Category: adventure

A NYC Adventure or Can’t I Just Park My Car And Go?

I hope everyone enjoyed their festivities during this Independence Day holiday.  Of course I had an adventure in NYC once again and I thought you might like to hear about it. 

As you know, my sister lives in Manhattan and it gives me the push to go there.  I’m such a wuss when it comes to doing things out of my element.  Not that the city is a new thing to me.  I used to work in the city years ago doing paste-up/layout on the boards in an advertising agency. 

Lately I’m comfortable in my day to day stuff around here, that and, I’m not the greatest traveler.  Not that going to the city is traveling, but I’m such a scaredy-cat when it comes to getting around anywhere.  When I worked there I used to travel on the Long Island Railroad with my father.  He working there too so we’d go in together and then go our own way once we arrived.  Sometimes we’d meet up on the street and walk to the railroad together.  Other times we’d meet on the train, and other times I’d go home alone.  But every time I’d get on a train I needed to ask another traveler, “Is this the train to Hempstead?” like a jerk.  Oh brother!

Anyway, I met my sister this week to attend a concert at Radio City Music Hall.  I drove my car in instead of using the railroad or the subway.  She lives on the east side of Manhattan where there’s no subway service yet.  Driving makes it easy and I found street parking pretty quickly. 

Soon after I pull into this roomy parking spot I notice a woman at the passenger side of the car trying to open the door to my back seat!  I’m thinking Who is this?  When she can’t get in my car she throws her purse on the trunk and leans her whole body on the trunk too. 

Now she’s laying on my car while it’s still running!  I hadn’t turned the engine off yet.  I was in the middle of calling my sister on my cell phone to say I found a spot and I’d be at her apartment soon, but now this woman is on my car!  She was in shock, but manages to tell me this is my next blog post!  Well light bulb moment for me, I whip out my camera and take pictures!

After long minutes of revving my engine, beeping the horn, making the alarm go off, and she’s still sitting on my car, I decide to get out.  How long could I sit there?  Clearly this woman is a homeless whacko.  So I get out of the car and ask her why she’s laying on it. She said she’s waiting for someone, so I tell her go wait somewhere else.  She started getting angry and yelling at me. A psycho-nut case for sure, practically undressed in an unbuttoned blouse and messy appearance. I counter that I’m going to call the police and ask guys, who are standing in an apartment doorway, to dial 911.

My phone is another area code, what good will it do me in the city?  The men just stare at me and the crazy lady with their faces all agog. The whacko woman starts screaming that if I call 911 she’ll tell the police that I threatened her life! 

And then she begins to hammer my car with her fists banging the trunk and the fender!  Ok, I decide I’m done with her.  I tell her “Oh yeah?  Go ahead.  Bang on the car some more because now I’m going to take your picture!  Go and bang away! Yeah! Good! Keep it up!” 

As I walked away from her and my car I saw her stop, take her bag and walk across the street to lay on some other car.  Wonderful.  Thanks alot NYC.  Do I need this stuff?

Adventure in NYC

At peek at lovely Grammercy Park through the wrought iron fence
Visiting New York City is always an adventure.  Not that I’m so into having adventures, on the contrary.  However, any time I visit, there’s some little thing that makes my trip adventurous.  It helps that my sister lives there.  She’s the instigator.  Ok, I can be my own instigator, I’m just blaming this one on her.  That’s fair, right? 
This visit was to help my sister move some boxes of books and other stuff from her office.  Just a couple of boxes, but heavy and bulky to carry down elevators, out the building and into my truck.  The craziness of parking in NY is another adventure, and a story for another day.  Lucky for us there was a religious holiday being celebrated and alternate-side-of-the-street parking was not in effect, halleluia!  That meant I could park on the street instead of in a parking lot where I might pay big dollar bills for that truck!
After we loaded the truck, with the help of the wonderful security guard who did the heavy lifting, we were free.  First lunch at a nearby diner for great burgers and later a little poking around a thrift shop.  My sister’s office is downtown Manhattan in the ’20’s on the east side of the island.  Plenty of shops, restaurants, cafes, schools, a busy neighborhood.  We walked around thinking of where to go, what to do, when we ended up walking toward Irving Place and the Gramercy Park section of the city and it was just beautiful.
Talk about hidden areas of beauty in NYC and this has to be one of them.  Not to mention it’s inaccessable to the regular person on the street!  We saw a fence and gates, tried the gate but it was locked.  So we walked around one side thinking the opening should be there, but nope, another locked gate. Around and around we went.  Not one gate opened!  Each gate had a shiny lock on it.  A sign said “Close the gate when leaving the park.”  I told my sister “I bet you need a key to get in!”  I was right!  People were coming out of the park with a key on a lanyard!  I had never seen that before.  How interesting!  So we drooled at the pretty two acre park from behind the tall wrought iron fence.  Area residents are the only people allowed to use the park.  Some were walking, some were jogging around, kids were playing in the grass under the tall trees and amid mature rododendrons and azaleas.  It was an oasis in the middle of the big city.
The area at one time was a swamp.  The neighborhood was developed around 1831and is considered to be one of the first planned communities.  The well kept apartments were brownstones and carriage houses designed in 1883 and the 1905.  The central statue in the park is a sculpture of the area’s most famous resident, Edwin Booth, who was the brother of John Wilkes Booth who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.  The area had been part of the Underground Railroad before the Civil War, one building was a Quaker Meeting House, and a flower shop was a front for a speakeasy during Prohibition.  Even President Theodore Roosevelt had a home here.  So much history in two acres! 
Since we couldn’t sit in the park we decided to return to my sister’s apartment to relax before planning where to have dinner.  When we were ready we got ourselves on the York Avenue bus for a ride crosstown to the west side where we had dinner at a Greek restaurant called Uncle Nick’s.  That girl drags me all over Manhattan!  I said it was adventure, right?