Taking a bigger bite out of the Apple
and some highlights from a fabulous week in incomparable New York
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been to New York City.
And no matter how often I see the sweeping skyline, so iconic, so familiar, it’s as if I’m seeing it for the first time. Immortalized in song, seared in my mind through countless images, both moving and still, when the city come to life before my eyes, I fall in love all over again.
But like all lifelong love affairs, it’s easy to fall into a routine, to take for granted the magic that drew you in the first place. We go back again and again to the old familiar haunts, eat at the same favourite restaurants. Feeling like a local has a charm all its own, but when you lose the ability to see through fresh eyes, a special place can lose some of its lustre.
It was time to put our tourist hats back on and rekindle our New York romance.
“Unite the world in friendship. One person at a time.”
—Lynn Brooks, Founder, Big Apple Greeter
Lynn Brooks was an avid traveler and native New Yorker. As she travelled the world, she realized that many people yearned to visit New York, but were overwhelmed by its size, scale and sheer volume. That’s when Brooks got the idea to start Big Apple Greeter in 1992.
Made up of nearly 300 local volunteers who all share a love and passion for New York, the greeters now accompany about 5,000 visitors a year to more than 100 neighborhoods in all five boroughs. The idea has proved so popular and enduring that free greeter programs now exist in more than 130 cities worldwide.
What better way to see New York through new eyes than those of a born and bred New Yorker? And that’s how we met 97-year-old Arnold Strauch, a Big Apple Greeter since the very beginning, and how we got to explore Harlem in a wonderfully intimate and personal way.
Throughout the five and a half hours we spent with Arnold, we learned about the Great Migration, which brought six million Black Americans from the rural South to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West beginning in the early part of the 20th century. We took in the many beautiful churches, some of them former synagogues, a reminder of the neighbourhood’s previous predominantly Jewish community.
We visited the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, one of the New York Public Library’s renowned research libraries, which is devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences. If you will be in New York before the end of November, do try to see the Center’s powerful exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which explores the impact of the US prison system on contemporary visual art, and the joy and hope that can spring from deep despair.
We visited the beautiful brownstones on Strivers Row, the colourful crafts market, and Richard Rodger’s house.
Most of all, we got to know Arnold, about the military career that saw him travel to France, Germany and the Philippines during World War II when he was barely 20, and about his work as a textile engineer in the days when America still had a thriving domestic textile manufacturing industry. He’s been an intrepid traveler, and counts the Scandinavian countries as amongst his favourites. And he is clearly someone who creates long lasting and meaningful relationships, some formed through his work as a greeter. That night Arnold was going to do a Zoom call with a couple he had guided when they visited New York more than 25 years before.
You can be sure that when we next go to New York, Arnold will be amongst the first people we will call.
Taking a bigger bite out of the Apple
Say New York City to just about anybody who doesn’t live there and it’s inevitably Manhattan that they think of. And why not? It’s the home of the Empire State Building, One World Trade Center, Grand Central Station. You can stare dreamily into Tiffany’s windows, gawk at the lights of Broadway (please go see Good Night, Oscar if you can!), try to flag a famous yellow taxi.
But beyond the outer edges of Central Park, and across a bridge or two, whole other worlds await. This past week, we ventured to discover some of them. The Bronx is home to what many consider to be the real Little Italy, and so we visited Arthur Avenue for a great Italian lunch, followed by a magical few hours at the wonderful New York Botanical Garden and capping the day by taking in our first Yankees game.
We headed to Brooklyn on Wednesday with a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and a visit to the Brooklyn Museum, where we saw an incredible African fashion exhibit, an appropriate bookend to our Harlem visit earlier in the week. We visited a favourite spot, the Lincoln Center, but this time instead of watching an opera in rarified air, we watched Moonstruck for free at the Lincoln Plaza on Friday night with 2400 other movie fans. We eschewed a touristy cruise around the Statue of Liberty and took the Staten Island Ferry instead, another free activity that attracts everyone from families and tourists to locals getting from point A to B.
It seems impossible that we did so much in such a short period of time. But that valuable change in perspective—treating a familiar destination as something completely new—made this week feel like we had gone to New York for the very first time. And while we did still go to some of our favourite places, this time around there was much that was new and undiscovered.
Perhaps that is part of Arnold’s secret: staying young and relevant comes when we continually open ourselves to new vistas, new people, new experiences. It’s a practice worth pursuing.
Sounds fantastic - what a trip!!
No wonder you never tire of New York. A multi faceted city with so many possibilities and adventures awaiting to be discovered.