“Oh Homer, of course you’ll have a bad impression of New York if you only focus on the pimps and the chuds!”

New York looms so large in our collective cultural consciousness. What can I possibly say about this city that hasn’t already been said by more talented people? That doesn’t sound hopelessly country mouse lost in the big city? Probably nothing. It would be impossible (and unfair) for me to make sweeping generalizations about a city so large and diverse after spending only a few days there, but I can at least sketch some impressions. Before we arrived, I made maps pinpointed with the places I wanted to visit, annotated with hours of operation, the actual address, and other bits and pieces of info I felt I’d need. I was aware that the territory I wanted to cover was large, but I really could not fathom the vastness of the city while I was planning. Trying to picture all of New York City for me is like trying to envision the universe: its enormity is boggling. I could live out my life there and not see, do, and try everything, and in this, I can understand what makes it so fiercely beloved by its citizens.

And its citizens! Its tourists! At all hours, on all days, the streets are jam packed with humanity; at least, everywhere I went. Potentially the slowest-moving on the planet, rivaled only by Costco on the weekends, the place where people fistfight over parking spots to buy butter in bulk. Just like Costco, people block the entire walkway, walking as slowly as possible, gawking at everything around them. There were so many times I wanted to take a photo of something, but didn’t want to be that guy blocking the sidewalk for everyone else. I’m used to not being around people most of the time, and to be among so many people almost constantly was overwhelming to me, with the only available retreat being the hotel room. I like people, I’m interested in people, I want to hear people’s stories…but even I have my limits.

We tried pizza everywhere we went. Cheap slices, expensive slices, slices on par with the cost of a subway ride. Honestly, we weren’t that impressed by any of it. Jason likened one of his slices to Little Caesar’s, which I think is the sort of opinion that can get you pushed into traffic in NYC. Pizza is pizza and even the bad stuff is usually pretty good, and I was thrilled with the general availability of pizza. In NYC, any time can be pizza time.

I was often surprised at the amount of garbage piled up on the street. Even when you can’t see it, sometimes the wind would shift and the air would be redolent of hot garbage. What surprised me more were the food carts that were parked next to heaps of trash. We stayed at The Row NYC and I was impressed at how well it kept out city noise. When we booked, we paid for an upgraded room with a ‘premium view’ of Times Square, previously referred to as The Worst. We got a tiny snippet of it, and I’m actually glad we didn’t get more because it is, again The Worst and I actually wouldn’t want advertisements flashing at me through my windows. In the short bit of time we spent there, Jason and I both agreed that it felt eerily like New York: the theme park. I understand completely why no locals go there, and even given my love of both tourist traps and theme parks, I still have no desire to return.

I don’t know how a city of over eight million people manages with so few public restrooms. On our way home from Coney Island, I was struck by an urgent need to use a restroom. Any restroom. A subway restroom. My guts were fighting with Nathan’s Famous and they were losing. My forehead prickled with sweat. I cannot confirm this, but I believe that I took on the look of a desperate animal caught in a trap. We got off at the next stop and there were no subway restrooms, so we ended up wandering around somewhere in Brooklyn where I could fall upon the mercy of a business owner. We finally found an oil change place/gas station and I begged to use their restroom. That I would buy something. Anything. They looked at each other, looked at my ashen face, and led me around the building to a terrifying half-bathroom half-shanty. I paid them $10, and I would have paid them more.

Their public transportation is top-notch. I downloaded the Embark NYC app and it was a snap to figure out multiple routes to get me where I wanted to go. More than once we had a group of Showtime kids on our train. One handed me a full-color glossy postcard with his headshots and social media information. His credits include: recording artist, producer, actor, dancer, model. He could not have been older than twelve. Every dollar I gave a Showtime kid felt like my volley in a war between NYC tourists and the NYC citizens who hate them. On the train, I heard someone talking about the rent for his one bedroom apartment: twice our mortgage payment. I don’t know how anyone affords to live there, especially people working lower-income jobs, but I’m impressed that millions of people are making it work. The city is fascinating. Its citizens are fascinating. I think I finally understand why Hollywood, why America, why the world looks to New York, the place where everything is happening, all the time.

