Joshua Bryce Newman

The old saw is, it takes seven years to become a New Yorker. More accurately, I’ve heard it said that you’re a real New Yorker when you don’t just know where everything is, you know what used to be there, too. New York City real estate turns over at a remarkable clip, with stores, restaurants, galleries and bars opening and closing literally every day. So a block you know one year like the back of your hand might indeed be nearly unrecognizable a few years down the line.

When we opened CFNYC’s 26th St location, five years back, we were more than a bit worried about taking space in that neighborhood. Sure, it was a half block from Madison Square Park, central and subway accessible. But it was also kind of an armpit. Would our members feel safe, we wondered, leaving the gym at night after class?

Just after we moved in, Hill Country, a pretty good but very popular BBQ joint, opened across the street. That gave us a navigational landmark nearby. And it lent us a critical mass of people on the street early evening. But otherwise, the block – and the whole neighborhood – remained largely a mess of hair extension boutiques, wholesale import/exporters, and abandoned buildings for the next couple of years.

In the last year or two, though, the whole neighborhood turned. The Ace and NoMad hotels opened around the corner one way; Eataly popped up around the corner the other way. And about six months back, the single block of 26th we’re on suddenly became the epicenter of hot.

In the last half year, we’ve seen the openings of a jazz club (Toshi’s), a whiskey bar (Maysville), a jazz club whiskey bar (Flatiron Lounge), a high end sports bar (Greybar), a gourmet grilled cheese joint (Melt), and the downtown sister of a restaurant – Danji – that has long been one of Jess and my favorites (Hanjan). Literally all within two hundred feet of the gym’s front door.

Of course, as fast as things come together, they also fall back apart. Having lived through the rise and decline of Hell’s Kitchen – moving in just as bars and restaurants were opening up, and departing as Times Square and Phantom of Broadway gift shops engulfed the entire neighborhood – I’m well aware of how tenuous cool can be.

Still, for the moment, I’m more than thrilled. Especially given that the rest of NYC is slowly turning into corner-to-corner bank branches, I’m gladdened by anything else opening up in these days before peak ATM. Especially so if it just happens to be on a block where I spend several afternoons a week.

It appears we moved uptown just in time, as our Upper West Side apartment survived Sandy with electricity intact. (We did, however, watch a gust of wind take out a row of trees outside our window, smashing a couple of parked cars in the process.)

This evening, we’re playing hotel for family that wasn’t so lucky: my 90-year-old grandmother is up from downton, where last night cars floated down her street, and today her apartment is still without electricity; my brother-in-law is down from Columbia University Medical Center in upper Manhattan, where he just finished a 48-hour hurricane shift in the ICU; and his wife is in from Fort Lee, NJ, where she was stuck at home in the dark on her own day off from the hospital, unable to cross the GW bridge.

Plus we have Gemelli, who’s weathered the storm completely unfazed. (Though, as Jess pointed out, he’s young enough and a recent enough transplant to simply assume we have howling winds like this every week here in NYC). It’s a lot of people all at once for a puppy, especially for a puppy who’d already started to go a bit stir-crazy in the apartment during the hurricane lockdown. (He terrorized Jess this morning with manic misbehavior while I was out opening and inspecting the gym.)

I’m happy to have them all here, in part because it’s nice to spend time with family, and in part because I feel like I’m helping out with storm recovery in some small way. But also because, like the man in the old Jewish parable who’s rabbi instructs him to bring all his chickens into the house, I’m sure things will feel awfully quiet and spacious when we’re only dealing with one crazy little dog, rather than an entire house full of guests.

Most of the year, I wonder why I live in New York City. During summer months, the air weighs down, hot and humid; clothing sticks to skin, garbage piles up fetid in the streets. During winter months, it’s rain, snow, sleet; cold bites numb hands and toes, makes even eardrums ache. And through it all I think, “why did I possibly leave San Francisco?”

But then, for three weeks in the fall, and three weeks again in spring, New York is the most beautiful place in the world. The air is crisp, the city clean, everything full of possibility.

Right now, we’ve hit those three weeks. The afternoon sunlight is golden out my window, autumn leaves just starting to turn. Sadly, I know it won’t last. But while it does, there’s no place I’d rather be. I’m off for a walk.

