Saturday Stroll

I didn't have any plans on Saturday until the evening, so as with most of my adventures I picked a starting-off point and just sort of went where the day took me. These type of wandering days usually end up to be some of my very favorite, and I always encounter something unexpected and wonderful. This is one of the things I like most about New York — no matter what I end up doing or where I end up going I'm never, ever bored.

I stared the day off by taking the 1 train to the Franklin stop in TriBeCa. My intent was to find one of the last Banksy pieces from his time here in October that hasn't been completely destroyed. I did find it (the 9/11 one on Staple Street) but the flower was long gone and half of it was tagged over. Staple Street is a tiny, almost alley-like street that I definitely would have missed had I not been specifically looking for it. Downtown Manhattan is an area that I'm not super familiar with, so it's always fun to explore.

I walked over to the Hudson River and watched the ice floes float downstream for a while before walking through the rest of Nelson A. Rockefeller Park. I always manage to sort of forget that Manhattan is an island and essentially a coastal town. I adore the Hudson River under normal circumstances, but when it's covered in gorgeous ice I could stare at it for hours.

I stopped at the Shake Shack on Murray Street for lunch, where I was actually able to get a seat — the perks of going to the downtown location relatively early (by New York standards, anyway) on a weekend. The next stop on my tentative list was the West Village, so I decided to walk up Greenwich Street.

Ever since I found out about the privately-owned house at 121 Greenwich Street, I had kept it in my mind to check out if I was ever in the area. It was originally on the Upper East Side, but was moved to its current location in 1967 (I'm apparently into moveable houses lately) and is definitely a strange sight in the middle of the West Village. They even have a cute little yard — something that I (living in Ohio) never would have thought would seem like a novelty.

I love discovering little odd city tidbits like this little house and reading the interesting stories behind them. It would be so neat to be able to own something so special one day, but I think I chose the wrong profession if I could ever hope to be able to afford it — special doesn't come cheap in New York.

When I realized that I was right by Bethune Street, my morbid curiosity got the best of me and I decided to walk by Phillip Seymour Hoffman's apartment building. I'm still sort of in shock about his death. I always considered him to be my male Meryl Streep — he was just superb in everything he did. I hugely regret not seeing him on stage in Death of Salesman last year, not because I didn't want to but because I just could not get a ticket.

It was sad and sort of eerie walking through his neighborhood and standing outside of the apartment where he died. There were flowers, cards, drawings and candles on either side of the doorway and I would be lying if I said I didn't get a little choked up reading all of the mournful notes from fans.

I wasn't meeting my friends (at the Guggenheim) until 5:30, so I spent the rest of my day browsing the dollar section at the Strand. I hadn't been in a while so I found a lot of great books, including: The Westing Game, which I always buy when it's cheap to give out as a gift, a novel about publishing in 1950s New York, Sweeney Todd, and nonfiction books on the plague, the Skull and Bones Society and lobsters. My taste in books is just as varied as it is incredibly off-putting and probably a bit alarming to strangers sitting beside me on the bus.

It was pretty much a perfectly ordinary, yet wonderful New York Saturday that ended with me paying a dollar for admission to one of the most famous museums in the world (more on that later) — in New York even the ordinary is sometimes so much more than that.