US customs house

st patricks cathedralMan, I bet this would be so beautiful if I could see it.

private clubI watched the entrance of the private club to divine its purpose but the only thing I learned is that only old white people go in and out.

private club elephantAlso, they have an elephant head on their building.

nyseIf you savagely beat a hedge fund manager, does money pop out like candy from a pinata?

george washington statueNo photos, please.

nyc view from the rowHotel view

nyc view from the row hotelHotel view

a peek of times squareHotel view

stalked by guy fieriSTOP STALKING ME, GUY FIERI

grand central stationI want the Grand Central Station ceilings in my house.

grand central station ceiling    

The American Museum of Natural History in NY, NY

museum-of-natural-history

One could easily spend an entire day seeing everything there is to see in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (or longer, hence their overnight visits!), which is why, of course, we only spent about two hours there and bemoaned the fact that we couldn’t see more. Since my energy levels were low due to the plague, I had to carefully choose which things were most important for me to see, and thus we had visited The Cloisters earlier in the day which didn’t leave much time for AMNH. But I’d rather see part of a museum than none of it!

Since we knew right off the bat we wouldn’t be able to see everything, we narrowed it down to the halls that would have the least overlap with museum visits we’d done recently: The Hall of Biodiversity, The Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life, The Hall of North American Forests, the Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites, the Morgan Memorial Hall of Gems, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Hall of Minerals. We also took a peek at the Gardner D. Stout Hall of Asian Peoples on our way out, and passed through the Akeley Hall of African Mammals on our way in. Mainly, we skipped out on fossils and the center for Earth and Space even though planetariums and dinosaurs are my jam.

hall-of-biodiversity

hall-of-biodiversity-amphibians

hall-of-biodiversity-crustaceans

hall-of-biodiversity-sharks

The Hall of Biodiversity was insanely awesome. It features more than 1,500 specimens and models, showcasing both the diversity of life on Earth and the threats to that life, including a timeline of the five previous mass extinctions. More than any museum exhibit I’ve ever seen, it serves as a call to action to guests to do what they can to preserve the variety of life teeming around them as each creature plays a important role.

milstein family hall of ocean life

eww some ocean creatures are not cute

hall of ocean life seals

hall of ocean life sharks

hall of ocean life

The Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life features, in addition to a 10.5 ton model of a blue whale suspended from the ceiling from a relatively small anchor point, some of the diversity of life in the sea, from the shores to the deep oceans. The quality of these displays are top-notch: if you can close your ears to the people around you, it’s almost like you’re underwater with these creatures. They also feature a squid vs whale sea battle, though it’s far from being the largest in the world.

a bugs life

The Life of the Forest Floor exhibit shows how terrifying it would be to be insect size. “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” doesn’t even begin to touch on the nightmare world beneath our feet. I don’t even like centipedes at centipede size. Centipedes the size of a horse? Kill me now.

tibetan-lamaistan-masks

Indian-rearing-wooden-horse

canadian ammonite

Up until The Hall of Meteorites, I was really impressed with the attention to detail and the care given to the museum’s subjects: to display them in a way that’s interesting and relevant to the modern viewer. However, some of the latter exhibits we visited have begun to show their age, the Earth and Planetary Sciences Halls in particular. The Hall of Meteorites is the only one that appears to have been touched since the 1970s; everything else has a display quality on par with the mineral exhibit we saw in some guy’s backyard near House on the Rock. Stained carpet everywhere, dusty exhibits, exhibits falling apart that haven’t been tended to, and a “wet paint” sign for paint that’s so old that the wall has since been scraped and chipped again. I know that minerals aren’t the most exciting subject, but there’s got to be a better way to display them than ringed in carpet. azurite-and-malachite-block radioactive minerals

realgar dust

wet paint

Overall, we enjoyed our visit to AMNH, and I think it would definitely warrant a repeat visit should we find ourselves in New York again. I just hope that some of our admission fee was earmarked toward updating some of the lesser-loved exhibits so that the museum can be truly distinguished in every way.

Evil Is Not A Scientific Word: The Jekyll & Hyde Club

  jekyll and hyde nyc lobby

When I talked about my upcoming trip to New York, my polite friends would inevitably inquire what sights were on the docket, and were generally perplexed when the first words that came out of my mouth were “I’m going to the horror Chuck E. Cheese!”  The look of confusion in their eyes would say everything. “Isn’t that just the regular Chuck E. Cheese?” “You’re going to a city with the best restaurants in the world and you’d choose Chuck E. Cheese?” “I bet the horror is what you find in the ball pit.” “What’s wrong with you?”

