Midsummer, and they’ve all fled to the Hamptons. Perfect time to be in the city! How empty is it? Well, not empty enough to get a reservation at the new-ish Union Square Café but you can definitely walk the streets without being jostled at every step. Grand Central is just as grand but seems just a bit less central – it’s as if everyone left but they were kind enough not to lock the door behind them.
Weather has been mostly fine. Caught this beginning of sunset from our living room window the other day. It made CPS and Fifth Avenue look like a jewel box:
Speaking of jewels, when everyone’s away it’s easier to shop. I am coveting these lace-dipped-in-gold earrings from Peipers+Kojen on the UES:
Ah, but the true jewel of the city is in my front yard – my beloved Central Park.
We paused along Central Park South the other evening just before dusk and saw the first glimmers of evening fireflies in the hydrangeas. Magical.
But back to coveting: Bergdorf’s home section seems to be one big tag sale right now, but as you might expect, the prices on their tags are forbidding. I adored this pitcher, but alas, not its price:
No matter. There are other things for the eyes to feast upon. We took a field trip down to the WTC Oculus to see the Up Close: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel exhibit. We paid for tickets, which gave us access to the interior of the exhibit and a complimentary audio guide, but you can get a pretty good gander at it just by walking through the hall.
We were told at the entrance that the photographs were transferred to cloth and that, as well as Michelangelo’s genius for understanding how the eye would behold the paintings from the distance of the chapel’s ceiling, probably accounts for the slightly fuzzy resolution of some of the panels. No one, least of all Michelangelo, is quite prepared for the extreme close-up scrutiny of the world we live in today, but it is, nonetheless, a joy to behold his work. I think Adam and Eve would agree:
We beheld another art form on a friend’s terrace the other night. Green and verdant and hushed and magnificent:
There we sat among the ferns and the orchids, drinking rosé until we had long worn out our welcome and walked home along the edge of the Park under a veiled sliver of a moon. NYC is just that magical – or maybe it is the rosé, which my friend, Lori, described to me yesterday as “the New York summer water”. Oh, how I love this city:
Okay, so it’s not always perfect. We went to a Yankees game last night, where it started pouring at the top of the 4th inning. We got antsy after what promised to be an interminable rain delay and headed home, only to discover in this morning’s paper that we missed seeing Aaron Judge slam the ball out of the park, breaking Joe DiMaggio’s record for most home runs by a Yankees rookie. If you aren’t paying attention, things can go awry in a New York minute.
But today is a new day and I’m sure new adventures (and plenty of that summer water rosé) await us. I would say that I wish you were here, but I’m kind of loving having this great, grand city all to ourselves…
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