It’s boolchit hot, man. Dog Day hot. Do the Right Thing hot. Africa hot. You name it. The city is roasting, man. A regular schvitz-a-thon.

This is why air-conditioning was invented.  Stay inside if you can. Boy, what a day to play hooky and go to the movies. If you’ve got to be out, find a way to cool-out and drink a ton of water.

[Photo Credit: Nivek]

Living at the end of the line alters your relationship with the subway. You rely on it’s presence and emptiness in ways that would not be appropriate in the middle of the city. There is also a level of accumulated filth at the end of the line that probably does not apply there either.

On weekday mornings, after the train empties out, somebody takes to the train with a mop and bucket and slathers chlorine on the floors. The odor is stiff and intense and often, but not always, worse than the filth. At rush hour, the trains are moving in and out too quickly for all of the cars to receive this treatment. So you can weave through the waiting train searching for a car that doesn’t overwhelm you one way or the other.

I am a New Yorker and as such I prefer to walk wherever I’m going. You know, if it’s possible. I had a dinner last night on 48th St and 2nd Ave. I had to run an errand at Columbus Circle first. I hoofed it. No other method of transportation occurred to me, though I’m sure there were smart ways to use crosstown buses to make it a little easier and a little cooler. I enjoy walking.

I understand that Los Angeles and the surrounding beaches and sprawl is not built for walking. Still, when I went to the Dodger game on June 26th, my older brother Chris and I figured we’d put that notion to the test. We drove to the game very early, parked the car and walked out of the stadium towards Phillippe the Original.

It seemed very straightforward, the only tricky part was crossing the 110. The walking map / GPS on my phone had it pegged as a 25 minute walk. The phone is lucky it was not smashed on the sidewalk.

Maybe if you were one of the Elves from Lord of The Rings, it would have been a 25 minute walk. But my family moves at Dwarf or Hobbit-speed, especially in the heat.

Did I forget to mention my wife was pushing a double stroller? Disaster. You can imagine that an area not expecting pedestrians would skimp on sidewalks. There’s maybe 50 feet of sidewalk around Dodger Stadium that can accomodate the girth of the doublewide stroller. The road ahead was so treacherous that we had to send a scout 100 yards in advance in order to map where we could walk.

The sandwich at Phillippes is good, and probably deserves a Tasters Cherce, but the lines go on and on and noboby eles has planned to walk back – ever. So as we ate, the spectre of the return journey hung  above us.

But as with any disaster, it’s all about the people you’re with and how they react. We couldn’t stop laughing at ourselves, for thinking like New Yorkers and getting ourselves in this mess. My wife put a gob of their mustard on her sandwich before realizing how hot it was. We cracked up again. We missed the first pitch, and the first inning, but we caught the other eight and didn’t leave early.

Good thing, because the Dodgers won in a walkoff. We even hung around so the kids could run the bases. As we were leaving, my older son said, “When I grow up, I’m going to play baseball like those guys.” I think we were the last non-employees to leave Dodger Stadium. Great day and a walk I’ll probably never forget.

Map Courtesy of Bob Timmermann @ The Baseball Toaster

Man, it’s hot today. The kind of day you want to escape from New York and find a place to swim. Or just hit an air conditioned movie theater and hang out all day.

It was already steamy early this morning on the way to work.  When I got off the subway I held the door open for a family running to get on. They were tourists. The husband was the last one on and he thanked me. I think he was Spanish which made me think of my uncle in Belgium who has been in Spain on his vacation for the past few weeks.

Dude sent me this picture.

Now, that’s what I’m talkin’ bout.

The wife tells me that one day she’d like to go see the fireworks on the Fourth of July. I say, “Sure, Dear,” and hope she doesn’t ask again until July 5th next year. When I think of going to watch the fireworks I think, “Who do I know that might have a good view?” Because the idea of sitting around for hours in a huge crowd, at the end of a hot, sticky day, well, that just ain’t my idea of fun, no matter how cool the light show is. It’s my New Yorker’s instinct to stay away from crowds at all costs.

Maybe I should just suck it up. Nah. I just need to find a spot, get an angle, work some magic.

After all, nothing like making the wife a heppy ket, is there?

Speaking of old New York, I was on Columbus Avenue last night with my sister and my cousin, an 18-year-old Belgian girl who arrived in New York two days ago. It’s her first trip to the States so we went out for a burger last night. She is a good kid, shy, but speaks English pretty well. We strolled up Columbus after dinner, past 81st Street where my grandparents used to live. Most of the neighborhood has changed, but here is one spot, between 82nd and 83rd, that remains. It was almost arresting to see it there, a piece of my childhood in tact.

