Nosebleed Seats

As I mentioned in the last post we were treated to an outstanding vantage point for the New Year’s Eve celebration in New York City. In this case the nosebleed seats and the luxury suite were one and the same. We were in the penthouse on the 39th floor of our building. This unit is about equal to four apartment spaces, two on the penthouse level connected by a stairway to an equal area on the floor below. The lower level has the master bedroom and two guest bedrooms while the top floor is an open plan living space and kitchen with the outdoor deck area that runs the entire west side of our building. She had totally gutted the place about eight years ago and when she did furnished the unit with top of the line throughout and much of it was custom made. It truly looked like a magazine cover story. A funny story about the unit is that the previous occupants were The New Kids On The Block and we were told that the word had gotten out and the building’s doormen had to constantly keep vigil for young girls trying to sneak into the building.

One of two seating areas

The foyer and hallway are to the right and our NYE champagne and homemade cookies were there to greet us.

On the deck, outside looking in.

Looking north to Central Park. There was still some blizzard snow left from a week earlier.

New Year's Eve 2011

I don’t think anyone needs an explanation of the relationship of Times Square and New Year’s Eve. Those of you who have visited us have seen our proximity to the ball drop area and the official clock or if you will, “The Crossroads of the World”. So it is hard for us not to think of New Year’s Eve practically every day.

Plan A: Watching from the street.

Our apartment entrance is only a few dozen feet away from a straight shot view of the drop from 7th Avenue but our apartment is not on the 7th Avenue side. So while we could get a great view of the crowd and hear all of the action, we would not be able to see the event itself from our windows. Neither of us is too crazy about crowds let alone being in a crowd of a million. They expected to cordon off our cross street around 6PM with barricades and check points. From that point forward you cannot leave the secure area and return, you are stuck. There are no restrooms available and no drinking allowed. That option did not appeal to us very much. REJECTED.

Plan B: Watching Central Park fireworks from our roof.

At midnight there is also a huge fireworks display at Central Park. This lasts more than twenty minutes and is put on by the most famous fireworks family/company in the world. The Grucci Family has been in the business since 1850 and contracts for most major displays worldwide and everything in New York City. This sounded like a better idea as we could go to our rooftop on the 39th floor with no problems. Wine, warmth, and restroom, at the apartment. Perfect. But then on Thursday we got a notice from the building management that the roof was off limits due to safety concerns and it would be strictly monitored. THWARTED.

Plan C: Begging for balcony space on 7th Avenue.

The week before New Year’s Eve I composed and printed a short note asking if someone with an apartment on the west side with a balcony might not let an extra couple into their home for ten minutes near midnight. Toni strongly discouraged this idea as a futile waste of time but we posted it on the laundry room bulletin board anyway. There was no response from any of the 36 balconied apartment dwellers and on Thursday Toni gave up and took it down. FAILED.

We were now out of plans and resigned to simply throwing open a window as midnight approached and enjoy being on the fringe of the big event. Then, at nearly 4:30PM we received an unbelievable phone call. The caller was a neighbor in the building. She had seen our note in the laundry room and invited us to share her view for the evening. She was not having a party, we were her only guests. She also happened to live in the penthouse on the 39th floor! We arrived promptly at 11:30 and the door was open. She greeted us and after introducing ourselves she opened a bottle of champagne and we were offered her own homemade Holiday cookies. We were needless to say wide eyed and practically in tears at our great luck. Her balcony extends the entire length of the 7th Avenue side of the building with outstanding views of both Times Square AND Central Park. SUCCESS.

I am including some photos and a video. The video requires some explanation. My memory card filled up before the finale but I found a great video, the second one below, of just the finale up close.

The apartment itself is worthy of a separate post so that will be next time. It goes without saying that it will be impossible to top this New Year’s celebration.

 MY VIDEO

SEE THE FIREWORKS FINALE BELOW OR HERE

Fifteenth Visitors and Visitor 1.4

We finished 2010 with one last group of visitors from Kansas City. Five of my cousins arrived on Wednesday to attend the first Pinstripe Bowl held at the new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx pitting hometown favorites, Kansas State Wildcats, against Syracuse. Included in the group was Cousin Brent who returned for his fourth time with us in nine months. He just might have pulled ahead for good with this trip. It seems that nearly all of my cousins are K-State alumni. In addition to Brent we had Doug, Paul, Brian, and Matt. Counting myself we had five branches of the family represented.

