A Chicagoan in New York
Scratching many surfaces of a great city
Short updates:
We’ll be in Memphis for Thanksgiving. After that, we don’t have any travel plans for a while. We’ve talked about going to Japan again sometime next year, but nothing concrete yet.
A few months ago, I mentioned in one of these updates that public transportation in and around Chicago was facing a huge budget cut. Last month, the state legislature not only filled the budget gap, but increased funding and made some governance reforms that can improve the whole system. Also part of this was eliminating minimum parking requirements in areas served by transit1. These are great first steps, but we have a lot more work to make transit in the area what it could be.
Here’s an interesting post on what makes a meaningful life: Flow as a component of meaningful living2.
We were in New York City for a long weekend last month, visiting our 3-year-old’s friend, whose family moved there last year.
Even Julie was surprised to learn that this was only my second visit to New York City. My first visit was for the 2014 US Go Congress, held at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Midtown3. I was there for a whole week including the weekends on both sides. But almost all of what you would call sightseeing happened when (then-girlfriend) Julie joined me during the second weekend.
Trying to demonstrate just how little sightseeing I’ve done in New York, I looked at the top 30 “Attractions” in New York City according to TripAdvisor. It turns out I only did 3 out of 30 on that 2014 trip: Times Square, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Broadway4. We did actually watch a musical—prophetically, Chicago.
Second time around, I checked off…none of the other 27. And that’s OK. The purpose of the trip was for the 3-year-old to see his friend, and that goal was accomplished handsomely—they slept in the same room, and got to play together for most of their waking hours.
Julie has a lot more experience with New York, having gotten her masters there and living in the Upper West Side during the program. Being from the Chicago suburbs, she was initially wary, maybe even resentful of New York, but soon accepted that it was a great city.
I mention this because I’m at the resentful stage. New York is the most important city in the world for so many things, and I’m a big fan of big cities. The problem, I think, is that when your main exposure to New York is online content, you get exposed to the loudest people—and loud people are oh so loud in New York because so many people are trying to “make it there”5. I also wish Hamilton didn’t popularize the phrase “the greatest city in the world” to describe New York6.
Anyway, it’s a city that I’ve barely scratched the surface of, and I’m not a good guide in terms of “here’s what you should do there”. Instead, I’ll do a quick rundown of good food we ate, and give you some of my observations and musings.
Food
We were staying in the Upper West Side, and had some local but not-New-York-style pizza from Mama’s TOO!. The square slices reminded me of Roman and Detroit styles. I really liked the poached pear pizza—I seem to be a sucker for good sweet pizzas.
Earlier in the year, it was reported that Din Tai Fung, the Taiwan-based dumpling chain, was the restaurant chain with the highest revenue per location in the US. This was amusing to us, because a lot of Din Tai Fungs in Japan are in relatively small restaurant spaces in department stores7, and each location is not handling huge volumes.
We went to their gigantic location near Times Square—they just have a very different strategy in the US. The soup dumplings were very good as you’d expect, and noodles with sesame sauce—spicy and nutty—was a hit. My favorite was the chocolate dumplings…I’m sensing a theme.
If you have kids, definitely check out the view of cooks making dumplings in the kitchen.
One night, after the kids went to bed, I headed out by myself to Ippudo Westside. New York has a lot more Japan-based ramen places than Chicago, and this is one of them. I did actually go to this location of Ippudo 11 years ago.
I sat at the counter, sharing space with people who just got out of Wicked, and got the yuzu shoyu ramen. This was a really good bowl of ramen with an unconventional choice—red onions in the soup—that worked. I did leave thinking that the top-tier ramen in Chicago (Akahoshi and Monster) is right up there with these guys.
Harlem
From LaGuardia Airport to the Upper West Side, we took the M60 bus. This took us through Astoria, Randalls and Wards Islands, and Harlem. Astoria is somewhere we want to get to, especially for the Noguchi Museum, which we wanted to go to this time but missed out on8. Randalls and Wards Islands are a curious donut hole surrounded by Manhattan9, Queens, and the Bronx.
But the most interesting segment of the bus ride was Harlem.
My knowledge of Harlem comes in bits and pieces, but a lot of it is from reading jazz history. By the time New York became a major hub for jazz in the 1930s10, Harlem was the center of African-American culture there11. Minton’s Playhouse stands out for me as the place where people like Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie were doing jam sessions, leading to the creation of bebop.
Even before that was Duke Ellington, who ran the house band at the Cotton Club—which shamefully had a mostly whites-only policy for the audience—and his signature tune “Take the ‘A’ Train” is about taking the subway to go up to Harlem. My favorite on that theme is “Uptown” by the Chambers Brothers, from 196712.
Riding along 125th St on the bus, you do see that this is a special neighborhood. It’s a corridor with a lot of foot traffic, with many small businesses, including restaurants serving soul food, Caribbean food, and African food.
