El Bar, Rio
from Notes on New York
Jennifer and I have lived here nearly 4 years, and in that time I’ve probably taken the subway less often than many tourists who come to town only once a year. That’s one of the benefits—and pitfalls—of living downtown: everything you could want to do is within walking distance. It’s easy to get friends to come hang out in our neighborhood, to induce them to take a series of trains or pony up for a cab to meet up with us at a place not more than a 5 minute walk from our apartment.
It’s easy for us, but it breeds laziness and provinciality: what’s worth the trip to Brooklyn? Why would we spend an hour on a subway just to go uptown or over the river to a neighborhood less (so we say) exciting than our own? We’ve made obligatory trips to see our friends in their new apartments in Inwood or the Upper West Side, let ourselves be lured to Bushwick and Flatbush, but these trips are exceptions; they feel like adventures.
So here’s one thing we’ve missed, until last night: Manhattan’s (I dare say) most appealing bar, the Tubby Hook. Located on a nub of land on the western end of Dyckman St. (that’s the 200th street stop on the A train), the Tubby Hook is an uncrowded (on weeknights) open air bar that looks out over the Hudson River. Across the river, New Jersey is densely wooded. The river itself is quiet on this side of the George Washington Bridge, small motorboats moored just off shore, old men fishing off a short pier: it feels more like Maine than Manhattan, even though the Henry Hudson Parkway rises up just a quarter mile to the east. Rachel and
Speaking of Rachel: we’d like to keep her in the city, but to stay in the city she needs a job. She has a few qualifications (speaks Arabic and French; M.A. in creative writing from Johns Hopkins just polishing off a Ph.D. in anthropology at Princeton), and she’s personable and well-rounded in a way that makes her totally unsuited to academia but a great fit for the normal world. If you know anyone working in analysis, development, or aid of or for the Middle East, let me know, and I’ll make the match. Perhaps Rachel will make you a tagine to thank you.
June 12, 2003
noteworthy:
- Jane
- Paintings from the last 7 or 8 years are archived on Jane's portfolio site.
- Ftrain re-vamp
- Paul Ford's already inimitable site, Ftrain.com, is now even less imitable, sitekit notwithstanding. Graph Narratives? Web Pidgin? A site designed to work better in Mozilla and Safari than in IE? Dreamy and strange.
- Walker Percy on Bourbon
- “Who is he kidding? If this joker has to knock back five shots of Bourbon every afternoon just to stand the twentieth century, he's already an alcoholic.”