TASTE: Glaser's Bake Shop's Black-and-White Cookie

I was skeptical of the black-and-white cookie. There was something obscene about their nearly half-foot diameter, the chocolate and vanilla icing: it was like having your cookie at eating it too. They always seemed to lurk near the beef jerky, stifled by Saran wrap, or beside dry-looking pastries in Italian bakery windows. But once I learned they were an iconic New York City treat, I had to find out what all the fuss was about.

So I headed to Glaser's Bake Shop, a century-old Upper East Side institution, and ostensibly the progenitor of the black-and-white cookie. Owner Herb Glaser couldn't confirm this; indeed, he knew very little about the origins of his shop's yin-yang confection. He did reminisce about having two for dessert when he got home from school ("I was a fat kid") and eating the white half first "to save the best for last." He told me Glaser's makes the cookies fresh each day, using a cupcake batter thickened by flour, which creates the cookies' signature cakelike texture. Both icings have a fondant base, spread on with a spatula: you do the white first, let it set, then the black, he told me. "After a while you get pretty good at making a straight line." Mr. Glaser said the bakery has made few changes to the original recipe, save eliminating shortening in a concession to the recent New York City ban on trans fats.

The Glaser's counterwoman plucked a cookie from the glass case and dropped it into a box wound with bakery twine. Though I carried it around all day, when I got home the two halves remained intact. I took my first bite, right down the center line. There was a slight resistance as my teeth met the surface. The sweetness of the icing melted into the floury plumpness of the yellow lemon-vanilla cookie, sticking to the back of my teeth. I imagined in another version, the icing might set into a crust that would crackle with each bite. The domelike shape made the cookie spongier in the center and firmer toward the edges. I found I could achieve a black-and-white melding only every three bites: I had to nibble down around the center bite to be able to reach it again. But when I did, I knew I was getting a taste of New York: stark contrasts coming together in a brash, frustrating, but ultimately satisfying way, and a mysterious past to make each bite just a little richer.

SIGHT: Horseshoe crabs spawning, Brooklyn

A few Sundays ago I headed out to Dead Horse Bay, in Marine Park, Brooklyn, to see the annual horseshoe crab spawning. The crabs’ mating season peaks each May and June at evening high tides on the full and new moons. As the bus pulled up to a ramshackle bus stop across from Floyd Bennett Field, the only sign that anything unusual was happening in this desolate part of the city was a cluster of pilgrims in anoraks and rubber boots huddled beneath the Q35 sign, where we had been told to meet for the hike to the beach, organized by the Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment. As it turned out, we’d all disembarked at the wrong stop, but we finally found our way to the trailhead with the help of a kind man in a car--a gesture of rare New York City altruism. The air smelled like honeysuckle as we wound through tall grass to the beach. Strangers chatted and shared almonds from their tote bags.

Though it had rained all afternoon, by the time we arrived at the beach the sun had started to streak the clouds pink. As we approached the water’s edge, we glimpsed the brown, shiny, domelike backs of a pair of horseshoe crabs washing to shore along with droves of rubbish (comprising a curious number of shoe parts, making me wonder if there was a shoe factory nearby). The male approached the larger female and clasped onto her back so casually it seemed almost happenstance. But they remained steadfastly joined even as the tides buffeted them to and fro. Sometimes another male joined the pair in a crustacean ménage à trois. Single crabs in search of mates buzzed along the shoreline with the smooth but erratic movement of bumper cars.


Some of the visitors lifted the crabs out of the water and passed them around. The horn-like tail swooped up and down like a drawbridge, threatening to poke someone’s eye out, but the BCUE naturalist assured us that we weren’t harming the animals. The crabs were heavy, their carapaces cool and smooth. It was incredible to think that these creatures had been engaged in the same dance since before the dawn of human civilization, when giant dragonflies droned overhead instead of JFK-bound airplanes, and the prurient spectators were cockroaches rather than Gore-Texed urbanites in search of a last weekend adventure before returning home to their suppers.

MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE: The YeloNap

What could be more New York than a PowerNap—and a trademarked one at that? Nestled in the heart of Midtown, just west of Columbus Circle, is Yelo, a “wellness sanctuary” offering naps and reflexology massage treatments: multisensory experiences designed to relax and renew in the time it would take to drink a venti latte. “Yelo is about time-efficient, results-oriented relaxation,” the Web site promises. And one Friday, with an hour to spare between an art show and a dinner party, this was exactly what I needed.

