W18 between 5th and 6th - The Evil Eye

I walked up to the counter ready to pay for my ham and egg sandwich. The woman behind the counter was focused on her newspaper. I quickly glanced at the article and notice a picture of Pope Benedict. She looks up at me.

"I don't like the current Pope."
"Oh. OK. I'm not catholic so I don't really know. Did he do something?"
"Just look at his picture. Pope John Paul looked so calm and saintly. Benedict looks like he's hiding something."

She rings up my order. "It's the Evil Eye!" she blurts.
I laugh and walk out the door.

Amsterdam and W78th - Pay Attention!

My fiance and I were walking in the Upper West Side to go to the GreenFlea Market. We were engrossed in discussing the kitchen island counter material for our new apartment when I noticed in the corner of my eye a woman with red hair coming towards me with her two kids. The person and I both stopped for a split second like you always do in a crowd trying to figure out which way that person is going to walk. Well, we did a little dance and walked around each other. I never bothered to look up and continued my all important conversation about how our kitchen island was to be constructed. A few seconds later, my fiance interrupted me and whispered...

"You know you just almost walked into Cynthia Nixon."
I need to learn to pay attention to my surroundings more.

Uptown 1 Train - Compulsion

The train was already crowded when it pulled into Times Square and I wasn't quite willing to give up my much coveted seat just yet. Dozens of commuters got on, jostled around and settled down. As the train pulled out of the station, the woman standing in front of me pulls out what I initially thought was an old hard bound dictionary. She props the book open on her hip while leaning against the pole for additional support. She looked quite uncomfortable so I gave her my seat.

When she sat down, I commented on the size of the book she was reading. The book was the complete works of Shakespeare. She explained she was going to watch The Tempest next week and decided to re-read it again. This was the only copy she had in her collection. I asked her if she had much more to read. "Oh, I finished that the other day. Now I'm reading the rest of his work before I watch the play."

She packed the massive book away as we pulled into Lincoln Center station. She offered me my seat back and hauled the book off the train.

5th Ave at 18th - Frequent Fliers

A new ad agency from Texas recently opened upstairs. Since then, I've noticed a huge increase of dogs in the building. One day, as I was heading out to lunch, I shared the elevator with two executives and their two dogs. I joked if there was a dog park upstairs. Turns out, when the ad agency was starting up, the president loved having his dogs nearby and encouraged his employees to bring their pets to work. The company took off and this perk was expanded accordingly with the company flying the dogs out with their employees and arranging for them to stay with their owners wherever they go.

The two executives and their dogs flew in from Houston a few days ago. This weekend, they will all be flying to the newly opened San Francisco office.

The London office opens in a few months.

W26 and West Side Highway - The Dockworkers (Part 2)

Three workers climb down to the river level ten feet below onto a raft tied to the dock. This "raft" was really a single plank of old growth wood maybe 3 feet wide, 12 feet long and 9 inches thick. It had to be at least 50 years old and, just like the workers themselves, had taken a beating from the elements and dangers of working between this threshold of land and water. It still serves its purpose flawlessly despite being deeply scarred and worn.

The three workers walk randomly up and down the raft to inspect the steel brackets they had installed the day before. Each dockworker's step causes the raft and his coworkers to bounce precariously up and down though each continues their inspection as if they were on solid ground, a skill undoubtedly gained through decades of experience. "Everyone falls in at some point," the foreman said. "It sucks." The orange life vests do serve a purpose.

"How's it look?" the foreman yells down. A voice emanating from somewhere under the dock replies, "This will last a hundred years." The foreman orders everyone back on the dock and radios the crane operator to prepare the bridge for installation. The crane's engine roars to life and the damp river air is infused with the industrial musk of exhaust, oil and metal.

Within a few minutes, the ton of steel that is our bridge hovers above the gap between us and our boats. It starts to pour rain. The bridge amplifies the sound of drops hitting its metal structure seemingly announcing to all of us that it will soon come to be.


--------

The time is 6:45AM. The City continues to glow in an orange mist. The bridge is in place softly clanging as it rises and falls in rhythm with the waves of the river. The floodlights are off and the boathouse is once again shrouded in darkness. The men are back on the barge quietly preparing to undock. The distant sounds of trailer trucks downshifting along the West Side Highway start to increase as the land dwellers wake with the rising sun.

Bleecker and Lafayette - The Fortune Cookie

In order to capture a city, first capture the heart of the people.
Lucky Numbers: 2, 21, 30, 33, 40, 50

W26 and West Side Highway - The Dockworkers (Part 1)

It's ten minutes before six in the morning and I head to the Pier 66 Boathouse as I do every Tuesday and Thursday to go rowing with my crew. They say the City never sleeps. In fact, it takes a much deserved nap between 4 and 5:30 in the morning. The streetlights are reflecting off the wet streets intensifying the orange glow of artificially lit asphalt.

I enter the dark boathouse and am startled by one of my teammates. She looks distressed which is a sharp contrast to her usual upbeat demeanor. "We have a problem," she says. We walk to the end of the boathouse and open the roll-up door that leads to the dock and our boats. The darkness of the boathouse quickly fills with a blinding light as the door cranks opens. As my eyes adjust to the brightness, I see our boats sitting on the floating dock in their usual position but the 20 foot bridge leading to it is nowhere to be seen.

My eyes gravitate towards the source of the blinding light. Several flood lamps are pointed in my direction from a floating barge next to the dock. Above this barge was our bridge, a few thousand pounds of steel softly swaying in the breeze suspended 30 feet up from the boom of a crane.


One by one, grizzled men in flannel shirts and bright orange life jackets emerge from the end of the barge. We explain to them our predicament and they are very accommodating, promising us they would have the bridge in place in a half hour. We decide to stand back and settle in for the show.

...to be continued...