TOUCH: Buying tickets at Grand Central Terminal

There’s no doubt that Grand Central Terminal offers a host of sensory experiences. There are slippery, salty oysters on ice and crunchy, buttery cinnamon babka, the smell of tar and heat on the tracks, the echo of heels clicking on marble and muffled voices beneath a vaulted green ceiling of stars.

But despite these, probably my favorite thing about visiting Grand Central is the process of buying a train ticket. These days, there are two options: the ticket counter, or the MetroNorth ticket vending machines, relatives of the MetroCard machines in subway stations. Both offer tactile experiences worth noting here.

Each time you press a button on the vending machine screens--to enter your destination, number of tickets, etc.--the machine emits a puck sound that is perhaps even more satisfying than the pop of Bubble Wrap. The buttons are just the right size to fit a fingertip, and after pressing one button the next screen appears instantaneously, ushering you through the ticket-buying process with the efficiency of a Manhattan sidewalk during rush hour. The MetroCard machines, while just as attractive and easy to use, do not make this sound. While I do like the way MetroCards shoot confidently out of a slot at the end of a transaction, there’s something wonderful about how the MetroNorth tickets flutter down into a plastic bin beneath the machine, still warm from being printed.

If you choose to buy your tickets the old-fashioned way, you can wait on line at one of the ticket windows along one side of Grand Central’s main hall. In return for your patience you have the pleasure of sliding your hand along the smooth, cool marble counter into the pool of light on the other side of the grille. There’s no bulletproof glass here: just elegant brass filigree and numbered triangular lamps hanging from brass tusks above each window, and a rack to rest your purse on beneath the counter. As you complete your transaction and let your fingertips linger over the veins in the marble, it’s possible to imagine the thousands of fingertips that have worn away this surface over the years, sliding bills (or credit cards) through and receiving a paper ticket (still paper!) in exchange.

It’s the simplest of transactions—a few buttons pushed, a few slips of paper exchanged--but in this setting the wonder comes alive in the stories behind each gesture, and behind each gesture the limitless destinations.

TASTE: Bombay Chat

The neon sign says it all: COFFEE BAGEL MOMO. It’s the first thing that greets visitors entering Bombay Chat, a sort of Himalayan bodega/deli in Jackson Heights, Queens. The store’s name, like the sign, appears to be a wink at its role as a meeting ground for the Nepalese, Tibetan, Indian, and American communities it serves, with “chat” a play on chat, for phone and Internet services, and chaat, or Indian street food. A glassed-in booth at the front proffers phone cards, Neem toothpaste, lip balm, Motrin, batteries, and a bowl of betel leaves and brass urns of spices for paan, the breath-freshening chew. As at any other corner store, a sign taped to the window reads PLEASE PAY AT COUNTER FIRST, but here features a clip-art picture of hands pressed in the namaste blessing gesture.


Inside, a flight of stairs leads downstairs to the Internet room. Upstairs, inside a small room festooned with streamers, one can snack on samosas and momos (Tibetan dumplings), as well as other Himalayan snacks from a steam table and small counter.

Though I saw no signs of either bagels or coffee, the American-Himalayan fusion was everywhere in evidence. A group of Tibetans in wool hats hunkered over tea in Styrofoam cups. A monk in red robes and sneakers rose from his table and bundled into a ski parka. A girl walked in, slipped a McDonald’s apple pie out of a paper bag, and munched on it while she waited for her plate of momos.


I ordered a samosa and vegetable momos, which were boiled to order and arrived fresh from the pot: warm, stretchy dough with poppingly crisp carrots, peas, and scallions bursting through the puckered skin, doused in a squirt of hot sauce. Though the samosa had been plucked from the steam table and microwaved, as it is in many of the Punjabi taxi stands I frequent, it tasted just the way I’ve come to like it: limp and saggy in the middle with large, crisp, flat edges, the inside a warm, soft mush of potato, cauliflower, and turmeric flecked with cumin seeds. A chai tea finished off the meal, tickling the tip of my tongue with a sweet ting of sugar and spices and a warm wash of milk.


As I ate I looked up the portrait of the Dalai Lama hanging over the tables. He had his hands in prayer but was looking over one shoulder with a distracted and slightly bemused expression, as if he had been interrupted mid-prayer by a humorous comment. This seemed a fitting choice for Bombay Chat, which with its Duracell and its dumplings is a prototype of the cultural distraction that enriches and exemplifies our city.

SIGHT: Dennet Place, the Street of Tiny Doors

When you move to a new neighborhood—as I did about six months ago—you suddenly find yourself more open to wonder and surprise. Carroll Gardens, my new home, has offered up its share of delights: the taste of tiny balls of fresh mozzarella dipped in salt water from Caputo’s deli, the old Italian men in sports sandals and tube socks puffing cigars in lawn chairs on the sidewalk, the startling sunsets over the BQE, the sound of the evening bells from St. Mary Star of the Sea Catholic church.


