Village Crawl With Visitor 3.2

Earlier this week our long time friend Barb Roscher arrived in New York for her second visit since we have been here. She was here for a business meeting on Wednesday but she had all day Tuesday free. A return engagement for one night only. We got together early in the afternoon for the start of our self designed Greenwich Village crawl. We grabbed a bus on Fifth Avenue that took us directly to Washington Square Park. We had never been there on a weekday before and as we sort of expected there were no buskers to be seen. We didn’t linger long there as the fountain area was a little toasty from the midday sun. We wound our way over to MacDougal and Bleecker and chose Caffe del Mare for our late lunch. Our server had a charming Jamaican accent and was very accommodating. He rattled off the special which was a choice omelets, fries, adult beverage, salad, and coffee. How could we refuse? We didn’t even bother with the menus. In just a minute we had our wine, bloody mary, and mimosa in hand and the salmon omelets and Eggs Benedict weren’t far behind. From there we headed west to a recent find, Fat Cat. It is a large place in the basement of a building off of 7th Avenue. It is a jazz club and game room. We weren’t expecting any live music on a weekday afternoon but a band was there rehearsing so we lucked out. The place is a mishmash of seating, some booths, some small tables, sofas with coffee tables, and some long cafeteria style tables. All the tables have checker/chess boards or Scrabble boards. Play all you want for $1 per person. The perimeter of the room is lined with at least a half dozen ping pong tables behind netting to keep the balls somewhat confined. Next are eight or so pool tables, a couple of foosball tables, and a couple of shuffleboard games. Like I said it is a big space. We opted for the Scrabble board and the gloves were off. Toni was lagging behind a bit and made a valiant effort to end the game with the word QUOTE. It was close but she still fell a bit short but a most impressive finish. We went on a couple more blocks for serious drinks at a little bar, Cubby Hole, appropriately named. The drinks are cheap and the house even opened up the bar for a round to celebrate the bartender’s birthday. From there we went for a quick and inexpensive dinner at Art Bar around the corner. If you go there be sure to go to the back room for a totally different dining experience. The three of us ate for twenty Dollars including tip!! The bus stop is right outside the door and one pulled up within a minute. By the time we said goodbye to Barb and got home it was after eleven o’clock and we had been on our crawl for about ten hours.




You might recall that we went to the Village on Barb’s first visit as well. We were struggling and bumbling around with a GPS back then and the machine was even having a hard time. The Village is one of several more challenging parts of Manhattan. If you have spent any time here you are no doubt familiar with the famous grid system here. However when you go this far south you encounter streets that predate the grid. In this case there three grids crashing together and they also overlap. As a result you get a lot of odd shaped blocks of every geometric shape you can name and more. You also get intersections with six or more streets radiating out like bicycle spokes. Some east/west streets are numbered but most are not and the ones that are don’t ‘behave’ as they should. For example, 4th Street takes a few bends and winds up intersecting with 10th Street and 12th Street when it should run parallel. So we consider it to be quite an achievement to get around there now without getting lost.