Inside the lobby tea lights flickered and pillows beckoned bearing the slogan NAP YOUR WAY TO THE TOP. A Yelo representative greeted me and handed me a multipage questionnaire on my health history and napping preferences. He then led me to the back of the room, where a uniformed “nap butler” of sorts guarded the entrances to the nap pods, or YeloCabs. These “patented treatment cabins” are maroon and yellow cubicles arranged in a sort of honeycomb, a red strip of carpet leading to each numbered door.

The Yelo representative settled me into what looked like a high-tech leather dental chair bolted to the floor in the center of the cabin. The room, purportedly filled with purified air, felt as sterile as an airplane cabin, and was constructed of similar material. The only accoutrements were a pyramid of rolled towels, two small trash cans (for what? I wondered), a revolving stool (for visitors?), and a pair of lit display shelves showcasing lotions and teas available for post-nap purchase. He left me to settle myself, assuring me, “I’ll be right back to tuck you in.” I found the intimacy of that prospect slightly unsettling. But when he returned he gave me the most businesslike tuck-in imaginable, arranging a beige cashmere blanket over me, adjusting the 500-thread-count pillow, and kneeling by the side of the chair to recline it into a “zero-gravity” position, to put my feet slightly higher than my head, which he told me was an optimal position for relaxation. Then he dimmed the lights, closed the door, and left me to my twenty minutes of high-powered slumber.

I had trouble getting to sleep because I couldn’t help myself from trying to optimize my level of relaxation. I fiddled with the recline position on the chair. I adjusted the blanket and pillow to achieve maximum softness against my skin. I squinted through the darkness at the beauty product offerings. I tried to dissect a faint whirring sound and regretted that I had chosen silence rather than a relaxation sound track (options include whale song, medieval chant, and “inner voyage”). With more deluxe nap packages, you can have a scent—such as fig or wild blackberry—piped into the room, but since I’d opted for the basic YeloNap, the room just smelled like vacuumed carpet. In twenty minutes, a “sunrise” gradually filled the pod with a pink-orange light that spread up the walls and ceiling, a lovely way to awaken, had I been asleep.

On my way out, as I sat in the lobby drinking a cup of water, I realized I did feel mysteriously refreshed. A guy in a windbreaker and big sneakers burst in clutching a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring. Glancing around nervously, as if afraid of being seen, he asked which nap package would give him the highest-value relaxation for his time. Nap your way to the top, I thought, pushing through the glass doors into rush hour.

SIGHT: Birdhouse fence, Flatbush

A few blocks past the tabernacle churches, hair-braiding salons, and Laundromats of Church Avenue lies a quiet residential neighborhood. Dogs bark. Children play catch in driveways. Ornamental cabbages grow along the edges of the sidewalks. But at 615 Lenox Road, at the corner of East 43rd Street, the suburban Brooklyn birdsong seems to swell. This is the home of Manny, a Vietnam vet who for the last twenty years has been transforming the chain-link fence around his house into a paradise for local birds.

“Some people like cats, some people like dogs; I like birds,” Manny told me. He said he got the idea for the bird fence when he saw a similar installation in Texas, where he was in the air force. Manny is from Panama, middle-aged, with dark skin and milky blue eyes that give him the appearance of being blind, though his vision—in the many senses of the word—is obviously keen. On the afternoon I visited, he was making the rounds of his fence in camouflage pants, vivid blue and green Nikes, and a hat with earflaps held together by a safety pin. His house is modest, covered in faux-stone siding, a corrugated metal roof over the porch. But even from a few blocks away it’s the fence you notice first, and the bush in the front yard that quivers with the hundreds of birds that call 615 Lenox Road their home.

“In the mornings the sidewalk is filled with birds,” Manny says, gesturing down the street with the tip of his cane. He suffered injuries in the war and walks with a limp, and he claims his hands don’t work as well as they used to. Still, every morning he sifts birdseed into the hundreds of cages and birdhouses that festoon his fence, and the birds arrive in droves; some even spend the night. “But the neighbors don’t mind, because I keep things clean,” he says. Manny’s English is impeccable, though his accent is barbed by the five languages he picked up during the war.

Manny’s collection includes wooden birdhouses with heart-shaped holes and slanted roofs, bird churches with steeples nestled in beribboned Easter baskets, traditional wire cages with swinging perches and feeding dishes, bookshelves lined with miniature houses and bird figurines. The blank spaces along the fence—and there aren’t many—are filled in with bird-themed doormats and chair pads and other souvenirs, all draped with bright flower garlands.

As the birdhouse fence grew into a neighborhood fixture, he says, people began to leave contributions on his doorstep. During the winter, when there are fewer birds, he covers the houses with an equally motley collection of plastic bags—Sears, Duane Reade, Met Foods—to protect them from the weather. But in the spring he unveils them, and birdsong and the colors of his collection fill the Flatbush air once again.