While circling the neighborhood one evening looking for parking, I discovered a one-block-long side street called Dennet Place running between Nelson and Luquer streets and Smith and Court streets. Each stoop of the tidy two-story row houses had a tiny door built into its base at street level, beneath the stairs. The doors were no more than four feet tall—the average adult would almost certainly have to duck to enter. But in all other respects, they appeared to be functional doors to the garden-level apartments. Painted a variety of colors, the miniature doors were complete with mail slots, peepholes, doorbells and knockers, numerals, and deadbolt locks. Some even had octagonal windows beside them festooned with pumpkins and Thanksgiving decorations, and when I peered inside I saw umbrella stands, coat hooks, hall lamps, and dustpans and brooms.


When I got home I did a little cursory research on Dennet Place and its miniature doors. My search turned up nothing but fellow admirers, no insights at all into why the apartment doors on this particular block were built on such a small scale. Whenever I’ve passed the street since and glanced down the block, its residents appear to be of average size.

MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE: Bryant Park’s Public Bathrooms

When I read that the public restrooms in Bryant Park were voted “Best in the Nation” in 2002 by CitySearch, I was intrigued. How nice could they really be, just blocks from the tourist traffic and former sleaze of Times Square?

In fact, the restrooms, housed in a grand stone building just off Forty-second Street, right behind the library, offer a multi-sensory experience fit for all but the most discerning of public-bathroom-goers. The queue was miraculously short for a seventy-degree summer day at the height of tourist season. A marble urn of fresh flowers, backed by a wood-framed full-length mirror and floral wall mosaics, greeted visitors in the foyer separating the men’s and women’s rooms. The signs depict the usual stick-figure man and woman, but bearing leaves at the end of outstretched arms to point the way.


Inside the women’s room is a marble changing-table and a marble sink, graced with yet more floral arrangements in bud vases. The stalls are dark polished wood. Natural light filters through an oval window. A discreet air-freshener box high on the wall emitted a clean smell, though the green-and-white tile floor was spotless, and a decidedly non-grimy white terry-cloth towel was folded by the sink to wipe up water spots.

Upon entering the stall, a floral-printed sign instructed me to push a red button for a new Hygolet toilet-seat cover. I pushed, and a scrim of plastic snaked around the perimeter of the seat, pushing the used portion into a receptacle at the other end. The toilet paper was unexceptional, but soft enough.


I was delighted to discover that the soap dispensers offered a plump pouf of white mousse—my favorite kind of dispenser soap. And to top it off, the air-dryers (no soggy paper towels here) are the gleaming chrome Xlerator brand, issuing a hand-free blast of hot air that dries the hands in seconds.

Exiting the restrooms, I noticed two janitorial workers chatting by a patch of pacasandra. Even their uniforms were a delight: leaf-green pants and a contrasting polo shirt, tucked in, with bright blue rubber gloves.

MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE: Canoeing the Gowanus Canal

One evening not long ago, I decided to take advantage of the free canoe rides offered by the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club and treat myself to a more intimate look at the infamous Brooklyn canal than I was accustomed to from bridges and subway platforms. The club itself turned out to be a trailer filled with canoes, paddles, and life jackets with “Gowanus Yacht Club” scrawled across the back in marker. After strapping one on, and installed in my own canoe, I was blatantly marked a tourist of the canal, but no matter: it’s hard to be a mere nine inches from the Gowanus and not become part of it.


Within moments of paddling away from the dock, spooky currents in the seemingly stagnant water spun my canoe in circles. I consider myself a competent paddler, but as I tried to regain control of my boat, fetid water splashed onto my lap and pooled in my sneakers. The air smelled of gasoline, tar, damp cement, moss, and burnt rubber.

Finally I got past the currents and steered down one of the canal’s several branches. There were few signs of life besides the hiss of the subway clambering over the Smith–Ninth Street trestle and the thrum of cars passing over the metal drawbridges: pa-plank, pa-plank, pa-plank. The occasional bedraggled seagull swooped overhead; sirens moaned; cranes from scrap-metal factories transferred fistfuls of rattling metal onto barges tied to the canal’s banks. The wind rustled through rough leaves.


Gasoline formed rainbow pools on the water’s surface, reflecting the overcast sky and clouds with unexpected beauty, though drifting bottle caps, dime bags, and candy wrappers inevitably shattered them. I also spotted unmistakable lumps of fossilizing human waste, and—ominously, puzzlingly—floating rocks. Old, wet wood and frayed rope seemed barely to corral the trees that struggled toward the sky from the muddy banks, pushing through tangles of metal and piles of old tires.