But you also see signs of gentrification, with generic big-name stores like Whole Foods taking up a lot of real estate. The most jarring might be the Banana Republic next to the Apollo Theater.
To be clear, it’s not a bad thing for a neighborhood to get popular amenities. The problem is that New York City is not building enough housing to accommodate all the people who want to live there. Housing costs rise, and lower-income residents have to move out of neighborhoods like Harlem.
Quick research showed that gentrification in Harlem is mainly a 21st-century phenomenon, and there’s quite a bit of literature on that gentrification and the activism opposing it. I’ll be sure to check out some of that before I finally set foot in the neighborhood.
Hudson River
The other observation comes from going to Riverside Park, a miles-long park along the Hudson River with nice paths and many playgrounds. What I didn’t appreciate before this trip was that both sides of this section of the Hudson are basically cliffs13.
I knew that the Hudson River was an essential part of what led to New York becoming what it is. Here’s a very good explainer on why New York got big, and it’s because the Hudson provided New York with easy connection to a large inland region, extending past the Appalachian Mountains to the Great Lakes.
How this worked geologically is that the Hudson River Valley was carved by glaciers, which cut through mountains and made the river wide. But I was also seeing how this also led to difficulties developing the riverfront in Upper Manhattan and New Jersey.
It also explained why it seemed so hard to go from the Upper West Side to New Jersey, which you can see right across the river. The closest river crossings to the Upper West Side are the Lincoln Tunnel around 40th St, and the George Washington Bridge around 180th. I could easily find two points, a mile apart on the map, separated by 10 miles of road.
And these river crossings did not exist until the 1930s. Trains first crossed the Hudson from Manhattan in 1908 (Uptown Hudson Tubes), and cars did the same in 1927 (Holland Tunnel). Before that, it was all ships between New York City and New Jersey.
I’ll stop here, but you can see I’m grappling with many aspects of what makes New York great, whether or not it’s the greatest. I’m looking forward to the next trip there.
What I’m listening to now
I’ve been a fan of Silvana Estrada since I heard her 2017 album, Lo Sagrado (“The Sacred”). She’s a singer-songwriter from Veracruz, Mexico, and her new album is Vendrán Suaves Lluvias (“Soft Rains Will Come“). She’s touring North America, and we plan on seeing her at Thalia Hall on 11/2814.
Her vocals are impeccable, usually a bit of drama but not too much, and she often plays the Venezuelan cuatro, a small string instrument similar to the ukulele.
There are so many pretty songs on this album, like “Flores” and “Como Un Pájaro”, but my favorite is “Good Luck, Good Night”. I already thought it might be a perfect song, and then I saw how she sets it up in her Tiny Desk concert (from 4:50): Imagine you’re at a cantina in Mexico, having had a few too many after getting ghosted by a date. And then this song comes on.
Yes, it’s a perfect song.
Many states and municipalities in the US have minimum parking requirements for housing and commercial developments. This would be something like, you must build 1 parking spot on-site for every unit of housing. A minimum that works in a car-centric suburb does not work in a dense urban area, and it’s one of many factors making it harder to build housing in cities.
Abolishing the requirement does not mean you can’t build parking—it simply means that developers can figure out the best amount of parking for each particular development, and they would try to do a good job because they want to attract buyers and tenants.
I think there’s also some connections between modern psychology’s “flow” state and artisan stories in Zhuangzi. I’ll need to do some re-reading.
The hotel was demolished in 2023.
and the Manhattan Skyline, I guess. That’s a weird one.
You can make a little game out of this. I’ve done 26 out of 30 in Chicago, which I claim is the best top 30 list in the US.
“New York, New York” is definitely overplayed in New York.
Not the same phrase, but the same idea: I’ll always remember when I just moved from Tokyo to suburban Memphis, a girl in my 8th grade class said to me, “America is the greatest country in the world.” I’m sure I was more amused and intrigued than annoyed at the time, but I hope you get why it can be annoying, even if I agree with the statement.
I went to the one in Namba, Osaka, inside the Takashimaya department store.
I was so close to becoming someone who’s been to the Noguchi Museum but not the Met or MoMA.
The islands are part of Manhattan, the borough, but not part of Manhattan, the island.
The other important cities for jazz early on were New Orleans, Chicago, and—not a lot of non-jazz people know this—Kansas City.
How Harlem came to be a black neighborhood is also an interesting story. A central figure was Philip A. Payton Jr.
written by Betty Mabry, better known as Betty Davis for her innovative solo career (after a brief marriage with Miles Davis).
I did know that Rudy Van Gelder’s recording studio—one the most famous studios in jazz history—is in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. It’s a few miles north of where we were, across from the northern edge of Manhattan.
We are depending on our flight back to Chicago not getting delayed too much.