new york city - fall 2003 - day 6

Sunday morning. It was a day to sleep in. It was a day to read the paper. It wasn't all that different from a typical Sunday morning at home in Minnesota. Only here you get all 5" of the Times and it's like $2 cheaper. Booya.

So after maxin' and relaxin' for a couple hours, we decided to head out and walk the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a gorgeous weekend morning, which I've read is the best time to walk across. I'm not really sure why, as the traffic seems to be crazy 24/7, and tons of tourists were out there with us, but in any event, that's when we decided to go. It was mint.

In the afternoon we had intended to tour the super fancy east side but in one of our walking-tour books it said that Sunday is the worst time to do so. It did, however, point out that Sunday was the best time to hit the Jewish lower east side, and seeing as we were basically down there already, we stayed in the neighborhood and did that stuff instead.

I guess back in the late 19th century up through like the 30's, that part of town was really hustling and bustling. Orchard Street had a huge Sunday bazaar, people were all over the place selling pickles and bagels and clothes and all that, and kids ran through the streets playing Dead covers on their penny whistles for nickels. Today, the neighborhood is kind of a dump. The fabled Orchard Street bazaar is now several blocks of the typical cheap luggage, fake leather jacket and blem'd T-shirt tables that you see all over town. It 's a joke.

Lucky for us, the rest of the tour was hardly a joke. First and foremost, we ate lunch at Katz's delicatessen, one of those crazy delis where you get a 6" thick pastrami sandwich. I love all the salted cured meats, but pastrami is probably my favorite. It was superb. A true highlight.

Later on we toured the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. It's a renovated tenement building from the 1860's that was boarded up instead of being brought up to code back in the 1930's. A few years back, the National Trust declared the building a landmark and renovated some of it into a museum. It was a first rate tour, and also one of the best things we've done on the trip.

We ate our way through the rest of the neighborhood (black and white cookies, knishes, bialy, etc) and headed home. We relaxed for a while and then caught a [super] late dinner at Molto Mario's joint Lupa down in SoHo. Great food, average service.

Highlights

  • Riding 50+ mph in a cab up Broadway at 11:30 at night. Borderline insanity.

  • Watching people wait 15 deep in line to buy pickles from the last pickle maker on the lower east side. At one time there were like 50 pickle makers in the neighborhood. Now there is only one. "He's the best," people were saying. Uhh, he's the best of 1, but yeah, he's probably still the best.