Summer Fun: The Nano-Honeymoon

After dropping the kids off at Ma and Gong's for their first sleepover--and our first weekend alone since their births 6 years and 50 weeks ago! (we called it the nano-honeymoon because we never had one, unless you count our decade without children!)--we headed to the Lower East Side.  We had a long list of possibilities, from bialys to knishes but settled on doughnuts for breakfast.

Great place to start the day-- Doughnut Plant !

Ah, Doughnut Plant.  They really rival the doughnut place in Westport for the best doughnuts ever.  They get extra points for unique flavors (and for spelling doughnut with "dough").  Mama devoured the luscious Coconut Cream and I was rapturous over the Orange Blossom Cashew Doughseeds (holes).  We both also liked the others we got--lavender, creme brulee, and chocolate black out (hmm, I feel like there was one more).  We got there too late to try the Rose one, which I know I would have loved.

Lowe East Side Tenement Museum--not air-conditioned.

The temperature was close to 90F mid-morning when we started our guided tour of the Lower East Side Tenement museum, which is NOT air-conditioned.  Yes, it gave us the real tenement experience.  Almost, because there were still electric fans and we weren't wearing long dresses with corsets.  Still, even on such a bright day, the unlit entranceway was forboding and the back room of each tenement was dark and airless.  The three rooms in each "apartment"--four to a floor--were smaller than my living room and probably held many more people than my family of four, including employees who worked in tenement sweatshops, i.e. the parlor, for 60+ hours a week.  We were on the "Sweatshop Workers" tour and heard all about long work-weeks with no access to the downstairs privvies because it caused such delays (all workers shared the chamber pot!), the effects of the Triangle Shirt Waist factory fire, the implications of the six-day work week in factories for Jewish families and the younger generations who became more "Americanized."  It was all quite sobering, the grinding poverty and miserable conditions.  But many got out of the tenements--and descendants of the original families at 97 Orchard are still in the 5 boroughs.

I had just, purposefully, read a wonderful book, 97 Orchard:  An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families by Jane Ziegelman, which investigates the foodways of immigrants and tenement families in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  The book was fascinating not only for the original recipes but also for its explications of similarities (they all seemed to eat herring in some form or another) and differences (how the Italians were very poor but dedicated to imported Italian foods while the Irish didn't have much dedication to their own indigenous foodways; also, the different relationships to alcohol) of the successive waves of foreigners.  It also provides a mini-history on immigration in this country, at least on the East Coast.  While my family immigrated here from Germany as well as French Canada (very few French actually immigrated to the US, except some of those in Canada, proportionally a very small number), ours is not the urban immigrant story.  No one went through Ellis Island--most came before that--and they all headed to the rural South--Tennessee, Louisiana, and, of course, Texas--to be farmers, ministers, and the like.  Still, I recognized specific German food traditions--dumplings and noodles, especially.  And, as a former New Yorker, I connected with this aspect of the city's history, though my own emigration--with money, English-language skills, a home, resources and connections--was so much easier.

Colorful yarn at the Green Market of Union Square

After our tour, we left the "Downstairs" aspect of our "Upstairs, Downstairs" weekend--though, really, I doubt many of those tenement girls or boys became servants on the Upper East Side, except perhaps the most menial.  We headed to Union Square, where we wandered through the tempting Green Market.  I admired some beautiful yarn and lots of produce but in the end only got a thirst-quenching citrus-mint iced-tea sweetened with maple syrup.  We had lunch at Chat 'N Chew, a comfort-food diner where we'd eaten years ago when I worked off 13th Street nearby.  We shared an amazing macaroni and cheese and house salad; Mama also had refreshing gazpacho.  And an icy Boylan's Black Cherry.

The staircase of the Rubin Museum of (Tibetan) Art

After checking into our hotel, leaving our luggage and having a brief respite, we went to the Rubin Museum of Art, a museum devoted to the art of the Himalayas.  I love the staircase, with its Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired spiral under a beautiful dome.  You have to always note the staircases in museums--they are multivalent, raising the pedestrian both literally and figuratively off the mundane ground into the high realm of art and often the main architectural statement.  The Met (and many institutions in classical buildings) does it twice--once off 5th Ave and then again up out of the lobby to the centrally-placed European art department.  MOMA does it with escalators.  The Guggenheim very famously makes the twisting ramp the actual galleries.  The Rubin has the same spiral shape, more oval than circular, but there are stairs not a ramp.

I was even more impressed with the holdings and the layout of the museum.  Even with some undergrad credits in Asian art, I appreciated the Gateway to Himalayan art galleries that elucidated iconography (Buddha, Arhats, Boddhisattva, Wraithful Deities, Tantric Deities, plus their hand gestures and accoutrement), media (lost-wax casting, scroll painting), and religious function.  There was also a first-rate handout summarizing all of it for when we went to the other floors.  I especially liked the shrine room set up to evoke a wealthy Tibetan's own shrine, with numerous statues, offerings, and the sounds of chants.  I was unaccountably moved to recite the phrases of metta as I stood there, never having been so touched in an art museum.  I was also captivated by the digital representation of the kind of visualization Tibetan monks do with mandalas.  An animated short showed a palace in brightly-colored three dimensions and the path to successive floors until you reached the top, which in the two-dimensional mandala is the center.  Fascinating.

