are all filled to bursting with signs of life at every hour of the day and night. This is in stark contrast to most cities on the West Coast, where cities become empty outside of peak hours, as if some zombie apocalypse had stolen all but the homeless.
Speaking of which, homeless folk were surprisingly difficult to find in lower Manhattan, a noticeable absence coming from the West Coast, where homelessness is widespread across urban areas. I spent nearly an hour during my only night in Manhattan wandering around with a box of pizza that had been gifted to me by a pizza shop. It took me nearly an hour to find a man slumbering on a park bench. I placed the box on a concrete guardrail opposite his face and propped it open with a plastic cup.
New York seems to exert some kind of strange gravitational energy that draws Italian immigrants in from every corner of the globe and implores them to open pizza parlours. It is nearly impossible to walk down an avenue or street anywhere in the city without tripping over 3-6 neighbourhood pizza spots. This is fascinating.
Times Square is not a good place to eat a hotdog. Mine cost $10 and all I got was a sad, flavourless weener slightly larger than my index finger on a stale bun, whetted by a few sparse drops of ketchup and mustard. When I asked for relish, the cart owner looked at me as if I had just requested a dollop of diamond-encrusted caviar and shook his head disapprovingly.
The riverside parks, particularly on the Brooklyn side of the city, are beautiful, and New Yorkers seem to enjoy doing shirtless pushups in them.
New Yorkers are highly innovative with their civic infrastructure, sometimes to a fault: I encountered one park covered in astroturf. It didn’t feel right, like a digitally-over-retouched photograph of a face. To me, dusty patches of uneven ground, alternating waves of brightly textured green and sun-bleached poufs, rocks, gravel, and the occasional ant colony are all part of the quintessential grass-lounging experience — yet the most tragic loss was not one of terrestrial nature, but olfactory. There is something about the piquant, loamy perfume of grass rooted in fresh soil that is calming, comforting, even mildly intoxicating. The lack of such sensory delights in New York’s astroturfed patches of park left me craving the real thing. Fortunately, there are parks of all sizes, shapes, and varieties in New York — so I didn’t have to look far to find an alternative.
The diversity of New York City is immediately felt, rather than sensed, in the massive throngs of passersby that flood across vision at every moment. This is not just racial diversity, but diversity across every imaginable axis: ethnicity, wealth, sex, gender, political leanings, cultural heritage, and on and on and on to infinity. The result is an overwhelming sense that variety is accepted, even celebrated; no matter where on the gridlines one exists, to be different is to be the same. This lack of pressure to conform and fit into a more narrowly defined “culture” for public display (as in the Northwest) is remarkably freeing.
Opera, theatre, film, fashion and fine art vie for New York’s attention, but New Yorkers’ primary form of entertainment is gustatory: restaurants of every imaginable variety and food from every place on earth exist together in glorious, nearly overwhelming density — somewhere in New York, there is a restaurant (or thirty) for any food your heart could desire, whether that is Isreali, Pakistani, Uruguayan, Korean, Burmese, or Turkish; a Jamaican jerk restaurant next to a Michelin babka shop; Egyptian soft-serve ice-cream cones flavoured with turmeric and saffron. Indeed, one need not even leave the confines of Brooklyn to eat all the world’s food. On an afternoon in Greenpoint, I sipped dashi made with fish flown in from Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, ate a bagel with smoked pastrami salmon, and munched on a Polish latke as I walked down Manhattan avenue past gourmet cheese-and-beer shops, Italian delis, and cafes of every variety imaginable.
New Yorkers love their Italian liquors: Fernet, Campari, and Cocchi Americano line the walls and wells of drinking establishments, and in a restaurant in Brooklyn or Manhattan you are more likely to find patrons sipping wine and cocktails than you are to find pints of house lager. While I love beer, I was impelled by such variety to choose alternative libations with my meals.
Speaking of wines — the density of wine-lovers in New York begets some remarkable opportunities for those so-inclined. In New York’s wine cellars and shops, you will find tapestries of bottled, fermented grape: white wine, orange wine, pink wine, red wine, natural wine; sparkling wine and flat wine; grapes from Japan; grapes from India; grapes from every corner of the earth. They make wine there? They do, and it’s sold in New York.
New York seems to extend forever, although this may be a traveller’s illusion. The illusion is nonetheless distressing, as one could take a lifetime getting to know a single subdivision of the Lower East Side, let alone Brooklyn, the Bronx, or Yonkers.
Incredibly, many New Yorkers I encountered seemed slightly jaded. They spoke wistfully of the potato farms and open air in Narrowsburg, Freeville, and Monticello, and as if dreaming of the opportunity to escape there. Yet, no-one had plans to depart — each seemed content in their malcontent. Perhaps this is simply the human condition, and the grass really is always greener on the far side of the interstate.