SOUND & TOUCH: Sitting in the New York Public Library’s Rose Main Reading Room

Every aspect of the Rose Main Reading Room, in the New York Public Library’s main branch, at Forty-second and Fifth, seems designed to encourage long visits and to foster serious accomplishment. Two marble candelabras flank the entrance to the room, which measures the length of two city blocks. 

The forty-two long, wide oak tables ensure you’ll never brush elbows with fellow patrons—or read over their shoulders. In addition to the light from chandeliers and sunlight slanting through cathedral windows, intimate bronze-shaded lamps spill warm puddles of (soon-to-be-forgotten incandescent) light over the writing surface. A trash can awaits at the end of each row, dictionaries on pedestals (with individual reading lamps!) await at the other, and white stripes run along both sides of the center aisle, like the emergency lighting on an airplane, keeping your mind and body from straying. Black numbers designate table spaces in front of each wooden armchair. 

And what chairs these are! As far as wooden chairs go, the Rose Main Reading Room's model seems designed to hold you and keep you, providing a firm launching pad for your loftiest thoughts. 

In these chairs, no amateurish, collegiate study positions are tolerated. Your feet rest so solidly on the floor, they will never seek out under-table ledges or chair rungs; they will not curl up beneath you. The arms, a graceful slope of polished wood, support the arms all the way to the table edge, where they meet it at perfect ergonomic height for typing or writing. The seat features a slight depression for each thigh. The curved chair-back hits just below the shoulder blades, and the carved central slat ensures your spine is straight. The legs are not on casters, and it takes a forceful nudge to wrest them from their spot, making it even easier to just stay put. 

In fact, the grating of the chair legs scraping the floor tiles is perhaps the most prominent sound in the room. The silence of the Rose Reading Room is the most dignified—sacred, even—of any public space I’ve encountered in the city. There is no laughter, chatter, or exclamations, only muffled coughs, the clicks of pens and the plastic buckles on backpacks. 

The distant rattles and bangs of the medieval book-delivery machine in the center of the room, which conveys books from the library’s forty-mile inner sanctum of shelves, seem to echo the churnings of the many minds bent over the tables. And if your mind should chance to wander, all you have to do is stay right there in your seat and look up to the ceiling, where, fifty-two feet above, ceiling panels painted with luminous sky and billowing clouds greet you, offering escape and, perhaps, inspiration. 

As Alfred Kazin described the room more than a hundred years ago, “There was something about the vibrating empty rooms early in the morning—light falling through the great tall windows, the sun burning the smooth tops of the golden tables as if they had been freshly painted—that made me restless with the need to grab up every book, press into every single mind right there on the open shelves.”

SOUND: Faerman Cash Register Company

Whenever the door of 159 Bowery opens, a digital doorbell chimes. And occasionally the ring of Brian Faerman’s cell phone echoes down the rows of cash registers that line the countertops, shelves, and floors of his family’s third-generation shop.

But, of course, this modern music isn’t the reason passersby peer in the window, hesitate, and step inside. It isn’t the reason that Brian Faerman, the store’s middle-aged proprietor, has to prowl the aisles, answering same questions—“What’s your favorite cash register?” “Which is the oldest one here?” “Are these for sale?”—with a combination of good cheer and weary exasperation, while preventing his visitors from spilling their lattes on the old machinery. It isn’t the reason customers swoon over old machines with ornate brass and iron casings, feathered arrows or sinister fingers pointing at numbers frozen in time. And it isn’t the reason that customers bring their cash registers here—or ship them from as far away as Egypt--for the Faermans to repair, often graffitied with stickers and the Sharpied-numbers of coworkers and credit-card companies (which threaten these machines’ very existence).

The reason, of course, is that there’s something enchanting about the old-fashioned cash register, and particularly its iconic sound: the ka-ching, which is no match for the digital bleeps that increasingly punctuate our days. Indeed, each ka-ching is a sound of small victory: a transaction completed. With its prelude of whirs and clatters, the ka-ching feels like a victory for the register, too: a final “hurrah” after all the effort of calculation.

If you’re lucky and kind, Brian might “play” the registers for you, filling the shop with tintinnabulation in the role of a grudging but respectful conductor. After punching the correct sequence of buttons, divoted like typewriter keys for the human finger, the gears rattle as the numbers spin into position, then the drawer springs open with a pop, followed close on the tail by the open-drawer bell: the ka-ching. Some registers’ ka-chings are clean, clear, and crisp, like a bicycle bell; others are lower and more resonant. The newer digital models purr satisfyingly as the printer spits numbers onto a spooling paper receipt. If the registers have two drawers—one till for each salesperson---there’s a different bell for each, not unlike party-line telephones. Sometimes dust puffs out when the drawers open, relics of long-lost transactions.

In the back of the shop, Brian’s father, Bernard, repairs the registers in a denim smock, silently. From a pile of old machinery, Brian extracts a “monster bell” disinterred from a massive old cash register that had multiple drawers. Two sets of nested bells are struck by four clappers, and when Brian rings it, the effect is almost like church bells, the notes cascading.