We also liked the installation of sacred texts, with the rectangular Tibetan sutras and their wooden book covers.  They're rectangular because they were originally printed on long palm leaves.  Interestingly, there were Korans, Bibles, and other important texts on display to compare and contrast the physical treatment of sacred texts across cultures.  (Mind you, it's not often that a Bible is a "token" in an art exhibition.  Usually, it's the other way, with one vitrine dedicated to non-Western/non-Christian.)

I don't have a photograph to represent our afternoon activity:  tea at Lady Mendl's, which is inside the Inn at Irving Place, where we were staying.  We showered first--mercy, did I mention it was just crazy hot?--and put on our fancy clothes.  And really just relished the entire experience, all five courses of it!  From an amuse bouche of butternut squash tartlet to various tea sandwiches (the usual egg, cucumber, turkey and cranberry, and salmon), from delicate butter scones with very authentic clotted cream and jam to a slice of signature Lady Mendl crepe cake, to assorted cookies (Eh, mediocre.  Cookies at these teas always are) and a chocolate-dipped strawberry.  I had a pot of Marbury rose tea (Marbury was the last name of Lady Mendl's female lover of many years . . . before Lady Mendl married Lord Mendl!).  We talked about all the times we've had tea together, beginning at the Palmer House in Chicago, then tea all over England (Leeds, York, Marlborough, Salisbury, Fortnum & Mason's in London, which doesn't include my tea with Lambeth at the beautiful manor), Silver Tips in Tarrytown, Alice's Tea Cup, and the British Shoppe in Madison.  It's one of our favorite things to do and Lady Mendl's was a high point.

In the kids' section at the Strand

We waited until sundown and a drop in temperatures below 90F before heading out again to the Strand, our current favorite bookstore.  What's not to like about 18 miles of books?  Except maybe not being able to peruse even a fraction of it in a single visit.  We spent a lot of time in our favorite sections--Buddhism, cookbooks, children's, manga/graphic novels, audiobooks--and ended up with three heavy bags of purchases, most of them half price.

New veg fast food in the city--a great snack!

After another respite, we headed out for a late-night snack, our fifth of the day (including an unremarkable breakfast in CT before we left).  Maoz is a European import with outlets mainly in big cities (and Austin, TX, I think).  The main food is a falafel and eggplant pita, with hummus, with all the salads you can stuff into it, like marinated beets, tabouleh, chickpeas, marinated carrots, marinated broccoli and cauliflower) plus garlic sauce and tahini, with a side of Belgian-esque fries (seemed like steak fries to me) and a mint iced tea (or was it lemon?).  We reveled in ours while watching the action in Union Square.  I wished they'd had Maoz when I lived in NYC.  Mmmmm.

Our home-away-from-home--the Inn at Irving Place

We'd been in and out of our hotel several times throughout Saturday and ended the evening just enjoying the space.  The boutique hotel has 11 rooms in two early 19th-century mansions, which are now joined and decorated in what I lovingly called shabby Victorian chic.  Downstairs is Lady Mendl's tearoom, as well as the little lobby, which was redolent with jasmine and other scents from these Trapp fragrances (Bob's Flower Shop, actually).  We didn't play chess but did borrow some books, one on tea houses and the other on women in art.  Yep, books.  Our room--the O'Henry--also had books, real ones, including O'Henry's stories.  

The Lobby/Parlor

Our room!!

Anyway, it was absolutely lovely, totally relaxing and comfortable, enveloping us in peace and tranquility, all with an historic flair.  Just the opposite of the Tenement museum, though pretty much concurrent with it.  Talk about haves and have nots.  

Sunday Chocolate Brunch @ Max Brenner's

We luxuriated in the room until midmorning, with a breakfast of almond and chocolate pastries and more tea (this time I tried lavender mint and Mama had peony, neither as great at the night before).  We then browsed Forbidden Planet and headed for brunch (yes, we squeezed in as many meals as we could).  Mmmm, chocolate brunch at Max Brenner's.  We started with beer batter onion rings with Ranch-cocoa dressing (no you couldn't taste it) along with a hazelnut milkshake and dark chocolate granita.  Mama had a skillet breakfast (eggs, onions, mushrooms, cheese, potatoes, spinach etc) and a side of baguette with milk and white chocolate dipping sauces.  I had dark and white chocolate blintzes with milk chocolate sauce.

With that, we were all done.  With breakfast, with our hotel, with our weekend in the city.  Re-entry into the real world of parenting and work was messy, but much of the rest and relaxation of the weekend (along with the jasmine scent because I bought some spray!) have stayed with us.