The Concrete Jungle — Four Days in New York

This one wasn't a van trip. No campground, no hookups, no dogs in the back — just a flight up to Queens, NY to see my cousin Elizabeth, and three days of walking a city instead of driving through one. I've spent most of this year measuring distance in hours behind the wheel. New York City measures it in blocks, and my feet noticed.

An education on the way to the airport

The trip started before I even left St. Pete. My Uber driver to the airport was an older man, maybe seventies, from Scotland — and in about twenty minutes he covered more ground than most people do in a whole dinner. He had a couple of farms back home in Edinburgh. He told me the Vikings landed in America centuries before Columbus, which is true and then some: Leif Erikson and his crew set up at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland around the year 1000, roughly five hundred years ahead of Columbus, and there's an archaeological site to prove it.

He also swore The Da Vinci Code was shot mostly in Scotland. Not quite — it was filmed across France and England too — but he wasn't wrong about the part that matters: the climax was shot at Rosslyn Chapel in Midlothian, and that chapel got so famous off the back of it that visitor numbers exploded. For a fifteen-minute ride to a regional airport, that was a lot of conversation.

Two flights, two views

The first leg was easy, and coming into Charlotte was better than it had any right to be — all those houses ringed around the lake, docks out back, boats tied up. I'd take one. Only need about two million. 😉

The second leg was the good one. Somewhere on the descent we crossed what I'm fairly sure were the Hamptons — enormous houses, pools, tennis courts, and I counted something like seven golf courses inside a two-mile radius. It is a strange thing to fly over that much manicured green and then land in the densest city in the country twenty minutes later.

Landing (and immediately giving up on the trains)

The plan on paper was tidy: AirTrain out of JFK, transfer at Jamaica, LIRR or the E train into Forest Hills. In practice I walked out of that terminal with no idea where I was, where any of those trains were, or which direction to point myself. So I took an Uber. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I've navigated mountain passes and 22-foot road advisories in a 24-foot rig, but JFK arrivals humbled me in about four minutes.

The best seat on the ferry

Statue of Liberty · Ellis Island

On the way down to the ferry we saw a wild turkey. In Manhattan. Apparently that's not a normal sighting — though there's precedent: a turkey named Zelda lived in Battery Park for about eleven years, showed up to basically every event the park conservancy held, and was named after Zelda Fitzgerald. She died in 2014, so whoever this one was, she's writing her own story.

We got the best spot on the ferry, dead center at the bow, and watched her get bigger every minute of the ride. There is no version of that approach that isn't worth the early alarm. We had pedestal tickets — the crown is a separate ticket entirely — and honestly, the pedestal view was perfect. I didn't feel like I'd missed anything.

A name on the wall at Ellis Island

Then Ellis Island, where roughly twelve million people entered this country between 1892 and 1954 — and where, my cousin told me, our great-grandmother came through. Elizabeth found her name there several years ago. That reframes a museum pretty fast. You walk into the Great Hall as a tourist and about thirty seconds later you're standing in a room your family actually stood in, tired and hopeful and holding everything they owned.

I've been to a lot of places this year that are beautiful because they're empty. Ellis Island is the opposite — it's moving because of how full it was.

Lunch where Washington said goodbye

Fraunces Tavern · 54 Pearl Street

Best food and best restaurant of the entire trip, and it wasn't close. I had a watermelon, feta and balsamic salad with grilled chicken, Tom had fish and chips with genuinely top-quality fish, and I drank a cider made right here in New York. But the food was maybe the third-best thing about it.

The building went up in 1719 as a private home for the De Lancey family, and it's widely considered the oldest standing structure in Manhattan. Samuel Fraunces bought it in 1762 and turned it into a tavern — then called the Queen's Head — and it became a headquarters for the Sons of Liberty in the years before the Revolution. On December 4, 1783, nine days after the British evacuated New York, George Washington said farewell to his officers in the Long Room upstairs. After the war the building housed the fledgling government's Departments of Foreign Affairs and War and the Board of Treasury — essentially the country's first executive office building. The museum also notes that Hamilton and Aaron Burr dined here together a week before their duel, which is the kind of detail that makes you look at the room a little differently while you're eating a salad in it.

Wall Street, and then the pools

We walked down Wall Street, which is a very different animal from the financial district in London. Tighter, louder, and more theatrical about itself.

Then the 9/11 Memorial. Everyone my age remembers exactly where they were that morning, so there was never a question of skipping it. They did a remarkable job — the two reflecting pools sit in the exact footprints of the towers, water falling into a void you can't see the bottom of. Some numbers I keep thinking about: 2,753 people were killed at the World Trade Center, and nearly 1,100 of them — about 40% — still have not been identified. The city's medical examiner is still working on it, twenty-five years on, and still making new identifications.

Coffee in a bag

We ducked into a café afterward and my coffee arrived in a bag. An actual bag. It was strange and delightful and it tasted great, and I have no further information to offer about it.

Took the subway back to the apartment — no incidents, no stories, just a normal ride, which felt like its own small accomplishment. Somewhere in there I had Shake Shack for the first time. Good. I'd give it a 7.5 on the burger scale. I said what I said.

The best part of the whole trip

Hands down, no contest: my cousin Elizabeth sat down at her piano and sang. She spent years singing and playing, and it shows in a way that recordings don't capture. Sitting in a living room in her Queens condo listening to her play and sing was better than anything I paid admission for that weekend. That alone was the most touching and memorable thing the whole trip.

A trail that ends in skyscrapers

Central Park

We'd been in the park about two minutes when I turned and saw the picture. A trail, curving away through the trees — and at the end of it, instead of a lake or a big old tree or a granite face, a wall of high-rises. Brick and glass and steel, right there at the end of the path.

That's when I understood why this park matters so much. In a national park, the trail delivers you deeper into the wild. Here it delivers you straight back into the largest concrete jungle in America, and somehow that's the point — 843 acres of real, breathing nature wedged into the middle of all of it.

We wandered from Bethesda Terrace up past the Alice in Wonderland statue, which has been climbed by so many kids since 1959 that parts of it are polished to a shine. Beach volleyball courts. Remote-controlled sailboats gliding around the pond at Conservatory Water. Rowboats bumping into each other on the lake. Vendors everywhere — fruit, coffee, art, all of it.

The Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art · Fifth Avenue

The Met reminded me enormously of the British Museum — same scale, same feeling of standing in front of an impossible amount of stuff. You could spend days in there and still shortchange it. We gave our time to the musical instruments, the arms and armor, and the medieval galleries, and left a hundred other wings unopened.

And then the gift shop got me. I found a magnolia necklace — beautiful on, and it's a magnolia, so that was already a done deal — and it turns out it's modeled on the Magnolia Vase in the Met's own collection. That vase was the centerpiece of Tiffany & Co.'s display at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the design is a whole map of the country: the form borrowed from Pueblo pottery, Toltec motifs on the handles, pinecones for the North and East, magnolias for the South and West, cacti for the Southwest, and goldenrod worked in American-mined gold to stand for the whole thing. I bought a flower and came home with a national road trip. Fitting.

Six slices

Dinner was the obligatory and non-negotiable New York pizza. Tom came back with six slices, all different, and we split every one of them. The buffalo chicken took it, which I'm told is a controversial pick in this city, and I stand by it. Washed down with a beer from a Brooklyn brewery.

Monday

Worked all morning, closed the laptop, flew home. That's the deal with this life — the office comes with you, and it doesn't care that you were standing in the Great Hall at Ellis Island forty-eight hours ago.