A quiet day is on the cards. There has been a lot of pounding the streets lately and we need a "downday". Well, it didn't quite work out that way. Not fully anyway. We still wander...
We have a very lazy morning, book our Megabus transport to Boston after New York and book a car there waiting for us. The plan is not to stay in Boston now but stay there around 4th July for American independence celebrations. It makes sense to pick a car up from there as we can then drop it off in the same location and go to our hostel accommodation. So, we will have a car travelling in the northeast of the US for a little more than a month.
We do not get out until 9.30am. First stop will be Ferrara in Little Italy, that cafe, cake and gelato shop on Grand Street that we briefly visited yesterday as part of our walking tour. We will go there for coffee, cake/gelato and to write postcards. And to chill too.
We decide to take Mulberry Street all the way from Worth Street. This is one of our local crossings, 6 streets amalgamate into one, from left straight ahead an in a clockwise order those are Bowery Street, East Broadway, Oliver Street / St James Place, Park Row, Worth Street where the photo below is taken from and Mott Street.
As you can imagine some mornings are bedlam here and they have a few NYPD traffic cops there to direct it all.
The first stretch of Mulberry Street is dedicated to the funeral business. Here are some guys carelessly loading artificial flowers onto a wagon. The frame on the rooftop of the car is used to display a photo of the "dear departed".
We liked the name of this funeral business.
Perhaps it is appropriate to have funeral businesses on Mulberry Street as the street later becomes the Main Street of Little Italy, and it was on this street that we heard of a mafia murder yesterday.
Columbus Park is across the other side of Mulberry Street and it is one of those places that if you walked into it you would think that you are in Hong kong or China. Music, gambling, smoking, chatting / yelling, Tai Chi. OK, we love it.
Here is Di with a statue of Sun Yat-sen, considered the founding father of the Republic of China. He led an unprising that overthrew 5,000 years of imperial dynasty reign in China. They refer to his as the father of democracy in China, which is ironic given the later years of communism. He still seems to be a hero among Chinese around the world as we have seen his statue in various places in Asia as well.
After a few blocks north, we are in Little Italy and Grand Street and outside our first destination for the day.
Yum, great coffee and great gelato (as you would expect with 120+ years of experience).
The Napoleon cake wasn't too bad either (an understatement)
A couple of location shots from Ferrara...yes the cabinet is full of pastries and cakes. Di drooled.
After an hour or so at Ferrara, writing postcards and chatting to the waitress who is not Italian at all but from southern Brazil (and lives in Astoria in Queens, the same place where lovely Mary in Chester comes from), we move on, loosely wandering north with no particular destination in mind.
We mail the postcards and then pass some marketing material from a new TV series featuring Dolph... I mean... Dolph... (who is Swedish and whose real name is Hans by the way...)... Why?
Lock art? Political messages on the locks but looked good though.
We pass the lovely St Patrick's Old Cathedral on Mott Street where we stop to have a look inside. There is an old catholic cemetery around the cathedral and it all looks very nice. The cemetery doesn't seem to have any new burials (maybe some old Dons are here) but they have re-opened the catacombs below the church and now take reservations for local catholics who want their remains preserved here.
Bicycle art?
Right of a sudden we end up in an area with German inscriptions on the buildings. This one had an ornate carving at the top and suggested it was something it used to be a German American Protection Company.
Yes, Di got a tear in her eye from all this "germaness". This is Manhattan's first free public library (or Freie Bibliothek as it says on the building)
Then we encounter the Polish section on 2nd Avenue in East Village and nothing could prevent Di from going into this Polish deli. She came out with very nice rye bread and very nice Polish garlic salami.
OK, it did smell fantastic and it means we change our dinner plans tonight - eat the remaining nice cheese, the garlic salami and bread, washed down with beer.
Almost next door was this old style barber shop. If anybody would remember (perhaps a bit of a push), Hans got a really crappy haircut in Pennsylvania Dutch country and this guy below, Yusef, looked like he knew what he was doing.
This is the result of Yusef's haircutting and Hans is posing satisfied outside the barber shop. All for $14, complimentary eyebrow trim included. Di gives Hans "2 thumbs up".
Across the road we see this little restaurant. We cross 2nd Avenue to have a closer look.
Yep, that looks good, particularly Bigos, which we have not tried before. So we decide to have lunch...
We both ordered Bigos with potato dumplings (or knödel as it is called in German, don't know the Polish word). Lots and lots of sauerkraut with bits of pork, sausage and speck. Very nice and very filling. Yep, Di looks satisfied although she could not finish it all (weak?)
Very nice atmosphere at Little Poland. Behind Hans are 2 older black guys who are very well spoken and talk business. It looked like they were settled in for a long time. Polish Mama is doing the cooking and we bet that she had done it for many many decades. Everything is made on the premises according to our waitress.
After lunch, we walk (waddle!) a couple of more blocks north to Stuvyesant Park. Nice little park, but hardly anybody there despite being lunchtime on a Wednesday. Oh well, their loss.
Note the missing leg / artificial leg of Pete (not the guy to the left). Peter Stuyvesant was the Dutch Director General responsible for ceding New Nertherlands (now New York) to England in 1664. We found out later he lost his leg as a result of canonball fire and was nicknamed "old silver leg" because the wood was held together with silver bands.
Yep, almost empty in Stuvyesant Park, except for this lovely lady...
We then turn around and walk south on 1st Avenue and then home to Henry Street. Here are a couple of local photos from Chinatown. Sell, sell, sell...
We have often been up and down the stretch of road below, on the east side of Manhattan Bridge as you can't easily get across on the other side as there is big apartment block there. It warrants a photo...
Home around 2.30pm and we have a break before going across the street to O'Henrys Laundromat again for some washing. As chaotic there as ever. Love it. It is efficient though, their big machines do the trick in a very short time and we easily load machines, leave it for 30 minutes, return and load dryers, leave it for 30 minutes and its all done.
Rain is predicted so we made no plans for later in the day and we find ourselves enjoying some reading and relaxing. We do one more useful thing - book a hotel for a few nights towards Cape Cod for when we leave New York. We also, sadly?, map out what we may do for the rest of our time in New York City. Yep, we have more than 2 more weeks here, but we feel already that we are running out of time.
Lazy dinner, bread, wine, stinky cheese and Polish salami.
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