The New Yorker movie theater (and bookstore), The Regency and the Metro, M.H. Lamston’s,  Morris Brothers, Big Apple Comics, Funny Business, Applause, Shelter, Broadway Bay, The Saloon, Paulson’s, O’Neal’s Ballon. Hell, Tower Records. That’s a quick jog down memory lane of places I used to go to on the Upper West Side when I was growing up. Long gone. And now that H&H Bagels is closed for good, some Upper West Siders feel that the old neighborhood is done, reports Alexandra Schwartz in the Times:

You can find dog accessories and artisanal soaps and Coach handbags, or trawl for oxidized silver pendants and kilt pins at Barney’s Co-op. You can withdraw cash on every corner from the bank branch of your choice. You can load up on chewing gum and razor blades at a host of Duane Reades. You can treat yourself to a perfectly mediocre manicure.

But some of us want more. We want to revel in a neighborhood brunch tradition that has nothing to do with endless waits and haughty hostesses and glasses of orange juice whose prices defy the logic of supply and demand — a tradition that means fresh bagels and whitefish with onions over the newspaper in the living room. When we’re wandering with a hangover down the silent stretch of Broadway at 3 in the morning and the need for an “everything bagel” is stronger even than the need for water and sleep, what are we supposed to do without H & H’s round-the-clock bakery at 80th Street?

Big Nick’s Burger and Pizza Joint, I think of you and your root-beer-stained tables with trepidation. The smell of grease from your nonstop griddles billows out toward 77th Street 24 hours a day, seven days a week — a siren scent taunting gymgoers and health food nuts. You’re an unrepentant West Side institution, and that means that you, bubele, must be in the cross hairs, too.

Of course, it’s only natural for neighborhoods to evolve. My generation of Upper West Siders grew up during the Clinton years in a scrubbed-up iteration of the place our parents knew. Unthreatened by the muggings that were routine a decade earlier, we claimed the identity handed down to us: a certain shabbiness, along with a good dose of brains and a scrappy sense of local pride. Few of us noticed that the neighborhood’s personality had come under assault long before we started to take the subway by ourselves, when Shakespeare & Company and Eeyore’s Books shut their doors after Barnes & Noble took over the old Schrafft’s building at 82nd Street.

I remember when Amsterdam Avenue was a scary place. And parts of Columbus and Broadway too. I knew which sides of the street to walk down and which ones to avoid back in the 1980s. I still have some family on the Upper West Side, but the neighborhood I knew as a kid is a memory. It’s safer now, well-heeled, less shabby. A different place. The old neighborhood has been gone for more than a minute.

[Photo Credit: Monika Graff, Marilyn K Yee, William Sauro, Bob Glass and James Estrin for the New York Times]

Emma hipped me to this coolness: the average color of the New York City sky, updated every five minutes.

Last Friday evening I saw these kids on the subway as I headed downtown.

Later that night, I saw the same crew again, this time on an uptown train.

Man, that’s the second time in a few weeks that I’ve run into people in both directions on the train. Weird but cool.

It’s Your Density

I was born in New York. I grew up outside the city. Since I moved back over a decade ago, I’ve lived in four different neighborhoods around Manhattan. So naturally when I think of great bagels, I think of … New Jersey.

This is an opinion I usually keep to myself. But I think most bagels in New York aren’t anything special. Going on reputation alone, you’d think you could get a good bagel, like a good slice, just about anywhere in New York. Ever since the puff-pastry style bagel overwhelmed the marketplace, it’s been difficult to enjoy a dense, crunchy, chewy bagel in the city.

If I had to sacrifce either the thin, crunchy exterior or the dense, chewy center, I’d lose the crunch. Where I grew un in Bergen County New Jersey, you can still get both.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. In New York, the bagel is such a menu-icon, every place has got to offer you a bagel. From diners to delis. So that eats away business from the bagel-specific shops. There’s not one within walking distance of my current apartment.

I thought Tal Bagels on 86th street did an OK job of keeping their bagels de-flated, and I liked that they answered “no” if you asked them to toast it. At least eight years ago they answered that way. Now they probably serve you a bagel that looks like a beach ball and will gladly slide it on a belt toaster for you.

Sometimes a place closes and you feel nothing, like the girl in “A Chorus Line.” That’s the way it is for me and H&H Bagels. I’ve known the store my entire life. It opened the year after I was born and was located on the southwest corner of 80th Street and Broadway just a few blocks from where my grandparents lived. Next time you watch “Night Shift,” you can see the old store front in the background as Henry Winkler and Shelley Long cross the street. That was a few years before H&H blew up and became a big deal, “the” place for bagels.

H&H was famous for it’s fat, doughy bagels, extravagant prices, and for its no frills (you could buy butter or cream cheese there but they wouldn’t put it on the bagel for you). It was a yuppie phenomenon. The bagels were tasty, but they were bloated and overrated. And again, way too expensive (these days one cost $1.40). If you preferred a meaty bagel, though, it was heaven.

