My Dinner with Arthur, part 2

While we were sitting in the Oyster Bar, downstairs in Grand Central Station, Arthur found out I'd never been to New York City before. And, as expected, he was rather surprised by that, and suggested that after dinner, we walk over to Rockefeller Center, so I can take a look at that.

Sounded good to me.

Let me say this again: Arthur is considerably smaller than I am, but moves at twice the speed. And we were on his territory.

So, I've been in New York something like two hours, and I'm walking the streets with Arthur Frommer. It's too good to be true. The man just takes charge of situations. When we got to the Center and the ice rink was closed--which would make me just go look for something else to do--he went and found out why.

There were tulips everywhere.

"We're only a block or two from Carnegie Hall," he said. "Would you like to see that?"

Of course.

We ended up walking as far as Lincoln Center, skirting the edge of Central Park. We talked about travel, we talked about New York, and we went inside a new building that had, as Arthur pointed out, one of the largest pieces of glass imaginable, what looked like several thousand square feet in a single pane, all watched over by a Botero sculpture.

At one point, he told me about his first guidebook to New York. There wasn't much time to write it, and he needed to put in restaurants, so he just put in the ones he went to all the time. A bit later, there was a review of his book, comparing it to a guide that specialized in restaurants. And still, somehow, they liked his picks better.

Outside his apartment building, he gave me very careful directions as to how to get back to my hotel. He'd pointed out the NYC grid system a couple times, and he was right: straight down to Times Square, hang a left, and I was pretty much there.

At no point did I tell him that the whole idea of walking alone in New York City had me a little tense.

We shook hands, and I started walking. The town was different now than it had been just a few hours before, when I'd arrived, following my friend Marie's careful directions on how to get from the bus stop to my hotel. Arthur had made the city understandable--the task of a guidebook writer, and of course, he's the best there ever was.

I walked through Times Square, walked past the lions on the library, all the while expecting to feel the same kind of waves of evil that I always feel in Los Angeles, and what really came out--so surprisng to my claustrophobic mind--was that NYC was actually pretty relaxed. Yeah, it's too crowded, yes, it could use considerably more sky.

But it was a place that was designed for people, not, like LA, for machines. It was a human city.

Before I left town, I did another walk, this time with Marie and another friend, Reid, who also wrote guidebooks to NYC. First Marie took me over to New Jersey, so we could take the train back up into the WTC site. Then we met Reid, and went down to Wall Street--Reid pointed out where the original tree had been where trading first took place--down to the Battery so I could see the Statue of Liberty, and past the Museum of the American Indian, where Reid pointed out the Tlingit-style raven on the back of one of the statues on the steps.

I told them about my dinner with Arthur.

And they told me about their city.

And here's the thing: I never would have known what they were talking about had I not gotten to go out with Arthur first. He made the city understandable to me. He turned it into a place, instead of a thing.

I've written guidebooks for more than fifteen years, and I'm pretty good at it.

But that's a lesson from the master.