We walked over to 34th & 7th to catch the 1 up to 103rd street. Once off the train at 103rd street we walked over to 2664 Broadway (bet. 101st & 102nd streets) to the Broadway Restaurant where I know from prior experience the food is good and decently priced and the service is top notch - old school mom and pop type of place all the way. I had a cheeseburger...it's a shocker, I know, but that's what I had. Lovely Ms. J. had herself a ham and cheese omlet with potatoes and we each got a lemonade Snapple which neither of us cared for much. But the food was delicious. A short while later we were out on the street heading north on Broadway. It was now around 11:00am and it was really starting to get warm. Every time you stepped into a shady area it felt 10 degrees cooler, so we tried to walk on the shady parts of the sidewalk when we could.
We worked our way over to Amsterdam Avenue at Cathedral Parkway to have a peek at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine which I've always found impressive...and large.
Cathedral of St. John the Divine, NYC.
Detail above main doorway.
A few blocks further south on Amsterdam we had a look at where I've stayed on my previous three trips to NYC, the Hostel International on 103rd Street. It's a beautiful old building worth having a look at. Then we walked east a few blocks over to Central Park and found a bench under a shady tree and sat for a while as the temperature around us soared as the midday sun glared directly overhead. After resting for a bit we began walking south on Central Park West, staying under the shadows of the large trees at the edge of the park. We worked our way down to 72nd street and stopped to take a few photos of the Dakota and the Strawberry Fields memorial inside the park for a friend of ours who had requested we take them for him. So we did...
The Dakota, at Central Park West and 72nd Street. Former home of John Lennon. Site of his December 1980 assassination.
Shhhh. It's a quiet zone. The Strawberry Fields Memorial to John Lennon just inside Central Park at West 72nd Street.
The hippie with the guitar was NOT following the rules! The sign CLEARLY stated: NO musical instruments. We thought about calling the NYPD and having them kick his hippie ass. OK, no, we really didn't do that. But we thought about it though.
We kept walking down to the southern edge of the park where we spotted these signs attatched to some fences near the edge of the park. As anyone who has been keeping up with the always fascinating news out of Central Park as of late knows, the trees are killing people and the raccoons want to.
We stopped in and got a cold water at the corner of Central Park West and South at Columbus Circle. As we were about to cross the street to begin walking back to the hotel (and did I mention it was hot out yet? I did? OK.) we spotted another pedicab driver. I yelled out to him, "Hey, How much to go down to 32nd and Broadway?" He thought about it and offered $35.00 as his price. I said we'd take it. A second later we were off, in the back of a NYC pedicab through the early afternoon traffic. Despite the 99* heat, the dude pedaled his ass off and seemed no worse for wear by the time we arrived back at our hotel about 20 minutes later. We paid the agreed upon price of $35 and we threw in a $10 tip for his hard work on such a miserably hot afternoon.
It felt very nice to get out of the heat and up to our room for a bit. We were waiting to receive a phone call from a friend to make some dinner arrangements. The call was eventually received and a place to meet was agreed upon. A litle while later we stepped back outside and hopped the R down to Union Square. We got off and walked back up to 16th street, over to the "Chat 'N' Chew" located at 10 East 16th Street. Our friend arrived shortly after we did and we all agreed that this would indeed be a good place to sit and have a bite to eat and get to know each other a bit more.
The sign on the street for the Chat 'N' Chew at 10 East 16th Street.
The conversation flowed freely. We discussed jobs, music, books and blogs. We discussed New York City and vacations. The food came and we conversed our way through our meal, the food getting a bit cold as we talked more than ate our food. We finaly finished up about an hour and a half after we started, paid the bill and walked out, back into the warm summer evening.
Our friend had to get home, so we said farewell and went our seperate ways, he back uptown, and The Gorgeous One and I headed back south, over to St. Marks. Along the way we spotted several Jim Power mosaics and stopped to take a few photos...
A little further east on St. Marks we spotted this funny naked Santa Claus artwork in the window of Nino's Pizza. We walked for a bit by Tompkins Square Park then headed south, on a long, long walk down to City Hall Park to get on the Pedestrian Bridge to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. It took us quite some time to get down there, the sun long having gone down by the time we got to the bridge, which was around 10:00pm. It was still hot. And it was humid as hell. It had made for an extremely punishing walk and we decided we would NOT walk all the way across the bridge after all, just half way, rest and take a few photos and then walk back across. Which is what we did...
Time: about 10:30pm. Temperature: Around 90*. Why did we walk all the way down here again?
City Hall viewed from the East on the Brookln Bridge at night.
We saw this on our way back across the bridge. It made us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. OK, maybe not.
So we took a few photos and chugged down the last of the now warm Gatorades we'd been drinking and headed back across the bridge to hop the subway at City Hall Park back up to the hotel and to call it a day. The newspapers and TV are saying over 100* for the following day. Hot fun in the sumertime indeed...
...to be continued.
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