Our youngest child has been to Manhattan before. He has walked in the West Village Halloween Parade, while dressed as a pirate. He went trick or treating in Brooklyn, both at along the lovely rows of brownstones and at the bodegas. He has stuffed his face with New York hot dogs, and hopped, skipped, jumped, and climbed his way across the city. He just doesn’t remember any of it. It is time to introduce him properly to my favorite city.
We scheduled this trip on the spur of the moment, with little more than a week to plan. How do you keep an almost 12 year old boy engaged? Well, mostly you feed him. It occurred to me that I could use food to introduce him to the flow of the different immigrant groups that swarmed into New York, seeking a better life in America. We will start off with a guided tour of the financial district, that includes ferry tickets to Liberty Island and Ellis Island. We will visit the Ellis Island Museum, and stand at the foot of Lady Liberty. I want him to truly understand what it means to be an American, and the level of both privilege and opportunity he had, simply by being born here. We will follow that by a stroll through Chinatown and Little Italy, stopping for dumplings at a favorite backstreet spot in Chinatown, and finishing with a lobster tail at one of the best Italian bakeries in NYC. Supper will be at Fraunces Tavern, where General Washington bid farewell to his troops after the Revolutionary War.
The rest of the trip will see us visiting the Irish Hunger Memorial, though lunch will be traditional British fare rather than Irish. There will be Ukrainian pierogi in a backstreet basement spot in the East Village, and a knish at a jewish spot on the lower east side that has been there since maybe 1920. We will visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, and bike through Central Park.
I hope he will fall in love with the whole overwhelming madness of my favorite city, but I will settle with him coming away with a better understanding of why people migrated there, and how that helped shape us as a country. If what he remembers most is that the food was really, really good….eh, that’s fine, too.
Vagabond.Belle 