I was on the East Coast for a math conference, so I decided to take the weekend to visit one of my friends who recently moved to NYC. The weather was awful – it was 7 degrees Fahrenheit on the last day I was there. Needless to say, I didn’t do too many touristy things. However, I did walk around Central Park, visit Grand Central, see Washington Square Park, walk through Greenwich Village, walk on the Highline Park (a long elevated park near the water made from a converted old subway area), see a Broadway show, and visit the Museum of Modern Art.
Some notes on what I enjoyed: Grand Central was definitely worth a short visit. The architecture is beautiful, and if you stand on the stairs and watch the people milling about below, it is surprisingly aesthetically pleasing and almost soothing in a way. I thought Greenwich Village was really beautiful and so nice to walk through – my friend said it was one of her favorite neighborhoods. Greenwich Village is also the home of the Stonewall Inn, the site of the Stonewall riots. The show we saw on Broadway was Come From Away, which I highly, highly recommend. It tells the story of Gander, a small town in Newfoundland, Canada which took in 7,000 stranded airline passengers in the wake of 9/11. All of the stories in the musical are true stories or very closely based on true stories, and the stories are incredible.
Finally, the MoMA had some seriously famous art that I didn’t expect to see there: Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Dali’s the Persistence of Memory, and Monet’s Water Lilies. Starry Night is much smaller than I expected, and the Persistence of Memory is basically the size of a postage stamp (I’m exaggerating, but it’s definitely tiny). I enjoyed the MoMA’s mix of very recent art as well as art from the late 1800s and early 1900s. I also liked how you can see the entire museum in 1.5 hours.
The rest of this post is simply a list of delicious food that I ate in the East Village. It’s amazing how many bars and restaurants are within a 10-minute walk of wherever you are in the city. They’re all unique and they’re all exceptionally good.
Tompkins Square Bagels: Classic New York bagels delivered with an unholy amount of cream cheese.
Veselka: Delicious Ukrainian pierogies and other Eastern European foods. I got the meat plate, which consisted of 3 pierogies, stuffed cabbage, kielbasa, and your choice of soup. The pierogies were the star of the show, overshadowed only by the sauerkraut soup, which was quite possibly the best thing I ate in New York that weekend.
El Camion Cantina: A solid Mexican restaurant with great food and really strong margaritas! We got the blood orange margs, which were delicious, but you couldn’t taste the blood orange that much.
Maiden Lane: A cool sea-themed bar with excellent cocktails. I had some sort of bourbon-lemon-honey thing that was absolutely delicious.
Empellon Al Pastor: A chill bar with lots of interesting margaritas, including blood orange margaritas where you can actually taste the blood orange!
WanderLiz 