SOUND: Sidewalk cobbler, Sunset Park

One recent winter afternoon, I found myself standing in my slippers on the sidewalk outside Happy House Seafood Restaurant in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. As shoppers hustled by, some glanced curiously at my slippered feet, and then at the Chinese man crouched before me, with my shoes in his hands.

As it turned out, I hadn’t needed to bring my slippers, after all: as a sidewalk cobbler, he provided a pair of courtesy rubber sandals, as well as a plastic stool to sit on, emblazoned with the words “Moon River Spice” and a cartoon woodland scene. His cobbler’s setup was simple and portable: a wooden cart, about two feet by four feet, containing a tiny hand-cranked sewing machine, a magnet with pins stuck to it, a hammer, an iron shoe tree, a few baby-food jars of shoe tacks and spare shoe parts, and a bench to sit on made of two-by-fours held together with old shoelaces.

When I first spoke to him, he had tapped his ears and furrowed his brow, apparently to indicate that he was hard of hearing, but we managed to communicate nevertheless. I handed him my boots and gestured to the worn-down heels; he slipped the boots onto his shoe tree and, amid the thronging horns of delivery trucks and the chatter of passersby, pried off the existing heel, plucked a piece of black rubber from his bench, traced the outline of my boot’s heel on the rubber with a pencil stub, sliced it out with a pocketknife, and tap-tap-tapped it into place. Then came the most satisfying part, as he turned my boot in his hand while holding a file to the edge of the sole, and a shaving of black rubber curled away from the heel beneath his thumb. Then he sanded down the edges with an equally satisfying rubbery rasping sound, leaving a small pile of black shavings on the sidewalk at his feet.

When I asked if he could polish the boots, he rummaged around in his wooden cart and emerged with a metal tube of Chinese shoe polish, nearly flattened, with only a nubbin of brown beneath the crusty cap. Still, he rubbed it into the toes of the boots with a hard old chamois cloth, making a pff-pff-pff sound, and presented the boots to me, one on each fist.

The re-heeling and polish cost five dollars. Admittedly, a month later, the heels had worn down again, and I had to turn the boots over to a more modern cobbler with access to Vibram rubber and a more abundant supply of brown shoe polish. But I’d say the experience was worth every penny, and every time I heard my heels click beneath me on the sidewalk, I thought of his little stand and the sound of his hammer, and smiled.

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.