SIGHT: City Hall Park in the snow at dusk

City Hall Park is always a magical place, but somehow a fresh snowfall brings its Old New York charm into relief. I made two trips to the park during the recent blizzard. Standing by the fountain and looking north toward the lit windows of City Hall, I felt like I’d stepped into another era. I could almost hear the clop of horse hooves on cobblestones and smell wood smoke in the air. The park’s combination of spindly bushes and bushy pine trees created a lattice of white. The snow coated each branch and needle and thorn, each park-bench rail and each bird-shaped finial. The gilt paint of the lampposts gleamed like candlelight against the black iron and the white snow. On my first trip, a group of teenagers was having a snowball fight, and their laughter rang through the park as their snowballs smattered against bright wool coats.

My second trip was later in the evening, when I hoped the gas lamps would be turned on. I could almost hear the hush of the flames whispering within the lanterns as the snow hissed against the glass, and could imagine their flickering golden glow on the white drifts. To my disappointment, however, most of the gas fittings have been replaced by fluorescent bulbs, which hummed and cast a lifeless blue light. The lamps on the fountain were turned off entirely. Still, I circled the park and came across a snowman, with a thorn necklace, bushy pine-sprig eyebrows, and even a carrot nose. Someone had impaled a Starbucks cup on his twig fingers, and crowned him with a cardboard java jacket. I replaced my romantic vision of an old-world park with its modern incarnation.

TOUCH: The crystal chair at Magic Jewelry

I’ve been spending some time lately in a chair in the corner of a hole-in-the-wall shop on Centre Street, just south of Canal. Despite its hectic location and cramped quarters, the crystal chair at Magic Jewelry has given me enough positive energy to drift out the doors and up lower Broadway on a cloud of relaxation, dodging tourists and taxis with hardly a trace of stress.


The first time I went to Magic Jewelry, I had my aura read by a beatific Chinese woman dressed almost entirely in pale pink. After she’d deciphered the colored blobs of my energy fields from a Polaroid snapshot, she suggested I try out the “crystal chair,” an unassuming wooden chair under a canopy in the corner of the shop, flanked by a large, pointed crystals, one black and one white, both resting in plastic boxes at waist height. I sat and, as instructed, placed my hands on top of the crystals. They were so cold I flinched at first, but also smooth and dense, and I could feel the rougher edges tapering toward the pointed tops.

Bird music was playing, and I closed my eyes to the room: the fake Christmas tree hung with red good-luck envelopes, the traffic through the neon-lit window, and a takeout clamshell heating up on the radiator. Almost instantly I felt calmed, and somehow (magically?) all distracting thoughts dissolved as soon as they entered my mind. I found I was sitting completely still, and my tense grip on the crystals relaxed as the stones began to warm a little beneath my palms, without losing their charge. There seemed to be a surge of energy traveling from the depths of the stones into my hands and arms, and permeating my core.

I waited for my instincts to tell me when to open my eyes and tune in to the chatter in the shop. Someone handed me a Styrofoam cup of black tea, which I sipped as I eavesdropped, still enveloped in a haze. A tourist had stepped in, and the rose-colored woman was explaining to him how the crystal chair realigns your energy: good energy enters through the white crystal and bad energy is sucked out through the black one. A Chinese man with a hennaed ponytail was pulling his cell phone from his briefcase, trailed by a long chain of crystals and stones, and placed the whole thing on a cloth to be “cleansed,” another of the shop’s specialties, along with the aura readings and special teas, incense, massage oils, and of course crystals and crystal jewelry, all purported to change your energy.

“Who’s that girl who always comes in here, that acupuncturist girl?” the cell-phone man was saying. “Every time I see her I feel like I’m getting a headache. I mean, I have nothing against her, but I think she’s cursing me. Maybe she’s practicing witchcraft on me or something. I mean, I have nothing against her, but last time after I saw her I felt so sick I couldn’t eat.” He rubbed his temples. “Just thinking about her, I’m starting to get a headache.” The women behind the counter laughed and teased him about all his good energy, and the tourist took a sip of his tea and looked around the shop in wonder. “Magic Jewelry, huh? I’ve never been in this place. You guys are so nice!”

MULTISENSORY EXPERIENCE: Newtown Creek Sewage Treatment Plant Nature Walk

The day before Thanksgiving, I decided to whet my appetite by going on the “nature walk” at the Newtown Creek Sewage Treatment Plant. Newtown Creek separates Brooklyn from Queens, and is one of the most polluted industrial sites in America, containing raw sewage, toxins, and oil that has seeped into the waterway from a massive oil spill beneath Greenpoint.

