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June 8th, 2003 |
As part of my infantile birthday demands, I insisted that everyone accompany me to the Queens Museum at Flushing Meadows (yeah, we all thought about that Simpson’s episode, too) to see the giant diorama of NYC as well as the highly impressive Unisphere.
Of course it was pouring raining. I was done in by the few errands I did that morning on Flatbush and said maybe we should just postpone until tomorrow or whenever. But by that point, there was all this momentum and we’d even snagged Jon to come along with us before going back to Philadelphia. I sketched out this incredibly round about way of getting there that would limit our rain saturation. This brilliant plan resulted in getting to Shea Stadium stop on the 7 line a little after four o’clock, just forty-five minutes before the museum closed, as well as a long walk through the old world’s fair grounds, which allowed all of us to get completely soaked anyway.
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One can only hope that thousands of years from now Planet of the Apes-style archeologists will be baffled by this remnant of the world’s fair.
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Behold!
I’d been wanting to visit this even before I moved to New York (check out thislife.org and search ‘Welcome to America’) and was happy to see that it was just as impressive as I’d imagined. Though I did think the model would strive a little harder to look like the city. The non-realistic colors and white (!) bridges made the diorama seem like a vast birthday cake.
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The Empire State Building.
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The Starrett Lehigh building (the terra cotta building in the center) is where I work. It’s cool to see the center of my Manhattan day depicted here with the train yards to the left and projects above, but there’s a whole building missing to the right of us (I think it’s a sanitation building) and that pier jutting out from the building is gone as well. But it’s cool that I can see the terrace where I smoke cigarettes.
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Coney Island, minimalistically re-imagined.
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Trash in Staten Island.
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Giant ice cream treats satelliting us in heaven.
At this point, Katherine stepped in as navigator and got our group back home to Brooklyn in about half the time it took to get out there. There wasn’t much time after that to get to The Jekyll and Hyde Club for dinner. On the way there, I found a copy of Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends and Influence People”. It’s pretty dated and hillarious. One of the six ways of making people like you is to model your behavior after Dale’s loveable mutt, Tippy, who from his description was kind of a pathetic doormat for the author. But while glancing at this on the train, there was massive friend-building and (perhaps?) influencing going on in my subway car. This multi-ethnic group of young Spice-Girl-esque women got invited to a party by a white guy with dreads and Seatle ‘92 look. Directly across from me, a goth couple playing some kind of gin-rummy with tarot cards befriended a group of heavily-pierced Goths at the NYU stop. And there just this over all suspicious amount of smiling and cooing going on.
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The wheelchair-bound grandma pops five feet out of her chair if you try to touch her.
Dinner here turned out to be a blast. Bartow, Ginny, Karen, Dan, Katherine, Jeremy, Mary, Jonathan and Anna met me there. The staff had super fakey British accents (except for our waiter, who seemed to really be from the UK) and there were animatronic robots and skeletons built into the walls that they did little routines with. Plus, there was a floor show, which was next to impossible to see. If you’re ever thinking of going here, insist on first floor seating. At one point, a giant statue of Zeus started singing the Three’s Company theme. This was exactly the kind of place I daydreamed about going to when I was a kid, so I’m glad I got to go now that I am truly no longer a kid.
