…where the United Nations General Assembly has begun! This is always a fun time in the neighborhood, mostly because I like the vibe, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also get a kick out of hearing people complain about traffic disruptions in Midtown Manhattan.
Today’s big disruption struck a little close to home, though—I wasn’t allowed to leave my block because somebody called “the president” was going to be passing by. I believe this is the closest I have been to a president (and the closest I’m likely to come for a while):
What a jerk!
What’s going on in your neighborhood?
jackmac
No presidents here. Going out to walk the dog.
Baud
@jackmac:
I’m right here, bub.
Starfish
He should be riding a bicycle to show his commitment to the green new deal.
HeleninEire
@Baud: No. You are still just running.
dilbert dogbert
Back in the day Big Bad Bill landed at Moffett Field and us Silly Serpants got to view the ceremony. The veting was minimal. My camera was inspected by a young woman and handed back to me. I was in the first row of greeters and thrust my camera in his face and took pictures. It was fun watching. Bill was certainly having fun.
I don’t know if this site allows links to Shutterfly. If it does I can post a link.
debbie
I always hated that week in NYC. I remember standing at 57th and 3rd for a half-hour waiting for GHWB’s motorcade, and years later Clinton’s, to zip by.
Major Major Major Major
@dilbert dogbert: should be fine!
NotMax
Lived for a time at 40th and 2nd. Frequently had occasion to go up and down the stairs at the rear of Tudor City, which let out right across from the UN.
dr. bloor
What’s your taste for tales of uber-backups on the Hutch, Cross County, and Henry Hudson this morning because the commuter flow to the East Side was shut down?
ASKING FOR FRIEND.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
I’m watching the election returns for the Canuck election and the commentators are complaining that the 35 day election season was toooo long.
NotMax
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
In fairness, there are parts of Canada where the day(light) is what – 16, 18, 20 hours long?
:)
Dan B
In other U.N. news Bolsonaro was made to eat outside at a pizza joint because he wouldn’t show proof of vaccination.
Major Major Major Major
@Dan B: LOVE IT
@dr. bloor: Can you work from home for a bit?
Poe Larity
Why didn’t he just take Amtrak?
Citizen_X
@Dan B: Really? That’s awesome! Welcome to New York, asshole.
Martin
@Dan B: NY restaurant owners are not known for their tolerance of rule breakers.
schrodingers_cat
In my neighborhood leaves are turning color and its no longer feels like I am in the tropics. We had a very wet summer this year,
Baud
@Dan B:
No indoor dining for you!
Doug R
I remember one of the times during the Obama/Biden era when there was a summit in Vancouver we saw Air Force 2 take off and fly over us, probably with Biden aboard.
Chacal Charles Caltrop
@Baud: that made me laugh out loud
NYCMT
The last time I was in the Secretariat, you could park the school van underneath in the parking lot. Anyway, four years ago my wife and I went on a date to the Upper West Side to ogle art and scout out driving paths to the Klingenstein Pavilion at Mount Sinai since my wife was six months schwanger with numero duo. It was the beginning of UN Week.
We had a date! On the east side. Forest Hills to 84th and 1st in seventeen minutes, which boded well for the main event in December. Lunch at a Japanese place on 81st and 2nd. Chocolate dessert babka – I mean, I’m sorry Eli Zabar, “Russian Coffee Cake”. The old Whitney I mean the Met Breuer! for some random Modigliani knockoffs and *impressively* ugly Italian modernist design. Ettore Sottsass. A cabinet in the shape of Chartres Cathedral, upended on its nave, with golden doors where its cellar floor would have been, and, um, I guess drinks? Oh la magnifica cultura degli anni ’80. (The 1990 vintage payphones in the basement next to the bathrooms have become part of the modern design exhibit, I shit you not).
Then, home. Or so we thought.
The GPS on the phone said take East End to the 59th street bridge, and then had a seizure. The esplanade park east of East End in the eighties is pretty! and then we got on the FDR, and hmm… why is the 63rd St. exit to the 59th street bridge blocked by New York’s Finest? Okay we’ll take the tunnel. Zoom zoom thud at 38th. Is…is that the traffic to the QMT? all the way down to 35th and back up? There must be a way around this oh, we’ll go up 1st-
AND WE WERE STUCK IN THE 44th ST TUNNEL IN FRONT OF TRUMP HOTEL FOR A HALF HOUR. A pair of outta borough cigarette-smoking toughs in a next-lane Jaguar convertible got irritated at the honking misery of a pair of livery cars behind us, and got out of their Jaguar and started calling shots at the drivers of the livery cabs “YOU WANT TO MOVE? MOVE ON ME MOTHERFUCKER HONK YOUR FUCKING HORN ONE MORE TIME!”
[coda. the tough guys got back in their Jag and the livery cars started honking again]
The traffic stretched north on First as far as the eye could see. I made an illegal left from the leftmost express northbound lane from first avenue to east Forty Sixth, and thence to Second where I was *sure* – Holy shit, the cops have blocked off 46th east of Second? —
so the die was cast.
We were for the QMT. Down Second Avenue.
From 846 Second Avenue, north of 45th Street, to the entrance ramp to the QMT, eight blocks, took an hour and half. There were cops everywhere but none directing traffic.
There were State Department security detachments in armored GMC Yukons. There were Escalades, Suburbans, Lexuses. There were *also* jitneys, cabs, botoxed becollagened BMW-driving tanning bed AARP Manhattan moms driving north on Second Avenue. North. Yes. North.
