At the dog run with Gemelli this morning, I caught the end of a story that a woman in her mid-80’s was telling the group.

She was at Home Depot recently, she explained, looking to buy a toilet. So she headed to the plumbing section, and waited for an employee to pass by to help. After ten minutes of waiting, she managed to flag someone down. Unfortunately, he worked in the paint department, and didn’t know much about toilets.

After a few minutes more of waiting, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She found a palette, rolled it back to the plumbing section, and started taking a boxed toilet down from the shelf herself. Another employee saw her, and came to her aid, helping her get the toilet down and onto the palette.

She thanked him, rolled the palette up front, and then rolled it right out the door. A cabbie helped her load the toilet into the back of his van. She got in. And then she told him to floor it.

So, wait, we said. You stole the toilet?

Yes. She stole the toilet. And then, a month or so later, she stole a sink pan. And a month after that, she stole a shower rod.

As in, she just walked out without paying?

Oh yes, she said.

We must have looked shocked, as she told us that, if we thought that was bad, we should meet her sister, who this fall traveled through Italy and France with an extra suitcase to carry all the fixtures she stole from her hotels’ furniture.

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.

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.

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.