Located on the Bowery and jostled on either side by high-rise condos, low-slung nightclubs, and chandelier stores, Faerman Cash Register Company used to be the center of a sort-of “cash register row”; now it’s pretty much a lone outpost. But the Faerman family owns the building, and Brian insists that they’re not going anywhere. He says people come to believe in “lucky” cash registers if business has done well under their aegis and will keep paying to repair them, like a patched but beloved pair of jeans. It’s hard to imagine a rectangle of plastic that could compete with that.

All the cash register sounds are recorded by soundscaper Makalé lore.is.

SMELL: Hot & Crusty Bakery, 4 pm, Grand Central Terminal

My earliest memories of the iconic New York City bakery smell are of Lichtman’s, a Jewish-Hungarian bakery on Amsterdam and West Eighty-sixth Street that closed in the 1980s. When my family visited my grandparents, who lived half a block away, we would often stop in for cookies (after picking up roast-beef sandwiches at nearby Barney Greengrass, which has its own iconic New York smell of sawdust, fish, salt, and pickle brine). I remember discovering that Lichtman’s crescent-shaped butter cookies fit perfectly into the cutout in the backs of my grandparents’ wooden kitchen chairs.

I was delighted to discover a modern incarnation of this scent right before rush hour, in Grand Central Terminal, just past the doors to the Times Square shuttle-train platform. The aroma emanated from New York’s bakery mini-chain Hot & Crusty, which has a small outpost there, a few steps from Zaro’s blockbuster corner store. As it turns out, a batch of the bakery's bread comes out of the oven around this time each day.

Grand Central has its own signature smell, of course, most intense as you approach the tracks: warm, stale, fan-blown air; mechanics’ oil; and hot metal mixed with a musk of floor cleaner and dank mop-swishings. But the Hot & Crusty smell quickly subsumes these waftings of the station’s underbelly with hot poppy and sesame seeds, caramelized sugar, onion, pepper, warm crust, and yeast. Inside the glass case, black-and-white and chocolate-drop cookies gently melt onto sheets of wax paper alongside rows of cake slices in plastic sleeves, gleaming orbs of egg-glazed challah, curls of rugelach, plump hamantashen, sugar-dusted cinnamon pretzels, linzer tarts as brazen as valentines, and golden palmiers with spiraling lobes, not to mention the shelves of loaves—rye, semolina, poppy. Perhaps it’s Hot & Crusty’s (and Lichtman’s) distinctly New York selection of baked goods (with Jewish leanings) that accounts for the “iconic” aroma.

On a recent Friday at dusk, I noticed passersby turning their heads as they caught the scent of the bakery. Some drifted toward it, lingering on the outskirts, then stepped into its fluorescent halo and emerged with a wax-paper bag. One businessman bit furtively into an enormous chocolate-chip muffin, glanced around, shoved it back into the bag, and dashed away with the bag mittened over his fist, leaving a trail of brown crumbs. I remembered how torn I had felt as a child between eating the cookies straight out of the bag on the sidewalk and bringing them home to delight in their perfect fit.

TASTE: McSorley’s Old Ale House cracker-and-cheese plate

This is a place where afternoon slips as easily into evening as the beer slips down the throats of its patrons. Dectets of mugs thunk down on the wooden tables from the fist of a smocked waiter. Beneath the clutter of picture frames and Christmas lights, glasses raised above the brims of baseball caps smash together. There are only two kinds of beer here: dark and light, not too different, and served in five-gulp portions.

This is a place to drink fast and drink long, a place so caught in the past that it’s easy to forget about passing time. But you need something to sustain yourself against all that beer and camaraderie, against the fading of the day. Forget the hamburger and respect the last part of the bar’s oft-cited former motto: “Good Ale, No Ladies, and Raw Onions.” The only thing to order here is the cracker-and-cheese plate.

It’s not much to look at: an unopened sleeve of saltines, a few slabs of cheddar sliced from a brick, curls of raw onion, and wedges of wan beefsteak tomato. Alongside arrives a flip-top bowl of horseradish mustard outfitted with a wooden tongue depressor. The idea is to slap a slice of cheddar onto a saltine, smear on a dab of horseradish, and drape it with a wisp of onion and a bit of tomato. Then raise the tower to your beer-foam-laced lips and bite.

First comes the dry crumble of cracker and crackle of salt crystals sticking to your tongue. Then a mitigating layer of rubbery, forgiving cheese. But almost before you can taste it there’s a punch of horseradish searing its way through everything else. The raw onion kicks in next with an oily stab, followed by a soothing spurt of tomato: a crunch of rind, a cool ooze of seedy pulp. Finally, a slurp (or mug) of beer to wash it all down and cleanse the palate for the next creamy, salty, tangy, spicy, sharp, soothing bite. There’s a combination and flavor for the mood of each passing hour: from the barbaric yawps of midday to the soulful ponderings of early evening.

The fading sun has left warm patches on the sawdust-strewn floor; the beer has left a filigree of foam on another round of just-emptied glasses. The cracker sleeve has been hollowed; there’s horseradish on both ends of the paddle. As Dylan Thomas put it, “Do not go gentle into that good night… Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”