Out and About, and a Bat

“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.”

― Tom Wolfe

Arrived back in Corning yesterday after driving from the Lower East Side to Binghamton, picking up the airplane, and flying it for the sixteen minute trip to KELM. Josiah the airplane mechanic was very excited to debrief all the things they'd fixed, which took enough time that I walked into our home FBO after landing just as Peg was walking in from driving the same distance.

This morning started with an unwelcome visitor, a bat flying frenetically around the condo. I adjourned to our bedroom to read the paper with the door closed while Dean and Slane stalked the terrified flying rabies mouse. An hour later it was gone, but I'm confident we'll be seeing each other again. I keep a broom close at hand, the closest I can come to an antiaircraft battery.

Our hot weekend in Manhattan extended into Monday--I handled one work call around lunchtime, after which P and I headed uptown to the Museum of the City of New York, a massive Greek revival structure on 5th Avenue facing Central Park. The museum featured an entire floor detailing the British occupation of New York for pretty much the entire American Revolution, and then some, after the redcoats ran Washington out of the city and its environs in a series of battles in 1776. The coolest part of that display was a video essay showing the sites of the various battles around town as they look today--usually a stone with an inscription surrounded by rough tenement housing, and sometimes no monument at all.

On the second floor, the museum displayed an amazing series of murals created over a century ago for the children's ward of a charity hospital just a few doors down from our place. The art was rescued after the building was condemned and shortly before its demolition over forty years ago. The murals depict the characters from Alice in Wonderland visiting the City, flying past the Empire State Building, fishing for swordfish in the harbor, and chatting with the lions guarding the entrance to the New York Public Library.

My favorite portrayed Alice and friends trying to cram their way onto a crowded subway car.

Plus ca change . . .

On the ground floor a massive scale model of all five boroughs filled a room.

Some guy literally just built this by himself over a period of years. Each structure, park, and street is accurate in every detail.

Here's our neighborhood, with NYU and Washington Square on the left edge about a third of the way up. Sione's not there because he created the model two decades ago, and our building wasn't constructed until 2019.

Afterward, we decided to visit the Central Park Boat House for tapas and a cocktail. We'd been there on a warm May weekend and found a line out the door. This was a Monday, however, and we hoped to avoid a repeat of that mob scene.

We weren't disappointed.

While couples rowed on the lake outside, we sipped a rather fru fru concoction called the Boat House Cocktail and feasted on gazpacho. Peg was inspired, and I'm thinking that will be on the menu in Florida next week.

Our trip home was marred by bad directions from the Metro app, taking us to the wrong subway station just in time for a deluge to trap us under some of Manhattan's ubiquitous scaffolding for a spell. The rain finally let up, and we found a station where the Number 6 train took us to Bleecker Street and then back to 7C.

I also noticed over the weekend that some wag was having fun with the "Messiah is Here" message plastered onto the backs of most of the crosswalk signs in the LES and Greenwich Village.

There's still a substantial orthodox Jewish presence in Lower Manhattan (we saw our first Hasidic schizophrenic ranting on the sidewalk as we were leaving yesterday), and followers of this crosswalk guy show up in a minibus on Fourth Street in front of the law school, looking for candidates who might be Jewish and in need of evangelizing. They even tried to start a conversation with me, until I assured them I was a good Episcopalian at which point they wished me a nice day and set me free.

Anyway, their Messiah waves down at you from most busy street corners, a constant reminder of, well, these people's belief that an old Jewish guy is the current Messiah.

But alas, this part of town also has more than its share of free thinkers, wags, and sexual adventurers. One of them has taken to slapping his or her own sticker over the one placed there by the Judaic crowd.

In case you're wondering, every traffic signal in our part of town is covered in stickers, and no one bothers them as long as they're not blocking the actual illuminated part. There are ads for self-published novels, pop up vintage clothing shops, and now the sexual orientation of the Chosen One of Elohim. Great stuff.