A few months ago, scouting locations for a Dobbin photo shoot, Jess and I headed up to Wave Hill, a public garden in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx. It wasn’t quite right for the shoot. But, we discovered, it’s just perfect for an afternoon escape from Manhattan life.

We went back yesterday, to remind ourselves what trees look like, and how excellent it feels to spend a few hours on a sunlit bench, doing absolutely nothing at all.

Apologies for the radio silence; it’s been a hell of a month.

Twenty-four hours before we were set to move to the aforementioned new apartment, we discovered that, despite our signed lease, the landlord had given the apartment to someone else.

So we’ve spent the last month living surrounded by boxes, madly scrambling to find a replacement apartment.

On top of that, I’ve been neck-deep in closing the last of Cyan (so that all the investors are made whole before we close down shop completely), getting Outlier up and running (and making its first portfolio company investment), helping Jess launch a company herself, and managing CrossFit NYC’s build out of and move to its new, much larger location.

Life is never dull.

As a follow-up to “Drag me to Hell(‘s Kitchen): Applebee’s“, an email I received from old friend Krissa “Le Petit Hiboux” Cavouras:

In honor of your brave chicken fiesta, here is my favorite story about that Applebee’s, having worked one block from it for five years (though never having been so brave as to EAT there). During Fleet Week one year, [her husband] Stuart and I are walking from my building to the subway, and we pass a young sailor on the phone with a friend, both clearly trying to locate each other in Times Square. Young sailor: “Where the fuck am I? I’m in front of the biggest motherfucking Applebee’s on the planet, where the fuck are YOU.” Congratulations for eating at the biggest motherfucking Applebee’s on the planet.

I have a business lunch planned; I’m coming from Chelsea, my lunchmate from East Midtown, so he kindly suggests West Midtown as an easy spot for us both.

“Do you have any ideas for a restaurant?” he asks.

“How about Applebee’s?” I say.

“Applebee’s?”

Silence.

Applebee’s it is.

++

“Where are you visiting us from?” asks the waitress.

“Two blocks that way,” I say.

“Two blocks that way?” she asks, confused.

“I live in that building,” I say, gesturing out the restaurant window.

“So why are you eating here?” she blurts, then covers her mouth.

++

I haven’t been to an Applebee’s in a while, I tell her. Can she recommend something?

The fiesta chicken.

“I’ll bring extra salsa.” She says “And some tabasco sauce.”

The chicken itself is fine enough – soft from chemical brining, the sauce salty and thick. The salsa tastes like it’s from a jar, but my waitress is right: it’s bright enough to make the meal work, at least with a good shot or two of tabasco.

It’s not so bad, this Applebee’s, I think.

++

Back at my desk, I reconsider, as all afternoon the chicken fiestas in my stomach.

For the past eight years or so, I’ve lived on the edge of Times Square. Technically, the neighborhood is “Clinton”, or, when I want to sound less like an asshole, Hell’s Kitchen. But, either way, it’s the border where the new, friendly, post-Giuliani New York City abuts against a two-century-old Irish and then Latino working class neighborhood.

On one side, excellent bars and ethnic restaurants abound – the city’s best Thai joints, Italian spots along Restaurant Row, the many new foodie-facing eateries on and around 9th Avenue in the 40′s and 50′s. On the other side, it’s neon-lit Applebee’s, Red Lobster, and the Olive Garden, as far as the eye can see.

At the end of this month, arguably a few years too late, Jess and I are headed uptown, to a quiet block in the low West ’70′s, a stone’s throw off Central Park. It’s pet friendly, so we can finally make Jess ecstatic by buying a dog. And, as it has a second bedroom and a small office that could eventually become another bedroom, we could stay there through starting a family, perhaps all the way up until the first kid hits elementary school, and we both give in to our suburban roots.

To be honest, we both would have preferred to head down, towards the West Village. But there’s way more space for the money uptown, so uptown it is. And, if nothing else, the Upper West Side is full of actual New Yorkers, rather than tourists from St. Louis, Sapporo and Berlin.

