Taking buses everywhere now, instead of riding the crazy trains with the local bat-eating Ozzy Osborne lunatics that now run the streets and subways of New YUCK City, has added hours to my travel time, but it's also forced me to explore neighborhoods that I never really spent a lot of time in. Of all the years I've lived in New York in three different "tours" over the last 25 years, one area I never really spent a lot of time in is the Upper West Side, which may surprise some people. I had one good friend who lived there for many years, but I didn't really get into that neighborhood, or anywhere in Manhattan above 23rd Street, for a really long time. Like many over the last decade and some change, Hell's Kitchen became a destination. And then a few years ago Harlem became a home. The sturdy and adult Upper East Side just south of my former East Harlem residence was a place where my dentist once was and the museums are, and a lot of restaurants that I like. A good neighborhood for jogging along Fifth Avenue. But the UWS was kind of at once a place I felt like I knew well enough (from films and books) but didn't need to really know. I never spent much time there. Some good bookstores, my ex-therapist's office, that was what I went over there for. But now that I have to transfer from the M60 to the M104 to get to my "nice gym" (as opposed to my neighborhood gym), I have fallen in love with this neighborhood. And I have not fallen in love with a New York neighborhood since probably 1999, when a 'wild-child' lover introduced me to the world beyond the obvious attractions of the East Village. Now I'm crushing on the Upper West Side for its diners (I love diners!), it's really good looking and well-dressed people (in a grownup way, as opposed to a rock star/model Soho/LES/West Village way), and it's general sexy intellectual vibe. It's nice to walk around the city and feel relatively safe and not have to look over your shoulder for thugs and lunatics between keeping your eye on the ground for dog crap like I have to live in my new neighborhood, Central Harlem, which was once a really nice part of the storied uptown village. I can't afford to live on the UWS right now, unfortunately, but for me that's one of the things I have never stopped loving about New York: where you live and where you sleep don't have to be the same place, or even anywhere near one another.
No comments:
Post a Comment