This fact apparently inspired artist George Trakas, who designed the trail, but navigating the quarter-mile of cement and steel made me sad more than anything else. Trakas put so much tenderness into his design: handicapped accessibility, plaques beneath each plant detailing its historical uses, plenty of spots for silent contemplation, graceful and sturdy construction echoing the themes of boats and water, even a fragrance garden and an etched path for raindrops to simulate the creek’s flow. But these details were so overwhelmed by the stench, the sludge, and the inescapable sound track of industrial churnings that I couldn’t help but wonder if Mr. Trakas’s elegant vision wasn’t really a giant wink at the prospect of such a polluted waterway ever becoming a nature sanctuary.

The trail begins at the corner of Paige Avenue and Provost Street in Greenpoint, otherwise an industrial no-man’s-land. Two boulders mark the entrance, and painted fish on the sidewalk lead you past a Time Warner Cable facility to a steel gate, which “has a wave shape to mimic the movement of water.” (A wink here, surely, as Newtown Creek is notoriously stagnant.) Once through the gate, there’s a choice: to a “fragrance garden,” or to the trail. It being November, there were no fragrant plants to mask the sewage reek. On the bridge, made to mimic a ship’s hull, portholes offered views of pipes and helmeted workers, and a distant church steeple. A loudspeaker bleated, “Time out! Time out!”

A walkway with jaillike cement and steel-bar walls abutted an asphalt factory, where I detected my first glimpse of nature in some scruff grass. It ended in the so-called “blooming lily,” a rotunda with a tree, benches, and steps leading right into “the placid waters of Newtown Creek.” The bottom few steps were rimmed with slime. I sat on a bench and watched a crane lift automobile carcasses and drop them onto a barge. Nearby I noticed an emergency call box, a “trash barrel” (representing Greenpoint’s cooper heritage), and a water fountain (what would spurt out if you pressed the button?). A brisk breeze ruffled the water. Seagulls swarmed in the scrap-metal dust.

The most impressive part of the walk is the gated “Whale Creek Path,” at the end, which features weeping willow trees, kayak landings, and a picnic bench affording a view of the gleaming onion domes of the plant itself. Next to a warning sign about a raw-sewage discharge point, a bayberry bush was planted (“Aromatic wax on berries rendered into sweet-smelling candles,” read the plaque). In the distance, the Pulaski Bridge hummed and arced against the Manhattan skyline, and a billboard for the Shriners Hospital asked, If you could improve a life, would you? If you could change a creek, would you? Yes, and yes! the native plans answer, but there’s no one but me around to hear them.

TASTE: A slice, New York City–style

The most important rule of eating pizza in New York City is not to plan to do it. You’re feeling a little peckish, so you pop into the nearest pizza shop, grab a slice and maybe a soda, and about eight minutes later you continue on with your day. A slice of pizza in New York is not an event.

My real pizza-eating story takes place on a recent chilly evening, around 9 pm. I was on my way to a cocktail party in Manhattan. I’d eaten dinner hours before but felt I needed some sustenance for a night on the town. So I ducked into Not Ray’s Pizza in Fort Greene (the parodic name is purely coincidental). Fluorescent lights. An intimidating, high counter of thick plastic sheltering stagnant pizzas on beat-up tin trays, and calzones and a bowl of garlic knots as afterthoughts. Glass shakers of faded red-pepper flakes, oregano, and Parmesan. Tippy stools, Formica-topped tables. I approach the counter and say, “Just a slice” (not “Can I please have one slice of plain pizza to go? Thanks!”). The counter guy jabs the pizza wheel across the pie, flips the cutter onto its side, and uses the blade to heft my slice onto a crenellated paper plate with a wax-paper sheet, then into the oven--all in a single fluid motion. Four minutes later he flops the plate onto the countertop. I pay, wordlessly, and sit by the window. The crust is so hot I can’t touch it, so I use the plate to fold the slice in half, taco-style. (N.b.: Another common New York pizza-eating style is to take the slice outside at this point, the plate protecting your hands from the heat, and nudge the slice forward, tip first, eating it one-handed as you walk.)

The spine cracks, and lurid orange grease oozes into the crease. I shake on cheese and flakes. I dab at the grease with a wad of napkins. I tip the slice into my mouth and the cheese slides toward me, leaving a naked, damp, bumpy crust in its wake. The taste: a crisp crack of folded crust, an easing of salty, stretchy cheese into the mouth mingling with the bland crunch of the crust, followed by a swig of effervescent, tangy Diet Coke, swallowed in one searing hot, icy cold gulp. I leave with a scalded tongue: the true aftertaste of a slice of New York City pizza.

Side note: A few weeks later, for thoroughness, I made a planned trip to “the One and Only Famous Ray’s of Greenwich Village,” purported to be the definitive New York City Ray’s. (The business pages list at least fifty-four Ray’s Pizzas in the city.) It was authentic to the core, and improved on Not Ray’s only by having fountain sodas, high, round tables at the front with no chairs (there was a seating area in the back that seemed only for tourists), and local customers who didn’t speak their orders but held up one or two fingers to indicate the number of slices.