We met up at Heartland Brewery which is near Rockefeller Center and roughly half way between our apartment and their hotel. There was a bit of wait but it flew by as we reunited in the cramped area between the bar and the hostess area. We did our best to stay out of the way of the wait staff and managers but the restaurant was packed with Holiday tourists. The seven of us were finally seated and it was worth the wait as we had managed to get an ideal secluded and roomy booth in the back out of harm’s way. The conversation was wild and loud as you might expect.

After dinner the guys all wanted to see our place so we came back for more drinks, music, and laughter. We also went up to the rooftop for a brief after dark view of some of the skyline and Central Park. Later we said our goodbyes and they headed out for a nightcap on their way back to their hotel.

The game was exciting (we watched from home) with the touchdowns going back and forth. Syracuse would score and K-State would come right back to tie and so on until late when a controversial play and a controversial penalty finally secured the win for Syracuse 36-34. There is no joy in JoCo.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE PHOTOS

The Blizzard of December 2010

I first started overhearing chatter about the upcoming storm on Christmas day. People were citing snowfall predictions of 15 and 18 inches. I thought surely these were exaggerations. But the next day it all came through as promised. Flurries started early with the first light of morning. The wind blew the flakes horizontally and we watched the pedestrians from our 15th floor windows and wondered what was being accomplished with umbrellas in this situation. Toni quickly made the “now or never” decision and quickly got into her most formidable winter gear incorporating a few items from my collection and headed out to the grocery store before it got any worse. Good move. Our first Nor'easter had begun.

Views from our apartment

The storm intensified all day long and well into the night. Once it hit its stride it did not let up. At around seven in the evening I only counted about a dozen pedestrians but by eleven o’clock the streets had become a playground of sorts. The numbers kept growing as tourists from the neighboring hotels poured into the streets to play in the snow and push cabs and cars through the ridges left at the cross street intersections by the plows. There were lots of people posing on 7th Avenue and the camera flashing was nearly constant. I found out from later news reports that many of them were from countries around the world and had never seen snow in their lives.
Buses stopped running by 8:30 and the airports shut down as well eventually canceling over 4,000 flights. The pressure center of the storm was so low that it was equivalent to a category 3 hurricane. There was lots of thunder and lightning as well. The official snowfall measurement in Central Park topped 20 inches making this the fifth highest 24 hour snowfall total since recordkeeping started in the 1870s and only six inches shy of the all time record.

Today there are only ridges of snow lining the curbs to remind us of what took place.

Tomorrow is the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium and they are hurrying up to remove the snow, something they have never had to be concerned with in the past. They expect 40 degrees at kickoff.

Santacon 2010

I mentioned in my last post that our friends had an interesting encounter with a group of Santas where they had stopped for lunch. Throughout the day we kept seeing large groups of Santas and mini-skirted Mrs. Santa as well. There were more Santas later when we stopped for a nightcap. I honestly didn’t think much about it and just figured much of it was street performers posing for photos with kids for tips. After all there were a lot of Mickey Mouses, Elmos, etc. all over town as well.
I later discovered that this was in fact an organized, or not so organized, event called Santacon.

They say not to call it a pub crawl but as far as I can determine that is exactly what it is.

This is a very short video of the start up at Central Park's Bethesda Fountain.



Thousands of Santas and Elves meet up, donate food, and then split up to totally engulf the sidewalks and bars of Manhattan spreading good cheer.

Fourteenth Visitors

The whole group in our lobby

click the photos to see full screen

Last weekend we had yet another group of visitors. There were two factions, Fred and Mahvash flew in from Chicago while Thom and Kay came from Kansas City. They met up at their hotel near 38th and 10th Avenue Friday afternoon. Once settled they found their way through Times Square and east to Bryant Park where they shopped some of the temporary Christmas stores set up around the skating rink. This park is totally transformed for the season. The rest of the year there is a huge lawn area in the middle of the park. They take the sod out and install the rink. Most of the rest of the park is devoted to the small shops made of plexiglass sheets. They look a lot more substantial than it sounds.

