For the past two weeks, Shirley has been cat/housesitting gig at a beautiful townhome in Tribeca. When I say beautiful, I mean multimillion dollar, 7-level, floor-to-ceiling-window, mid-century-modern-design-furniture-from-wall-to-wall beautiful. (Shirley is gainfully employed and really doesn’t need to catsit for money, but I can see why she took this one.) As it is kind of creepy to stay alone in such a vast space—and because I really like their self-cleaning espresso machine—I’ve been staying there, too. And while it was a little weird at first to have to climb three flights of stairs to get from the kitchen to the bedroom, after a few days of lounging about and sipping on iced lattes, I had to admit that I could get used to this kind of life.
But it’s been two weeks now, and I’m really ready for this mini-vacation to come to an end. I love the cats, and the place is as beautiful as ever, but there’s something about Tribeca that gets to me. I’d never spent much time in the neighborhood before, and now I know why. Sure, there’s a certain (small… very small) rush one gets peering out the window of sitting at ‘wichcraft and seeing Dennis Leary pedal by on his bicycle, but that’s really no substitute for what the neighborhood lacks. Despite its beautiful historic buildings and narrow, winding cobblestone alleys, Tribeca is missing the energy that one finds in other, similarly scenic New York neighborhoods.
Tribeca fills the gap between the Financial District and SoHo, and does so in just the way one might imagine. Having diluted the “hipness” of SoHo—if it can still be called that—so as to make it palatable for the financial types a few blocks down on Wall Street, the cobblestone streets of Tribeca are lined with restaurants that, for the most part, are expensive purely because they can be. They’re the kind of places a guy might take his date just to show her he can afford it. Maybe there’s a premium for using the word “Bistro” in your name, and I guess the overhead on tight black t-shirts for all those servers must be pretty high. Or maybe whatever magic they’re doing to that brown butter sage sauce is really worth it, but having tried one of the more moderately priced of these restaurants (one with a good reputation, even), I kind of doubt it.
I have a love/hate relationship with my own neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. Among New Yorkers, Park Slope is mostly known as a breeding ground for hyper-PC thirtysomethings. I like to say it’s where hipsters go to die. The neighborhood is epitomized by the Tea Lounge, a kid-friendly coffee shop with daytime children’s song singalongs, and the Park Slope Food Coop, which has a reputation for fantastic produce and a Stalinist member base. Given my extremely close proximity to both of these institutions, I am truly in the nexus of the Park Slope storm. This is at once wonderfully convenient and tremendously irritating.
Sometimes the myriad of strollers (and the self-righteous parents pushing them) gets me down, and as a member of the Coop, I’ve had my fair share of run-ins with kooky socialists. But there’s more to Park Slope than that. There are good restaurants and bars, Prospect Park, trees along the streets, historic brownstown buildings, and stoops—beautiful stoops on which I’ve whiled away countless hours watching people—dog-walking, stroller-pushing, organic-Swiss-chard-eating, Coop-membership- having people.
Staying in Tribeca has renewed my love of Brooklyn and Park Slope. I love Manhattan, but the college feel of the East Village just isn’t for me anymore, SoHo feels too trendy, and Tribeca has the beautiful old buildings and quaint streets but all the enthusiasm of a GM shareholders meeting. It’s a nice place to visit, but right now at least, I’m glad I don’t live there.