Things To Do

As a wiseman recently said:

Understand America? You can't understand the world without understanding the history of New York. It's not the only city one should study, of course. I mean, there's Berlin. (And on this site in 1932, chalk-faced Communists premiered a musical devoted to exposing the horrors of the international rubber trade.") But I like the island Manhattan. Order me a Berlin, but make it an Irving.

I've lived no more than 30 miles from NYC my entire life and like most native NYers that I know (including LIers like myself and Westchesterites and throw in New Jeresyites also) I've never been to the top of the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. And most regrettably, I'll never see the view from the top of the Twin Towers.

I don't know why exactly this is so, but it is. It's one of the those things that shows up on chain emails like "50 Ways to Tell You're From Long Island." From my experience, if you didn't do it as a class trip when you were a kid, you're not going to make the effort as an adult. As a kid from the suburbs, once you're old enough to go into the city by yourself (or sneak in without parental consent) you're too busy roaming around the Village looking for vintage clothes that will make you cooler back home or trying to find places to get hammered and hook up.

I know that everyone offers advice about what "You Absolutely Have To Do When You're In New York," but let me offer one more that you may not have heard of. My wife and I are taking our parents to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. When we were dating my wife lived on the LES and we went to the museum a few years ago. Last Father's Day our gift to our dads was a trip to the museum, which we're finally making good on today.

If you look at the "Virtual Tour," the ones we saw last time and are seeing again today are the renovated (retrovated?) apartments of an 1870s German family and another as an Italian family from 1913.

The late 1800s New York in my head is the one where Teddy Roosevelt is the Chief of Police, the Brooklyn Bridge is being built...OK to be perfectly honest it's the NY of Caleb Carr's The Alienist.

But it's the Italian family that will obviously hit closer to home because all of my grandparents lived on the LES at that exact moment. Both of my grandmothers were born here, but my grandfathers came to this country as toddlers with widowed mothers. I suppose that this is as close as I'll come to seeing what that life was like for them. Well, that and the DeNiro scenes in The Godfather II, but as far as I'm aware without all the killing.

The tour is an hour and you'll probably have to order your tickets in advance but if you're here and looking for a history lesson, this is worth your time.