Tag Archives: New York City

2015

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Previously: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.

I wrote one year ago that 2015 would be a hard year. And so it was. Here’s the requisite Dec 31 braindump.

In January, I became a dad again. Seeing my two kids grow together and become friends has been one of the privileges of my life. But the logistics of having two kids is pretty different (and much more exhausting) than when you’ve got just one child. The process of finding balance is ongoing.

The other big event of the year is that, in July, our family moved from New York City to Chicago. Moving sucks. It’s expensive, it’s disorienting, it’s inconvenient. My possessions were in limbo with the moving company for something like 13 days. Practicalities aside, it’s hard to leave NYC. While I grew up in the Midwest, I spent my entire adult life in New York and feel like a New Yorker. There’s something about New York that features more prominently in its residents’ inner ideas about who they are than when you live in, say, Ohio. In the same way as when I left graduate school, I’ve had to face this miniature identity crisis by reevaluating those aspects of my former life that are actually (ie, not just conventionally) central to what makes me tick, and then find a way to fit them in the context of my new life. This project is also ongoing 🙂

Partly in response to my man-without-a-country malaise, and partly out of philosophical motivations, I poured myself into free software contribution in 2015. More than 50% of my working year was spent doing unpaid work on WordPress, BuddyPress, and related projects. (More details.) I’m a vocal proponent for structuring your work life in such a way that it subsidizes passion projects, though numbers like these make me wonder whether there’s a limit to how far this principle can be pushed. I guess I’ll continue to test these boundaries in 2016.

One of the things I’d like to do in 2016, as regards work balance, is to find more ways to work with cool people. I am a proud lone wolf, but sometimes I feel like there’s a big disconnect between my highly social free software work and my fairly solitary consulting work.

Happy new year!

A New York City farewell eating tour

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Posting this mostly for my own records.

Next week, I’m moving away from New York. Starting with a pizza tour a few weeks ago, I’m trying to cram in some quality NYC meals in my last stretch as a New Yorker. Some of these are classic places, some are on the list for sentimental reasons. Here’s a summary of where I’ve been in the past few weeks, along with a few places slotted for my remaining 10 days:

First, the pizza joints:

Etc:

  • Bagels: have been hitting my local, but would like to get a last trip to The Bagel Hole
  • Court Pastry Shop, for the spumoni and maybe a lobster tail
  • White sauce hot sauce – probably won’t make it to my favorite Halal cart (near Queens College), but trying to patronize all my neighborhood stands
  • Some quality pastrami – probably Pastrami Queen, which is near my place and is ridiculous
  • A last slice of the weirdly delicious cheesecake at my favorite diner

Chicago

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I’ve spent a lucky thirteen years in New York City, but my time here is drawing to a close. My wonderful wife is entering a PhD program at the University of Chicago in the fall, so this summer we’ll be trading the First City for the Second.

I’m trying to untangle my thoughts about leaving my adopted New York and returning to my native Midwest. It’s heartbreaking, thrilling, terrifying, a huge relief. For the moment, I can say with confidence that I am excited to be relocating to a city that’s served as the setting for so many great theme songs. Nothing’s gonna stop me now!

Brooklyn is for runners

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I lived in Brooklyn when I started running in my mid-twenties. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was spoiled.

I never really enjoyed running for its own sake. I did it because my then-girlfriend (now-wife) was a serious runner, and because I wanted to continue to eat and drink as I pleased without risking my girlish figure. I managed to tolerate running thanks only to my Brooklyn backdrop. Over the course of about five years, I ran some 5,000 miles on Brooklyn’s streets. It was my way of learning the grid. From Williamsburg, I got to know Greenpoint, Bushwick, Fort Greene, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights; from Park Slope, it was Windsor Terrace and Kensington and Sunset Park and Bay Ridge; from Carroll Gardens, it was Red Hook and DUMBO and the waterfront. I have a decent mental map of maybe a third of Brooklyn’s seventy square miles, thanks to these here legs.

So I came to think of myself as an “urban runner”. Pounding the pavement was my way of getting to know my surroundings, and soaking up the city was my way of coping with running.

Then I moved to Queens, and everything changed. I’m not talking about Whitestone or Hollis or Rockaway or some other deep-Queens neighborhood. I lived in Ridgewood, about five blocks from the border with Brooklyn. But it was a totally different world. The car-to-pedestrian ratio was out of whack, which resulted in a totally different relationship between drivers and non-drivers. Instead of grumbling deference, I came to expect outright hostility from cars. I can’t count the number of times a driver sped up – or ran a stop sign – to beat me through an intersection. I even got hit once (albeit slowly), even after having made eye contact with the driver.