The impending move has led me to look more carefully at our current neighborhood, to think about why we might one day come back here. Certainly for Danji, the excellent Korean fusion spot (and the first Korean restaurant to earn a Michelin star) on 52nd St. Perhaps for Delta Grill – New Orleans good enough to win an official commendation from that city’s mayor. And plausibly, if it’s convenient, for Vice Versa (a nice Italian spot), Uncle Nick’s Ouzaria (fun Greek Tapas), or Russian Samovar (now under new, questionable, management, though a mainstay of my misbegotten NYC youth).

But, weirdly, it’s also made me think about the places I’d never go. Every day, for example, my two block walk to the subway takes me past an Applebee’s, a TGI Fridays, and a faux-50′s diner with singing waiters. All of which I’ve never even set foot inside. Perhaps that’s for good reason. Or, perhaps, it’s simply New York snobbery. Either way, it’s occurred to me that if I don’t find out now, I most likely never will, as if I’m not willing to stagger two blocks to Tad’s Broiled Steaks, I’m certainly not about to cab down to it.

So, to memorialize the end of my tenure in the neighborhood, and to reboot my blogging in 2012, I hereby officially kick off Drag me to Hell(‘s Kitchen): Exploring Midtown West’s Most Questionable Spots.

Wish me luck.

On September 11, 2001, I came into my office early, to follow the market, to watch the tech bubble slowly implode on the monitors in our bullpen that perpetually played CNBC and CNNfn.

I can picture our small company that morning, gathered in twos and threes around those monitors, as video played and replayed the first plane crashing into the North Tower.

We were still gathered around those monitors when the second plane hit, as we slowly realized that neither strike had been a mistake.

We were still gathered around those monitors, an hour later, when the South Tower collapsed.

##

Shortly after the second plane hit, I called my parents’ house in California. My father picked up. “I’m okay,” I told him. “I just called to let you know I’m okay.”

“That’s great,” my father said, still asleep, not understanding why I was calling. “I’m okay, too,” he said, before hanging up.

##

We were evacuated from the office before the second tower came down. We were a half block from Grand Central Station, and police feared an attack on that similarly iconic target.

Still, after I made it downstairs, I stood on the street corner by our office for at least fifteen minutes, looking downtown, watching smoke billow. Gusts of wind brought an acrid smell, a fine coating of ash.

I worked the game theory in my head: my apartment, nearby, was across the street from the United Nations, clearly unsafe. Some of my office-mates were headed to an evacuation center the city had set up at a West Side high school. But any terrorist group sophisticated enough to mastermind this complex an attack would have also known where large groups of evacuees would be directed by city plan, where they would gather as sitting ducks.

I stayed away from my home and from the evacuation centers. I stayed away from crowds, from city landmarks. I headed west, then north. I stayed away from the tall buildings of Midtown, from the crowds of Times Square, from picturesque Columbus Circle and Central Park.

By quiet side streets, I headed up to Harlem. There, I wandered, dazed, from one block to the next, listening to the news with groups gathered around radios on old buildings’ front stoops.

##

Late in the evening, I headed back towards my apartment, showing my ID to dozens of policemen as I inched closer to the UN.

Along the way, I reached my parents again briefly. Now, understanding, they were effusive in their relief.

Once home, I fell asleep nearly before my head hit my pillow. I slept badly, fitfully. And briefly: we were evacuated from the building early the next morning.

I headed to work, but after an hour, we were evacuated from there, too.

For days in a row, I was evacuated from one, and then the other. Unsure of what to do, I wandered the streets, still dazed. I considered heading out to relatives in New Jersey or on Long Island, but transportation was a mess. Besides, though I had only been here for three months, I already knew that New York was my city. I couldn’t simply leave it behind.

##

Months later, I was asked to contribute photos for a gallery showing of young New York photographers reflecting on the city in the wake of 9/11.

I thought about that week wandering, about how little I remembered of it. Where had I gone all day? What had I thought about?

I made two images for the show.

##

I visited my brother, a freshman at the University of Denver.

A woman who checked my ID there saw I was from New York and asked if I had been in the city during the attacks. I had, I told her.

“Even if we weren’t there, all of us were New Yorkers that day,” she said.

##

On the first anniversary of 9/11, I headed to the roof with my trumpet and played Taps facing downtown. I read the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer of remembrance.

I did that each year, until the fifth anniversary.

On the sixth, I didn’t.

