![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trip report/The Hudson Hotel
Made it to NYC with little ado (a teaspoon of cough medicine taken half an hour before boarding the red-eye flight is a remarkably helpful thing) and proceded to potch around the city of my birth for most of the day; had coffee with my friend Lucie, then made it back to Tor to pick up ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
claireeddy to go back to her apartment. Made it there just before the thunderstorms hit, and had a riotous dinner of takeout Chinese, and an eccentric triple feature: Richard III (the Ian McKellan version); DeLovely, and The Bandwagon. Much singing and comments (the only one that I still remember was "I see London, I see France, I see Cyd Charisse's underpants!" which, lamentably, was mine). Sunday Claire and I hit the Met to see the new Classical wing (they got all the stuff out of the basement and onto view; some of it is just breathtaking) and then hared off to Brooklyn for a lovely dinner with pnh and tnh and their friend Lydy.
Sunday I left Claire's to check in to the Hudson Hotel for the night (through the kind offices of Priceline.com; thank you, William Shatner). I have entertained myself with the image of an SF convention being held in this place: it's one of the new boutique high-style hotels, so stylish there is no signage anywhere. From the street it looks like a longshoreman's union hall (at least until evening, when the windows onto the street glow yellow-green in a strip across the slab of concrete that is the front). I walked by three times before I decided to chance the door. Once inside and up the escalator (which is clad in yellow-green plexiglass) you find yourself in a reception area so dim that you can barely see your way across to the desk. All dark wood, eccentric furniture, and the reception desk itself is a long bar of dark wood with carvings, accented to one side by a massive crystal chandelier which should not go with anything else in the room but somehow does. At the desk the corps of clerks--women in boatneck black knit dresses with 3/4 sleeves, men in white shirts, black sweater vests and black trousers, all of them young and handsome--checked me in and sent me on my way with great cheer. Upstairs--the material says that the gestalt of the hotel is "ocean liner". I can tell you that the hallways, dark, painted gunmetal gray, and narrow, certainly called to mind the belly of a very chic ship.
The room was a little bijou. Little. Bijou. The hallway (three feet by six) is white, with a cubby for hanging away clothes, etc. The bathroom next door is five feet by six, white, and extraordinarily stylish. Then, the room itself. I estimate it was ten feet square. The same dark wood on floors and walls, a big square window on the far wall; and dead center against that wall a pillowy white queen size bed, flanked by stainless steel side tables. Impeccably tidy. Turn around and you realize that there's a window into the bathroom which allows natural light into the bathroom and a view of the tub from the bedroom. Stainless steel desk and chair. And a dark wood cabinet that contains the tiny TV, a stereo system, and a basket of highly expensive trifles--T-shirt, hat, $4 Kit Kat bars, and my favorite, an "intimacy kit" which includes two condoms, two individual-portion tubes of KY jelly, and two moistened towelettes, all for $12. Looked at dispassionately, it's really just a place to sleep while you're living La Vida Loca in NY, but it sure is a shiny place. And everyone--the maids (Polish, rather than Latina...that's how I know I'm in NY), the porters who checked my bags the next day, the people you pass in the hallway--is young and fit and cheery. Wow.
At 4pm I arrived at Grant's Tomb, where the camp bus decamped Younger Girl, who has a new camp name: Avocado. She is beautiful, bronzed, and goofy. Filled with stories and gossip about camp-mates--one of whom, O, Glory, lives only 45 minutes from us. So we returned to the Castle of Style, dropped off her bags, and went off to complete a family ritual: dinner at Shun Lee, a high style Chinese place across from Lincoln Center. Killed some time at Barnes and Noble, then went to see a late showing of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, since Younger Girl/Avocado had been movie deprived all summer.
Next morning we packed up and headed north to meet my Lovely In-Laws at the Museum of Natural History. On a Monday morning in August, the place is packed (I remember lazy afterschool wanders through the Museum with toddlers; all the children would meet and race around like mad fiends under the whale...this was not that kind of day). My in-laws carry a chaos field with them; F-i-L is ninety, and his hearing is erratic; in order to locate them in the scrum of the museum I called their cell phone, which he answered, and then waved in the air while instructing his wife as to which way to turn, effectively rendering my attempts to find out where the hell they were useless. We did finally find each other (my F-i-L uses a wheelchair in places like the Museum, which are foot-intensive). The rest of the visit was spent occasionally appreciating the Museum and largely trying to decide where we were going to eat lunch. The Museum used to have a nice sit down restaurant; they now have a classy cafeteria instead. Eventually we made a decision, milled through the lines, and ate a very nice lunch together. Then they drove us to Newark airport (another Dagwood and Blondie sort of exercise, as my M-i-L keeps instructing her husband and he keeps ignoring her loudly; it's a time-honored and very affectionate way). But we got to the airport, and thence to the airplane and thence to San Francisco, with only the usual amount of stress. And we are now a two-child-one-dog household, which is a fine thing.