But it’s also a neighborhood place so many Upper West Siders are upset that H&H is closing without ceremony. I appreciate that even if I don’t share their sense of loss. What I will miss is the smell. You walked past the place and the air smelled comforting and inviting.

[photo credit: highlowfooddrink]

Man, I miss our pal Todd Drew. I think about him often and feel as if he’s still with us.

Here is a picture taken last week from his box seats at Yankee Stadium.

It was a treat to ride in a cab as a kid. The best was when we hailed one of those plump checker cabs, the kinds with the fold-out seats in the back. My brother, sister, and I would fight to claim those two seats.

Checker cabs were the bomb.

[Picture by Joel Zimmer]

Girl at the bus stop in the Bronx last night. She was hardly wearing anything. I’m not a father but I felt, for a brief moment, what a father, or mother, must feel like when they see their daughter start to grow up too fast, too soon.

The wife shops inside, the husband waits patiently outside. The marriage works.

“Women are beautiful. They are really beautiful.” –Bill Cosby.

Men are not subtle when we check out women. We stare. Most of us are developed enough not to drool.  Some start yapping and there is a fine line between appreciating a woman’s beauty and being a pig. Women are cool, though. You know a woman has checked you out when you catch them just looking away. That’s not usually the case when they look at each other. Then, they are thorough, eye-balling one another from head-to-toe, deliberately, sometimes with admiration, other times with envy or god knows what else.

They are really  beautiful.

A young mother and her son were fighting on the train this morning. The mother sat near me with an infant strapped into a harness that pressed into her bosom. She was heavyset with blond hair and a pug nose. Her son, a toddler, got up from his seat and stood at the pole. I hadn’t been paying attention but I noticed them when he turned around the pole and the mother grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back next to her.

“You don’t say that to me, do you understand?” she said.

He stood up and reached for the pole, just a few feet away. She grabbed him by the ear this time, pulled him back. He got up again and she grabbed his arm and yanked him. The boy was strong, had round cheeks and green eyes.

“Stop beating me,” he said.

An older woman sitting across from them looked up and smiled.

The mother laughed. “You think I’m beating you?”

He stood up again and she grabbed his arm and twisted.

“Stop beating me.”

This tug of war went on for a while.

“I’m not so terrible,” he said.

He continued to get up and she’d pulled him back. Then she said, “When you get to school I’m telling your teacher you are in a time out for the whole day. Time out when you get home. No remote control.”

He started to cry. He sat down. Another woman sitting across from them smiled too.

I couldn’t concentrate on the newspaper, kept reading the same sentence over and over.

Now, the boy was sobbing. “Please don’t tell my teacher.” He grabbed his mother.

“Oh, now you are going to hug me? Maybe you’ll think before you talk to me like that again.”

“Please don’t tell my teacher.”

“You are almost four-years-old, stop crying.”

He settled down after awhile but I couldn’t go back to reading. When they got off the train a few stops later I realized that I wasn’t breathing.

[Photo Credit: Masao Gozu]

The wife and I met friends for dinner in Manhattan on Saturday night. On our way downtown, we were sitting on the subway when I gave my seat up to an older woman. She was with a friend and we all got to talking. They were on their way to Church. I gave them the names of a couple of restaurants. We had a nice exchange. Shirley and Phyllis.

We stopped by Pearl River and then had dinner in a loud, expensive restaurant where the food was so good it reminded me that cooking is more than a craft but an art. It was drizzling when we finished and walked uptown to the Stand. Then we said good night to our pals and headed west to catch the subway. When the train reached 34th street, Shirley and Phyllis got on.

What are the odds? Not only that we’d get on the same train but the same car.

I called out to one of them and before they got off they gave us their phone numbers and invited us to church.

We talked about how strange it was that we ran into each other again and Shirley said, “God is Good.” Then and Phyllis got off.

I don’t know if I would have put it that way but I agreed with the sentiment. Then I looked up and the woman standing in front of us was wearing this shirt:

New Yorkers cherish our space because it is hard to come by. Happy weekend.

My father was a schvitzer. Schvitz is a Yiddish word for sweat. His mother was a schvitzer too (but only on one side of her face, it was the strangest thing). I remember calling the old man during the summer months. “How you doin’, Pop?”

“Wet,” he’ say, or “Damp,” or “Moist.”  Sometimes he’d just say, in his best Zero Mostel:  “HOT.”

I thought of the great family schvitzer last night watching Alfredo Aceves on TV. I have never seen a baseball player sweat like that. The bill of his cap was water-logged after a few batters, thick drops of perspiration falling in his face. Aceves was in trouble in the sixth inning, but then Brett Gardner froze at third on a passed ball, Derek Jeter to hit into a double play. Aceves didn’t stop sweating but he saved the rest of the bullpen and finished the game.

Hey Aceves, this schvitz’s for you.

[Photo Credit: Weegee]