From there they turned north to our apartment. We hadn’t seen these couples for nine months so there were big bear hugs all around. They took a quick tour of the apartment followed by wines and beers. The girls went to Famous Original Ray’s Pizza around the corner on 7th Avenue and got a couple of large pies, New York style of course. This is not to be confused with other similarly named pizza restaurants. Read this linked article AND watch the Seinfeld video below to fully appreciate this.

After dinner we took a quick tour around Midtown. It was dark and really cold but we were fortified with pizza and alcohol. We went along the edge of Central Park and then down Fifth Avenue to see the high end retailers all decked out for the holidays, outrageous lights on the buildings and even more outrageous display windows. We continued south to Rockefeller Plaza just in time to catch the Saks Snowflake and Bubble animation. From there it was back home for a quick warm up. Our guests had been up since 4 AM so we called it a night.






Saturday evening we all met at Katz’s Deli in East Village for the concert event that brought the Prellbergs to New York. We caught up on the day’s events over pastrami, pickles, and fries. Earlier they had taken the Staten Island Ferry and followed that with lunch that wound up with them doing shots with a bunch of Santa’s at a bar. Just some of the odd things that seem to happen in Manhattan.





We went around the corner to the Rockwood Music Hall 2 to stake out our territory for the general admission show. We snagged the last seats left at the bar. The floor quickly filled up with the standing room only crowd. We were all there to see one of only five shows on Elliott Murphy’s mini-tour. He plays in the US very little and I think it has been years since he has done so with a full band. Murphy is a little known rocker who has been releasing albums since 1973’s Aquashow. He is originally from the Long Island and New Jersey area but he has been living in France exclusively for several years and his latest recordings have only been released in Europe. But despite focusing his career strictly in Europe he still manages a small but devoted following in America. Everyone loved the show and I think my favorite part was part of the encore that he and the band performed totally unplugged, not even a microphone. He included a few cover songs for his encore with Bob Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell” being the highlight.


We finished up the evening wandering around the Village. We found the “nexus of the universe” made famous in a Seinfeld scene.

Fred at First and First

This clip is extra funny because we now understand the Ray’s Pizza joke. From there we continued on for a little nightcap at a bar on Third Avenue called the Village Pour House. It is a sports bar with 100 varieties of beer. We did not realize it that evening but I found out later that it was a KU alumni bar. http://myalumnibar.com/kansas-village-pourhouse/ There are so many transplants here that most major schools have some bar in NYC that has become associated with their university. Now the two Jayhawks’ stickers we saw randomly pasted on the exterior make sense.

Sunday started out with a pretty heavy rain. This had been forecast so we planned to go to the MoMA with Thom and Kay. It turned out that Fred and Mahvash’s flight back to Chicago was canceled due to snow so they quickly put plans together to stay another night and go Murphy’s next show in Larchmont to the north about 30 minutes. Thom and Kay’s flight was delayed a few hours and the rain cleared so the plans were changed to take advantage of this turn. We took a nice long walk through Central Park followed by a leisurely dinner at the French restaurant across the street. The flight delays gave us some welcome bonus time with our longtime friends and I was happy they were able to spend it with us instead of stranded at the airport. The extra time did not make the goodbyes any easier though.

Visitor 3.3

Toni and Barb with their unplanned coordinated outfits.

Last week we had another flurry of guests. First up was Barb who was here on business for her third time since we have been in New York. She dropped by the apartment for some wonderful omelets that Toni prepared. I think that is one of her favorite recipes.

The dinner party at The Beacon hosted by Jason at the head.

Later Barb had a dinner planned with some business associates at a restaurant that was just around the corner from us. The owner of the company was nice enough to also invite Toni and me to come along with Barb. The restaurant is called The Beacon Restaurant & Grill. It is a rather large place by New York standards but yet has a variety of totally private spaces which are mostly achieved with a complicated series of lofts and staircases which gives the feeling of being in an M.C. Escher print.

We had a wonderful dinner and Barb’s friend, Jason, generously picked up our tab. Even though it was getting late and it was bitterly cold out we went for a tour of some of the store window Christmas displays on Fifth Avenue. From there we went to Rockefeller Plaza to see the tree and the light show animation at Saks but we got there too late and all the lights were turned off. We had no idea they shut down at 11:30. So much for the city that never sleeps.

Bergdorf Goodman window on Fifth Ave