##

In the wake of 9/11, we came together in a way that still awes me: with heroism, generosity, and community. We love our country. And, even if we don’t always show it, we love each other.

Yet much of what has come after 9/11, of what has been done in its name, has troubled me deeply: from the security theater of the TSA and the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security, to the serious violation of citizens’ civil rights by programs like the CIA’s warrantless wiretapping and the even more serious violation of others’ human rights at Guantanamo and through programs like extraordinary rendition.

We’ve slid slowly towards a security state, yet we remain ultimately insecure. We’ve run afoul of framer Benjamin Franklin’s cutting remark: that “they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

We’re now permanently at war. We piss away lives and hundreds of billions of dollars yearly, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and elsewhere. We have no clear objectives there. We have no clear exit criteria.

Like Britain during the Boer War a century before, we’ve spread ourselves too thin, have begun to underfund crucial long-term investments at home, like education, infrastructure, and scientific research, in favor of fleeting yet ever-expanding pursuits abroad.

Historians often argue it was the Boer War that ultimately ended the British Empire; I wonder if, a hundred years from now, historians will reflect similarly on our War on Terror.

##

A few weeks ago, Air Force pilot Chris Pace contacted me about a 9/11 fundraiser bike/run he was doing to benefit the Disposable Heroes Project, a nonprofit that supports wounded veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq, where he had done four tours of duty.

His plan was simple, albeit vaguely insane: leave Arlington Cemetery by bike on the evening of Friday, September 9th, bike 150 miles, then dismount in New Jersey and run 100 miles, all without stopping to eat or sleep, to arrive in New York City on the morning of September 11th.

He had been training for this simply by doing CrossFit workouts. So, he wanted to know, would it be okay if he used my gym, CrossFit NYC, as the endpoint of his run?

Obviously, I said yes. But I also thought about the patriotism and generosity and welcoming sense of community, that feeling of being in it together, that had made me proudest in the wake of September 11th.

So, this morning, I woke up at 4:30am, and met Chris (and his support crew) as he crossed the Verrazano Bridge into Brooklyn, to welcome him to New York, and to show him our support, by running with him for the final 12 miles.

##

After we made it to the gym, after we hooked Chris into an IV to rehydrate him, then packed him into a car to his hotel so that he and his crew could get some much-needed sleep, I hailed a cab home.

The driver asked what I had done that morning, so I told him. I told him about Chris’ 250 mile, about my joining him for the last New York stretch.

“Your friend,” said the driver admiringly. “He is very strong.”

Yes, I agreed.

“Not just body strong,” said the driver. “Strong in heart.”

The driver told me he was from Mauritania. And that, back there, ten years ago, his brother had similarly biked a 150 mile round trip, to and back from the capital. But there, he said, nobody had been proud; instead, they had been angry.

“We thought it was embarrassment!” he laughed. “We say, who bike 150 miles? Only poor people who have no car!”

But now, this driver told me, he thought about that differently. He thought about a lot differently. For ten years in the US, he had been able to consider his country from a distance. And he’d been able to consider this one with an outsider’s eye. He told me that each had good and bad. And that, for those ten years, he had thought carefully about where there was more bad, where there was more good. And, earlier this year, he had become a citizen of the United States.

I used to read about Boy Scouts helping old ladies cross the street, and wonder. Where did they find these old ladies? Could the old ladies not cross on their own?

Apparently, though, the old ladies find you. And, no, they can’t make it across solo – or, at least, they’re worried the light will turn on them before they do.

I’ve deduced as much over the past few months, during which time I’ve become a magnet for street-crossing old ladies.

“Young man!” one will exclaim as I pass by. “Can you help me across?”

Indeed I can. Looped arm in arm, we’ll slowly head from one corner to the other, making small talk along the way. This afternoon, crossing Irving at 14th St., a lovely woman and I discussed the weather, how much the city changes each year, her grandchildren here in NYC, and my own grandmother (hi Grammy!), who lives not too far off from that very intersection. Amazing what you can fit into a single street-width of conversation if you shuffle across in sufficiently small steps.

I seem to be averaging about a crossing a week at this point. And I’d be happy to do it more often if asked. Though, between this and my attempts to direct lost tourists, I’m pretty sure Mayor Bloomberg at least owes me a merit badge.