I have never seen such gridlock. We talked to the Best Man on the carphone. We listened to Chopin. We laughed at the absurdity of life.
and finally, we got home.
Starfish
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: So when are we moving to Canada?
Mary G
I came face-to-face with an ex-President twice. It was rather nerve wracking. In those days the rich didn’t cocoon themselves away from the rabble as much. There was only one gated community and the gate was usually open because the residents felt the guard was a nuisance.
PsiFighter37
I hate UN week in NYC.
schrodingers_cat
@Mary G: Nixon?
cain
@dilbert dogbert:
I had one pretty close – whenI worked with Intel, Obama came to chat with the CEO at the silicon fabrication plant here in Hillsboor, OR.
Obama was in the next building over – about 10 minutes walk. In fact, that is when I created a twitter account and watching his motorcade coming via twitter. :-) Good stuff!
NotMax
@NYCMT
Headed for 125th Street to zip across the Triborough and thence ease onto the Grand Central in Queens?
Major Major Major Major
One fun thing about NYC is the subway. You guys know they have that right.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Just avoid the Q train.
//
Another Scott
@Doug R: A former neighbor was a pilot with the AF group that flew the VP and SoS everywhere. He was gone a lot when Hillary was SoS…
I asked him if he was going to be a commercial pilot when he retired, he said no way. He’d had more than enough of being away from home.
Cheers,
Scott.
laura
That guy was just up the street the other day and his helicopter flotilla was the point of interest for spouse’s bike ride. That guy sure does get around.
Any chance you might reward the blog with a quick photo of that lovely fog-pelted snappy bow tie wearing moggie?
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Retro cool that there’s still signage with now obsolete terminology. (H&M stood for the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, later – and currently – known as PATH.)
NYCMT
@NotMax: Since Second is one way south, I imagine the counter-current swimming salmon drivers had some bizarre inkling of that.
It added to the frustration of the evening.
Shana
I shook Obama’s hand once. In 2009 my daughter worked on the Creigh Deeds campaign for Governor of Virginia. She got me in, without having to pay the minimum $500 for the event, to see Obama stump for him. I was standing next to a woman who had been in Obama’s law school class. When he came down the rope line to shake hands with everyone she reminded him they’d been in the same class and said “you know, we have a reunion coming up. I hear you have room.” He laughed, genuinely it seemed, but he’s a pro so who knows. Anyway a lovely memory.
Yutsano
My closest Obama moment was in 2012 when he came to our building. We were all told we couldn’t go downstairs (we were working anyway) and the building was in basic lockdown. It was when he was in Seattle for like a day. It was a really quick trip. Messed up traffic at SEA like nothing.
jonas
I was driving home from a dinner one evening in Santa Monica years ago and all of a sudden about a million flashing police lights appear in my rear-view mirror. A motorcycle cop roars up beside me and motions us to pull over, so we do, along with the rest of the traffic. Then I notice that all the cross-streets are being blocked by police cruisers. He speeds off. Behind him come like 20 more motorcycle cops, dozens of cruisers, all whizzing by, lights blazing, followed by like 10 huge black secret service SUVs followed by two presidential limos, followed by like 50 more motorbikes and police cruisers.
So I turn on the traffic radio, and evidently it was Bill Clinton returning to LAX from a swanky fundraiser in Pacific Palisades or something. A presidential motorcade is quite a spectacle.
A Streeter
@jonas: I had a similar experience on my bike on the way to work in Washington, DC one morning, also during Bill Clinton’s presidency. That’s actually the only time I’ve encountered a presidential motorcade in all my years in DC.
West of the Cascades
I passed the former guitar player for a moderately well-known band who lives in my neighborhood on the street recently (Peter Buck of R.E.M.).
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
The Cathedral branch of NYPL is at 50th and Lexington Ave, halfway between the subway and the street. (Hell of a strange real estate deal once.) It’s across from the Waldorf-Astoria and got frozen endlessly when presidents were in town. Misery to try and run it then.
Mary Ellen Sandahl
My sis and I saw Bill Clinton from maybe 25 feet at a campaign stop during his first Prez run, at a small but rather well-known university here in northern NJ. Drizzly, cool September day, and all the local Dems had been alerted, so there was a goodish crowd waiting outside one of the main buildings in front of a small temporary podium. He was late, naturally – this was one of a chain of stump stops – but nobody minded. He looked great, ruddy and full of mojo (I heard one woman say appreciatively, “He looks like Kennedy”} and tailored his standard speech to the occasion by tutoring us on the history of the school (a post-Civil War Methodist Seminary that branched out into liberal education), which he had probably been reading up on while motorcading. Real quick study, our Bill. It was great. We were damp, happy Dems.
My brother and sis-in-law had a convivial chat at a local Dem function (central NJ) with Biden during, I think, Obama’s second campaign. He stood next to my sister-in-law, who’s a tall, good-looking woman then in her mid-60s, and as the three of them talked he rubbed her back a bit. She reminisced about this in an email convo we had back in the Spring of 2020 when various parties were trying to gin up interest in Tara Reade’s fabulations. It didn’t make her feel uncomfortable. “That old Joe!” she said, and I could see her grinning thru the e-mail.
Three-nineteen
I know this thread is dead, but I wanted to complain about the time that Obama had me stuck in traffic for over an hour while trying to buy brats because HE wanted to go buy kringle. Not cool, dude.
He went to O&H Bakery in Racine, WI which meant they had to secure a main road in from the interstate, basically cutting the bottom half of the county off from the top half. I didn’t realize he was here and didn’t leave early enough. I got to the butcher OK but couldn’t get back home.