Late winter and early spring always bring a similar affliction for me. I will call it Manhattan fever. I’m not sure why it is this particular time of year, but perhaps it is because I associate New York with ducking into churches and coffee shops to escape the frozen air for a minute. This seems to be the time I am often there, and sure enough, photos popped up in my social media memories from just a two years ago.
That trip was a girls’ trip, my first time in many years that I had been there without small people, and I renewed a mad love affair with my favorite city. It was very cold when we landed, and we had been warily watching weather reports for days, as a Nor’Easter made its way through the northeast. Predictions at one point were for fifteen to twenty inches of snow, and the storm was going through the night before our flight. We were lucky, and it only left seven inches dusted across Manhattan. In the city though, seven inches is a lot, and it takes up a great deal of space once it is plowed. One of the women in our group was five months pregnant, and had to all but snowshoe her way over the mounds of snow between the street and the sidewalk, to get to our apartment.
Let’s talk about that apartment for a minute, shall we? Many people have told me that I was born in the wrong era. I love the glamour of earlier decades…the flapper beads and speak easy jazz of the 1920’s, the polished cool of big band and swing from the 1940’s, and everything in between. That apartment looked like a film set for a period film, circa maybe 1935. It was stunning, quirky, and exquisitely decorated. There were lovely antiques, polished and glowing with wax and love. There were top hats, there were glove stands, antique maps, crystal chandeliers, and a giant canopy bed that felt like a room all of its own. I loved every inch of that apartment, from the perfect location on east 82nd Street, to the tight spiral staircase that made us all watch our pregnant friend in panic, worried she would slip. The building had been built in the 1920’s, and the boiler was noisy in the night, sometimes making it sound like someone was banging on the pipes with a hammer. The walls were paper thin, and earplugs were an absolute necessity for sleeping, making me glad I always keep them in my travel bag. The kitchen as tiny, but all we did in it was pour wine, so it worked fine for us. The rest of the group may not have loved it as much as I did, but for me it was sublime.
It was 19 degrees when we left the apartment to head out to dinner, with a brisk wind, and the temperature was falling. We walked several blocks to the train and ended up getting off a stop too soon, so we walked ten blocks to get to the restaurant. We were freezing. We were tired after having been traveling since the early hours of the day. We were starving. It was 100% worth it. We stepped into a tiny, intimate space, with a roaring fire and a jovial Italian bartender. By the time we unwrapped all of our layers the wine had already appeared, and could feel the stress of travel and logistics beginning to fall away. Tarallucci e Vino is one of my favorite places in the city, and though there are maybe five locations, it has to be the the one on 1st avenue, on the lower east side. I know the bartender is a kisser, whether he knows you or not, and I know the chef turns out the most gorgeous polenta, served on the board in the traditional style. It is only on the menu in March and October, but if you tell him the lady from Alabama raved about it so much you had to come and have some, he will make it for you. That meal was truly one of the best of my life, partly because of the amazing food, but mostly because of the amazing company. We were on an adventure, and there, wrapped up in the warm glow of the fire and the wine, life was perfect. There was an awkward first date happening in the corner across from us, right in my sight line, and it provided all of the entertainment we needed.
There was much food that week, and gallons of wine. It was cold the entire week we were there, though not so painful as the first day, and it certainly didn’t slow us down. We went everywhere, from an amazing dinner at Fraunces Tavern in the financial district, to the Irish Hunger Memorial in battery Park, to Hamilton Grange in Harlem, and across the East River on a cable car to Roosevelt Island, where Typhoid Mary was sent when there was a hospital on then Blackwell’s Island. We had cherry cream cheese strudel at The Hungarian Pastry shop, one of my favorite pieces of old New York, where you better have cash because that antique cash register doesn’t process credit cards, and wandered in to an evensong service at the stunning Cathedral of St. John the Divine. We had noodles at midnight at New York Noodle Town in China Town, and then went halfway down the next block to my favorite slightly sketchy foot massage spot, which is the perfect thing at the end of a long day of walking. There was a dinner with a drag show, there were lunches in the food hall at the Plaza Hotel, and we started each day with cheap breakfast at the end of our block, where we always lingered because we loved their playlist so much. I have been back to that place since, but it just wasn’t the same as it was on those chilly mornings with the girls.
I had pizza tonight, but it wasn’t John’s on Bleeker Street. I woke up this morning, but it wasn’t with the background noise of hearing the city come to life. My body might reside in Alabama, but my heart? My heart is always in Manhattan.
Vagabond.Belle 
Great post 😁
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