In some ways, The Jekyll & Hyde Club is the horror Chuck E. Cheese, but it’s also so much more: if Chuck E. Cheese and an English library and freak show shared a magical evening and somehow split their DNA three ways and had a baby, The Jekyll & Hyde Club would be that baby. Unlike Chuck E. Cheese, the animatronic parts of the restaurant were created much more recently than the 1970s, and they’re creepy in an enjoyable way, not a “I can’t believe they’d let that dusty half-rotted material jerk around near food intended for human consumption” way. No detail was neglected: the servers dressed like Victorian-era butlers, complete with bowler hats, every seat in the house was near something interesting to look at (unlike the sequestered mine area in Casa Bonita), there was even a secret entrance to the restrooms through the fireplace and down a book-lined corridor, AND in said restrooms sometimes a face would pop out at you in the mirror like the Bloody Mary nightmares of your childhood sleepovers….good thing you’d already let go of your bowels just minutes earlier! The eyes in some portraits would move. Other portraits would morph over time–sometimes it would look like a standard portrait, sometimes the subject would blink, slowly erupt in boils, his face would twist in pain, or the shadow of a tarantula would start crawling across. It was excellent. Truth be told, this place looks exactly how I’d decorate my house if I had infinite money and no one to tell me no. Except I’d also have a dinosaur room.

jekyll and hyde specimens

elephant head mountI was seated opposite this, so I had a lot of time to watch these most-excellent moving portraits.

king tut wall of skullsSometimes the pharoah would talk!

disco skeletons

Jekyll and hyde bar

shrunken head bar

jekyll and hyde mummy

fireplace werewolf mount

fireplace restroom entrance

hidden restroom doors

shark head mount

skeleton ventriloquist

wall of masks

zeus is pissed

drusilla dreadfulFrankly, I’ve seen a few dolls that are scarier than this.

jekyll and hyde conjoined dolls

jekyll and hyde mermaid tank

jekyll and hyde haunted house

What I didn’t know was that the Jekyll & Hyde Club also contained its own haunted house: The Chamber of Horrors. If I hadn’t already decided to visit, this would have sealed the deal for me. Objectively, it’s not the best haunted house I’ve ever been to–it was fairly evident that there were only a few employees working inside and they relied overly much on the room being pitch black for scares. However, just having the place to ourselves was enough to make it better than our experience at Halloween Horror Nights Orlando : it’s hard to be scared with a line of bros penguin walking with their arms around their girlfriends in front of you. I don’t know how the experience would change when the restaurant is full. The night that we went was relatively dead and we were some of the last people through the maze before it closed for the night.

mad science experiment

frankenstein lives

They also put on combination live/animatronic show every so often (Every hour? Two hours? We only saw one while we were there, so it’s not often enough to be obnoxious) that was definitely Frankensteinian in nature, not Jekyll and Hyde. Not that I’m complaining! The show was entertaining, the actors looked like they were having fun, and the audience was definitely into it, which are all important elements to keep it from from feeling sad and awkward.

It’s weird to talk about a restaurant and not mention the food, right? I went in with really low expectations, because restaurants in this category rarely make food that you feel enthusiastic about eating, and I ended up being more than pleasantly surprised, as was Jason. Granted, the things that we ordered were hard to mess up (a Memphis burger and a margherita pizza, respectively), neither one of us have food critic tendencies, and we were both quite hungry, so a boiled shoe probably would have been acceptable at that point in time as long as it was a large one. Still, I would say that it outclasses many of its theme restaurant peers. As far as prices go, I didn’t find it shockingly expensive save for the stupid-expensive drink I ordered ($20!!! In USD! For a drink that didn’t get me drunk!)–in general, the prices seem in line with other theme restaurants. They do tack on a $3 “entertainment fee” per person which is a little annoying, but seems reasonable by comparison to Casa Bonita‘s insistence that no one may enter without purchasing an entire meal. Neither would be preferable, but ultimately $3 is negligible. The Chamber of Horrors isn’t included in that $3 fee, it comes at an additional charge which varies depending on whether or not you’re dining at the restaurant.

I would say that the biggest downsides to the Jekyll and Hyde club are that it’s in Times Square (which is all-around horrible unless you are a fundamentally different sort of person who enjoys massive crowds of people wandering aimlessly and excruciatingly slowly in a mall filled with stores you have at home and advertisements flashing at you on all sides…it’s like walking in a stinky, annoying, pop-up banner), the seats all have arms which make them difficult to climb into when you’re butted back to back with another customer, and your experience is wholly dependent on how much effort the employees are willing to put forth into their performances. None of these caveats would prevent me from going back, should I find myself in NYC at some point in the future. In fact, I think Casa Bonita has a serious contender for the title of “most exciting restaurant in the world.”