In which Sid and Doris muse on the very, very big differences between the country and the city.
Sid and Doris are Londoners born and bred, although theirs is a cross-border marriage as Sid was raised south of the river and Doris north. They lived in central London until 2014, when Doris decided that small-town life would make a change, and they now live in Salisbury (Eng), known as Smallsbury to its friends because of the high likelihood of meeting someone you know in the high street.
This trip up the Eastern coast of America has not featured any cities – an evening arrival and dawn departure from Miami not really counting – and so your duo opted to spend the last two nights of this trip in Manhattan. They picked the utterly appropriate Hotel Chelsea, which is fabled for the “creative nobles” who lived there, optionally paying their rent by donation some appropriate works. It reopened in 2022 as a hotel although alas the new owners declined to take a blog post as payment for our stay.
It is very very fabulous indeed, it has been restored with exactly the right amount of shabby chic and it still has long-term tenants living there, one of whom was a tiny old lady just across the hall from the room allocated to S&D. There is honestly no point in my trying to write an entry about the building when Mr Wiki has done a fantastic job here, please come back when you are ready, and meanwhile I will try to paste some photos in… and yes! we were given one of those rooms with a twirly wirly iron balcony at the front, it was really perfect.
Like the Scranton hotel, and several other places on our route, the Hotel Chelsea is on the National Register of Historic Places although as you can only search this if you know the county that the building is in, this is unlikely to detain you for long. For your information, New York’s Hotel Chelsea is in New York County which is in New York State and so the city could perhaps be called New York New York New York so good they named it thrice.
The Hotel Chelsea is in the Chelsea district of (NY)3 which is described as being “bohemian”. This weekend it is the venue of the Pride Parade and so the streets are full of fantastically dressed people, creating a certain feeling of being in one of the more creative bar scenes in Star Wars. The Guardian recently ran an article on why populists hate cities, and certainly the feeling of enthusiastic tolerance here contrasts very oddly with the Farmers Want To Close Borders poster we saw only about 100 miles away.
Overnight there is an odd, prolonged squeal of tyres outside, not followed at all by the sound of sirens. In the morning it turns out that two perfect doughnuts have been executed outside our balcony which gives a mild feeling of unpoliced lawlessness.
Today’s mission is to MidTown where we have been advised to go to the Frick Collection – an art collection in a house, which Sid and Doris, avid visitors to Sir John Soames’ house in London, are looking forward to a lot. Alas so are many other people, all better organised than S&D and so already possessing timed tickets. Thwarted, the Zoo beckons. It is a boiling hot day and the animal enclosures have been designed to give them plenty of options of shady places, all of which they have gratefully taken advantage of. After seeing No Snow Monkeys, No Red Pandas, No Snow Leopards and a trio of completely sparko bears, the ticket was feeling a bit bad VFM (Value For Money) although the penguins were great fun and helpfully chilly. The tropical house was quite exceedingly tropical but rewarded your red-faced duo with a completely fearless bird who helpfully posed next to the correct page of the bird book, also a very determined tortoise.
Oh, and a carefully-organised snake.
Central Park seems to have embraced the Star Wars theme since we were last here by teleporting in some very strange thin tall buildings. To put this picture in perspective, the Essex House Hotel is 40 stories tall and you can just see the sign on top of its roof peeking over the trees between buildings 2 and 3.
Back to the Land of Strange But Happy People via a prolonged visit to the “42nd St Ballroom”, a kinetic sculpture in the Port Authority Bus Station. Nerds attract nerds, and after about half an hour an interested group is observing that one bit of the machine never gets used, due to an incorrect alignment spotted by an eagle-eyed Sid. Doris drags him away before he can get his Sonic Screwdriver out and fix it.
Forget about endowing libraries, Doris harbours a secret plan to buy one of these for Salisbury – apparently one the size/complexity of 42nd St would cost around $250K which seems very good VFM given the amount of fun it delivers.
Although a subsequent visit to the Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) has generated another idea. Karl Sims has created an illustration of different types of fluid flow based on a live camera pointed at the observer. If you wave a hand you can stir the fluid around your image. It is entrancing and has a possibly beneficial side-effect of being completely silent. Apparently it runs on a home-spec PC although with a super-large screen. I would have taken more photos but a queue of small children was building up behind me, despite my best efforts to bat them out of the way.
MoMath is great fun although not terribly educational, which suited us very well.
That’s it! Time to go home now and catch up on Cathedral stuff, about which more later…