The Neighborhood

There really isn’t much to report this week, mostly just working and errands and dealing with day to day issues that come up regardless where you live. We did squeeze in an hour walk through parts of Central Park, parts that we hadn’t seen before. There are so many meandering paths there I don’t think I will ever get it memorized. We also found another “keeper” restaurant called Hummus Kitchen that we liked enough to prompt Toni to write a review at Yelp. I have to agree with her.

Saturday we went to the American Folk Art Museum. This is a rather small museum right next to the MoMA that is really easy to miss as it has a rather small “store front” that almost looks like it is a side door to the MoMA. We were there specifically to the see the Henry Darger exhibit which runs through September 19th. We learned about Darger from a documentary several years ago. He lived a reclusive life in a one room apartment in Chicago where compulsively created art and wrote fantasy stories on an old typewriter. He worked as a janitor and had no friends. His creations were not known until after he died in 1973 and his apartment was being cleaned out. They found hundreds of works of art and several books he had written, one book was over 15,000 pages typed and single spaced. He is probably the best known of the so-called outsider artist world, that is artists who have created a large body of quality work without any formal art training, totally self taught.

For dinner that evening we went to Maison. This is a French restaurant right across from our apartment on Seventh Avenue. I have been reluctant to try it as we have not had the best experiences with the eateries right in our neighborhood. We are right in the midst of several large hotels and I think with all the built in traffic they aren’t worried about locals and repeat business. But Maison had just set up a rather large outdoor seating area a week before and the weather was so perfect we just could not resist. We got a great table where we could see Times Square down the street. I got a poached chicken crepe and Toni ordered a ratatouille crepe. Mine was so good that I was tempted to lick the plate. The kicker is this place is open twenty-four hours a day!! A great French restaurant that is never closed. We will be back.

Sunday was a pretty lazy day. In the afternoon Toni went off for a manicure/pedicure and I headed the other way for a quick stop at Home Depot. It was getting late and I hadn’t had lunch yet so I intended to grab something quick from the cart just outside our entrance. However, by the time I got to the street I promptly forgot all about it and turned the opposite direction and I was three blocks away by the time I remembered. I didn’t really feel like taking the time to stop at a restaurant, hmmm…. Then suddenly I saw that Madison Avenue was closed off for yet another street festival. I had no clue what the occasion was but there were blocks and blocks of booths and a fourth of them were all food. Saved. I was bad and got an Italian sausage sandwich that was smothered in grilled onions. It was delicious with just enough kick to keep it interesting. My mouth is watering again as I type this.

On Monday Toni had a late afternoon dentist appointment. The office is just a couple of blocks away, a short walk. On her way back she came down 53rd Street which happens to be the location of David Letterman’s stage door. She saw a gaggle of photographers and went up to see who their target was. It turned out to be Kyra Sedgwick, the star of “The Closer”. When she got home to tell me about she was all in a dither. The strange coincidence is that our first celebrity sighting when we were still in the hotel was an actor from the ensemble cast of this same show.