On Broadway

Walking down the Street of Dreams

There was a public service announcement that used to play on television in the middle of the Ohio night when I was a kid and it captivated me. Radio Free Europe had a 30-second spot where a young man cues a record and says something in an Eastern European language before lifting a finger and intoning the title of the record: “On Broadvay”.

Growing up in small-town Ohio I felt as removed from New York City as if I were in Eastern Europe. I yearned to walk down Broadway and be free in the biggest of the big cities.

It took me another three decades, but I did it. I moved to New York City and on my first full day in the city, I rushed out to Broadway, ready to take in the street of dreams, The Great White Way. I was going to be On Broadvay! Imagine my confusion as I stood at the corner of Broadway and 181st Street in Washington Heights, seeing all-night Kennedy’s Fried Chicken joints, corner bodegas, 99 cent-and-up shops, auto-body shops, and a whole lot of ordinary New Yorkers going about their business. Not a theatre in sight.

Eventually, I figured it out and in the subsequent years, I’ve spent countless delighted hours up and down Broadway. I’ve been to big Broadway hit musicals (some starring actual friends of mine!), amazing concerts, and eaten several thousand delicious meals up and down that Great White Way.

Things are a little different now.

Pandemic Broadway

As the warm weather fades, we’ve been more assiduous in getting our backsides out at every opportunity. With limited means, we do a lot of walking. We also mask up, sanitize like crazy and, yes, ride the subways. Recently we took the train down to Times Square and walked down Broadway from 41st Street to 14th Street with a dinner stop at the iconic L’Express at 20th and Park Avenue South (I hope they make it).

As we made our way down Broadway, I had occasion to not revile the name of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg — much — thanks to his legacy of wide pedestrian malls that dot the storied thoroughfare. The city isn’t as deserted as it was three or four months ago and it’s fascinating to see that nearly everyone is a good little doobie, wearing their masks properly. But we are nowhere near street capacity these days and I, for one, am not crying over that.

Before Mayor Mike pissed off all the taxi drivers in the city by turning Broadway into a place to sit and breathe in the mingling toxic fumes of the city, I would take the now-defunct M6 bus down Broadway all the way to the Staten Island Ferry, fascinated by all the wholesalers’ tiny stores that lined the street south of 23rd Street. Some of those are still plugging along.

Now, much of the street — and the city for that matter — has been turned into the world’s largest outdoor restaurant with tents and tables and lights on all sides. We found one joint’s solution for hiding that unsightly phone booth hilarious.

Coming down to 23rd Street, we saw that the Flatiron Building is shrouded in scaffolding and netting. Spooky, yet seasonal. Can I just say right here that I love that it’s never really dark in this city? I’m not afraid of the dark or anything, or at least not much, but I do love the white night sky of the city.

We’re hitting the point in the season when dining outdoors is losing its appeal. We shivered through our onion soup, salmon tartare, and shared organic half chicken with mashed potatoes at L’Express and then stepped out smartly to warm up again.

And once we made it down to Union Square, where a whole lot of the protests earlier this year went down, we came across this mural. I hope it lasts. I hope the determination to wake TF up in this country lasts. I’m cautiously almost not-quite optimistic.

We’re getting out every day and making the most of the beautiful autumn weather while we can.

It’s going to be a very long winter. When our friend, the virus, came to town we were just coming out of winter so for most of the worst of this year — our pandemic year — we’ve had the luxury of getting outdoors and walking. We’ve still got another six to eight weeks of that, but even here we’re liable to go into a serious deep freeze come the new year.

More to write about.

© Remington Write 2020. All Rights Reserved.

(All photography by Remington Write or AleXander Hirka)