on friends and drunken munkeys

a SoHo street with Freedom Tower doing the photobomb

From Freedom Tower, it was time to hit some coffee shops and saunter around the neighborhoods of New York’s innermost borough. There were the much lauded SoHo – the first hip neighborhood of America to be referred to by its first syllables – and the aptly named, cute and quaint West Village, which should not be confused with the utter nightmarish spectacle of East Village. West Village is best known as the home of “the Friends,” where somehow a chef and a waitress had a good enough rent control deal to afford that massive two-bedroom flat that should have cost around $5,000 a month (adjusted for inflation, of course) – every New Yorker thanks God for their dead relatives.

Both of the two neighborhoods we visited were a little more comfortable than Lower Manhattan. Less tourist traffic, more beautiful and cozier buildings, lines of brown houses and rowhomes, with their brass railings and decorated trash cans lining each street. The sun could be felt and seen, since few buildings were over five or six stories, unlike down where the sentinels that patrolled further south or north to Midtown. They were indeed, weird oases, and you do find yourself feeling somewhat like you’re in a village, especially compared to Midtown. If we were to stay in Manhattan again, it would probably be in those neighborhoods.

John's of Times Square, near the Manhattan of Times Square

From there, we met some of my wife’s friends up near Times Square, at an old church converted to a pizzeria. This was the famous John’s of Times Square – New Yorkers and their creative names! I wondered if there was even a John, or was that name summoned from the creative depths of whatever marketing company wreaked their havoc upon that corporation. In Europe, they convert churches to classical music halls, in the US, we convert them to any odd thing – pizzerias, night clubs, loft apartments. At least we haven’t gone Soviet style just yet; the Soviets often converted churches to boxing gyms, I guess they were inspired by the whole Christ coming with the sword bit. John’s’s wasn’t the best pizza, but it was perhaps one of the coolest joints I’ve eaten pizza in since Angelo’s in Denver (another church turned pizzeria). Most of the restaurant is in the central nave, under a great cupola towering high above. There are large stained glass windows surrounding it and a gigantic mural of New York City on the wall. We sat up on the mezzanine level, looking down below at where the altar once was, which was now full of tables and during events served as a dance floor. The wait there can be up to 3 hours, and as one of our friends put it, “It’s pretty normal for a New Yorker to wait three hours. If there’s nothing to wait for, then it can’t be a good restaurant!”

“They don’t take reservations?”

“You gotta get in line, pal!”

I wasn’t sure which was better – Prague’s obsession with reservations, even at bars or coffee shops, or New Yorkers’ obsession with waiting a long time for a pizza. But we lucked out, the big line didn’t happen until after we left.

The last interesting place we hit up for food was in the Upper East End, at an Indian place called the Drunken Munkey. Luckily, this was a place where reservations were in fashion and our friends had a reservation. We got there first and I felt as if I was in the way of everyone – being such a small place, it was impossible not to be in the way, something you’re quite aware of when you’re a big guy like me. Small guys might have an underachievement complex, but big guys have an in-the-way complex. I wasn’t sure what my friend’s girlfriend’s name was, and if the name on the reservation was actually hers, but I ventured to guess it was and took their seat next to the window. “But if someone else comes,” the host warned me, “then you guys will have to wait for another table.” Hopefully it wouldn’t be a three-hour wait. It was cold outside. 

The Drunken Munkey though has some fun décor inside – for the lamps, they were made of munkey statues - along with other pieces of munkey furniture - dressed up like old-school bell boys and the whole thing gave a bit of a vibe as though it were half-way in an Indiana Jones film, full of all the fun racial clichés. But racial clichés aren’t exactly a bad thing when in a restaurant, and my mango chutney held up righteously to the flavor I’ve come to expect living in the States for most of my life. I mean, Aunt Jemima ain’t so bad when you’re stuffing down the pancakes and sausage, folks; or the Redskins when they are having a good season.

A street in the Upper East End, west side of Park

The Upper East End is a weird place to walk around at night. On one side of Park Avenue, towards the park, it’s full of beautiful and elegant walk ups and brownstones, with an occasional brick ten story building squeezed in. On the East side of Park, it looks like the Left Bank of Kiev – gigantic behemoths towering over, what once were tenements with one bathroom to a floor, standing as strong evidence that Capitalism isn’t necessarily the best way to deal with the lower classes. Even the brand new, falling apart post-Soviet construction of Kiev has better living conditions than some of the older tenement housing of New York, and they look about equal in the level of hideousness. But don’t worry, one of these days though, those Upper East End massives are going to get a remodel and be multi-million dollar condos, just you wait. At night though, the buildings there look giant and foreboding, many surrounded by chain link fences, like cell blocks in some futuristic waste land, far from the inspiring and blinding lights of Alicia Keys’s New York.