To make matters worse, Queens (or at least my portion of it) was boring. The semi-suburban neighborhoods bleed together in my mind: Glendale, Elmhurst, Woodside, Maspeth, Middle Village, Forest Park, Woodhaven. I know Queens is a (ethnically, linguistically, culinarily…) diverse place, but I could take or leave the bafflingly numbered streets/avenues/lanes/courts and single-family houses.

I moved to Manhattan a few months ago, where I hoped to recapture my love of urban running. It hasn’t gone well. Too many cars, too many people, too many stoplights, too much street construction. Dodging walkers on the sidewalk isn’t fun for me, and it isn’t fun for the people being dodged. Central Park is very nice, but I’m bored with it already.

In retrospect, Brooklyn is the perfect balance for the urban runner. It’s dense enough to be interesting. Neighboring neighborhoods contrast sharply with each other. Cars – at least in the northern and eastern parts of the borough – are few enough (and deferent enough) to make it safe to share the streets. I miss it.

If you are a runner living in Brooklyn, fight the urge to stick to the well-trodden paths. I too love Prospect Park, and the Belt Parkway Promenade, and Brooklyn Bridge Park. But you should be out on the streets, because there’s no better place to run.

Where is the artisan bagel movement in NYC?

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Moving to New York, I was excited about two things: pizza and bagels.

Pizza did not disappoint. NYC’s pizza landscape is rich, and has become richer over the last decade. There are overlapping ecosystems for dollar slice joints, traditional slice joints, and hybrid slice/Italian food joints. There’s a stratum of old school NY pizza restaurants: Totonno’s, Arturo’s, Sam’s, etc, as well as the newer places that aspire to a similar aesthetic. And there’s whole class of artisinal, neo-Neopolitan places, where foodies shell out big bucks for bufala. You could eat pizza every day and never hit every place.

The bagel landscape is perhaps equally complex. But it’s bottom-heavy in comparison to pizza. You’ve got the guys in the silver street carts who sell bagels pre-filled with a slice of cream cheese wrapped in wax paper. There’s the bullshit bakery chains, the Panara-Dunkin-ecticut-n-crustys where bagels are an afterthought to other baked goods. And then there are the mainstays, the neighborhood bagel shops. Like neighborhood slice joints, the quality of this category varies widely, from shoulda-had-a-Lenders to the Bagel Hole (the only really outstanding bagel I’ve ever had, in NY or elsewhere).

But where are the artisan bagels? Dom Demarco has people lining up for $5 slices at Di Fara. There’s gotta be a similar market for someone to sell outstanding bagels – small, properly boiled, without preservatives – even if they charge a premium for them. I get that it’s not glamorous: stirring a pot full of boiling bageloids in a dingy kitchen doesn’t have the sex appeal of wielding a peel in candlelit Lucali. And I get that bagel-place-as-destination is hard to fit into the geography and the late-night culture of New York. At the same time, a great bagel can be just as fantastic as a great slice, and IMHO is just as important a part of NY food culture. Where are the hipsters lining up to continue this particular foodways tradition?

Maybe I’m way off here, and there is actually a bagel subculture in NYC that I’ve never stumbled on. I hope someone’ll clue me in.

Ten years

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I realized today that, as of a few weeks ago, I’ve lived in New York City for ten years.

In 2002, I was a college senior in Mt Vernon, Iowa. I’d received a few different offers for graduate school fellowships. In the end, I ended up choosing CUNY more or less on a lark; NYC seemed like a cool place to live. So, I packed up a truck, and moved to a city two thousand times the size of Mt Vernon, and one hundred times the size of any city where I’d ever lived.

In everyone’s life there’s a handful of breakpoints: moments at which you make a decision that (intentionally or otherwise) forever and irreversibly changes everything. Ten years on, it’s dizzying to imagine the path not taken – the road that didn’t lead to this city, this job, this wife, this child, this me. I’m humbled, and somehow comforted, by the power that chance and caprice wield over the formation of the things that make up a life.

Here’s a picture I took of myself a few weeks after moving to my first place in NY, a shared apartment at 129th St and Lenox Ave:

Plus ça change….