As I turned to head back to the club, a power boat manned by a middle-aged man in a blue T-shirt putted toward me and sputtered to a stop to let me pass. “Where did you put in?” the man called out. I liked his use of the term “Put in.” Apparently he hadn’t seen my yuppie life jacket; I had been mistaken for a fellow mariner. But I decided to tell him about the Gowanus Dredgers and its free sunset canoe rides. He regarded me dubiously, hand on his tiller. Just ahead, we could see two more life-jacketed canoers batting at the currents with their paddles. “Well, enjoy the evening,” he said, sweeping his arm toward the sky and firing up his outboard. The murky canal burbled in his wake, then settled back to its implacable stillness.

SOUND & TASTE: Shaved-Ice Carts

Though Marino’s Italian Ice carts are perhaps the most ubiquitous New York summertime sidewalk sight, I can never help feeling that some essence of refreshment is lost when the ice is scooped from a tub. To experience a true icy sensation, you have to find an authentic Puerto Rican piragua cart, where the ice is shaved fresh from a brick and then doused with syrup. I’ve spent the past two months of summer hoping to come across one in my travels around the city, and spotted my first cart just a few days ago, in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn.

The cart was parked on the corner of Church Avenue and East Seventeenth Street, distinguished from its two neighboring food vendors by a green-and-white-striped umbrella and rows of colorful glass bottles ringing the cart’s edges: green, orange, red, yellow. The vendor, who spoke little English, wore a Yankee cap over his white hair, and smiled from beneath a mustache as white and fluffy as the shaved ice itself. I asked a waiting customer what her favorite flavor was, and she pointed toward a bottle of creamy syrup: vanilla.

The vendor picked up a metal scoop, removed a damp blue towel from the ice block, and began scraping at the surface with brisk strokes. The scoop made a rasp, shuffle, shuffle sound as the ice softened beneath its edge, not unlike someone shoveling their walkway on a snowy winter day, and immediately I felt a few degrees cooler. Once enough ice shavings had collected in the scoop’s pocket, he tapped them into a soft plastic cup and tamped down on the mound at the top with a paper cone, creating a pyramid. (I later learned that the word piragua comes from agua and piramide.) He shook a few squirts of vanilla syrup onto the point of the cone, and it melted a path through the ice flakes, tainting them yellow. Then he dribbled the top with sweetened condensed milk, which solidified in a few shiny squiggles, and impaled the whole concoction with a bright pink straw.

As soon as he pressed the cup into my hand, I felt the cold seep through the thin plastic. The ice at the bottom of the cup began to melt beneath my grip. The custardy vanilla pooled at the bottom rushed up the straw, whose diameter was thin enough to admit only the purest rush of cold flavor and no bland, chewy flakes of ice. Once I’d drained the dregs, I impaled the straw in a fresh spot, chipping at the surface and then plunging it through the icy shards with a crisp rustle. Like the summer day itself, this treat, its crunch and slow flavor trickle, became something new in each moment beneath the beating sidewalk sun.

SIGHT: Staten Island’s Secret Rock Sculptures

Before I made the trek all the way to the southeast shore of Staten Island, I had verified the rumors I'd heard of Doug Schwartz’s rock-sculpture garden on the beach of Mount Loretto Unique Area (as the nature preserve is formally called). But once there, on a blistering hot July afternoon, I tried to imagine what his creation would look like to someone who had no idea it was there: A modern-day Stonehenge? The meeting grounds of a demonic coven? The work of
a marooned sailor? According to a fairly recent PBS documentary short, Schwartz has been building a pyramid a day for no other reason than that he wants to--as a temporary gesture to art and nature and the emphemeral.


The beach overlooks Raritan Bay and, in the distance, the New Jersey shore. It’s not the first place I would choose for a casual stroll. As I followed a park ranger’s instructions and headed to the right out of the pier parking lot, I saw no sign of Schwartz’s sculptures, only a stretch of litter-strewn sand and a gangly lighthouse on a steel trestle. But after tiptoeing across a tidal stream burbling with yellow foam, I rounded a bend and there it was: a forest of stone cairns, of the sort hikers use to mark a path or mountain peak, set along a rock-edged path beneath a leafy bluff, overlooking the ocean.


Perhaps it was because I was the only visitor, but there was something enchanted about this place. The careful balance of the rocks beneath the rust-colored cliff, the smell of fish and sea salt, the lap of the tide and caw of seagulls, a string of tattered and sun-bleached prayer flags. Shells of extinguished tea lights beneath a few of the cairns brought to mind what the garden would look like at night, the sun-baked rocks cooled, the flames and shadows muting the colors: rust, ochre, slate; marbled, freckled, jagged, round. A few cairns were buttressed with crumpled beer cans or sticks or clamshells, others tangled with fishing line or feathers, but most were freestanding. One mandala of small rocks and bright blue mussel shells set flat into the beach looked like it had been rearranged by the tide. Many long benches made of washed up boards weighted with stones awaited guests.


On my return walk, I found the tide had come in, and the stream was now uncrossable. I had to duck through the underbrush to reach a gravel spit. It hadn’t occurred to me, when planning my visit, that the path might be as ephemeral as the creations themselves, subject to winds, vandalism, tides—and interpretation.