claireeddy to go back to her apartment. Made it there just before the thunderstorms hit, and had a riotous dinner of takeout Chinese, and an eccentric triple feature: Richard III (the Ian McKellan version); DeLovely, and The Bandwagon. Much singing and comments (the only one that I still remember was "I see London, I see France, I see Cyd Charisse's underpants!" which, lamentably, was mine). Sunday Claire and I hit the Met to see the new Classical wing (they got all the stuff out of the basement and onto view; some of it is just breathtaking) and then hared off to Brooklyn for a lovely dinner with pnh and tnh and their friend Lydy.Sunday I left Claire's to check in to the Hudson Hotel for the night (through the kind offices of Priceline.com; thank you, William Shatner). I have entertained myself with the image of an SF convention being held in this place: it's one of the new boutique high-style hotels, so stylish there is no signage anywhere. From the street it looks like a longshoreman's union hall (at least until evening, when the windows onto the street glow yellow-green in a strip across the slab of concrete that is the front). I walked by three times before I decided to chance the door. Once inside and up the escalator (which is clad in yellow-green plexiglass) you find yourself in a reception area so dim that you can barely see your way across to the desk. All dark wood, eccentric furniture, and the reception desk itself is a long bar of dark wood with carvings, accented to one side by a massive crystal chandelier which should not go with anything else in the room but somehow does. At the desk the corps of clerks--women in boatneck black knit dresses with 3/4 sleeves, men in white shirts, black sweater vests and black trousers, all of them young and handsome--checked me in and sent me on my way with great cheer. Upstairs--the material says that the gestalt of the hotel is "ocean liner". I can tell you that the hallways, dark, painted gunmetal gray, and narrow, certainly called to mind the belly of a very chic ship.
The room was a little bijou. Little. Bijou. The hallway (three feet by six) is white, with a cubby for hanging away clothes, etc. The bathroom next door is five feet by six, white, and extraordinarily stylish. Then, the room itself. I estimate it was ten feet square. The same dark wood on floors and walls, a big square window on the far wall; and dead center against that wall a pillowy white queen size bed, flanked by stainless steel side tables. Impeccably tidy. Turn around and you realize that there's a window into the bathroom which allows natural light into the bathroom and a view of the tub from the bedroom. Stainless steel desk and chair. And a dark wood cabinet that contains the tiny TV, a stereo system, and a basket of highly expensive trifles--T-shirt, hat, $4 Kit Kat bars, and my favorite, an "intimacy kit" which includes two condoms, two individual-portion tubes of KY jelly, and two moistened towelettes, all for $12. Looked at dispassionately, it's really just a place to sleep while you're living La Vida Loca in NY, but it sure is a shiny place. And everyone--the maids (Polish, rather than Latina...that's how I know I'm in NY), the porters who checked my bags the next day, the people you pass in the hallway--is young and fit and cheery. Wow.
At 4pm I arrived at Grant's Tomb, where the camp bus decamped Younger Girl, who has a new camp name: Avocado. She is beautiful, bronzed, and goofy. Filled with stories and gossip about camp-mates--one of whom, O, Glory, lives only 45 minutes from us. So we returned to the Castle of Style, dropped off her bags, and went off to complete a family ritual: dinner at Shun Lee, a high style Chinese place across from Lincoln Center. Killed some time at Barnes and Noble, then went to see a late showing of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, since Younger Girl/Avocado had been movie deprived all summer.
Next morning we packed up and headed north to meet my Lovely In-Laws at the Museum of Natural History. On a Monday morning in August, the place is packed (I remember lazy afterschool wanders through the Museum with toddlers; all the children would meet and race around like mad fiends under the whale...this was not that kind of day). My in-laws carry a chaos field with them; F-i-L is ninety, and his hearing is erratic; in order to locate them in the scrum of the museum I called their cell phone, which he answered, and then waved in the air while instructing his wife as to which way to turn, effectively rendering my attempts to find out where the hell they were useless. We did finally find each other (my F-i-L uses a wheelchair in places like the Museum, which are foot-intensive). The rest of the visit was spent occasionally appreciating the Museum and largely trying to decide where we were going to eat lunch. The Museum used to have a nice sit down restaurant; they now have a classy cafeteria instead. Eventually we made a decision, milled through the lines, and ate a very nice lunch together. Then they drove us to Newark airport (another Dagwood and Blondie sort of exercise, as my M-i-L keeps instructing her husband and he keeps ignoring her loudly; it's a time-honored and very affectionate way). But we got to the airport, and thence to the airplane and thence to San Francisco, with only the usual amount of stress. And we are now a two-child-one-dog household, which is a fine thing.