On the first Saturday in March, my roommate Jake, his girlfriend Margaret and I decided to go on an adventure in the city. The plan came together haphazardly: I wanted to go to Arthur Avenue, Jake suggested we tack on the Bronx Zoo, and then we stopped in Sable’s on the way, as it was near Margaret’s Upper East Side apartment. Like any good trip, the whole plan was new. I think Jake was most excited to see a red panda, which the zoo website promised we’d see, and I had heard about the true Little Italy in the Bronx, and knew if I didn’t rip the bandaid sometime I’d never go. Margaret, as a local New Yorker, had seen the zoo, tasted most authentic Italian food and ate at Sable’s regularly, but she came along for the ride just the same.
We started the day at Sable’s, which is an unassuming “appetizing” store on 2nd Ave, between 77th and 78th, and a true mecca of smoked fish. I wonder whether that will resonate with people outside of the city, for whom that probably sounds disgusting and connotes the aroma of a Chinatown sidewalk. For me, however, Sable’s was truly that: paradise. We walked in and, like kids in Dylan’s Candy Bar, were stunned into silence by the trays of richly colored salmon and heaping bowls of seafood salads. So overwhelmed were our faces that the guy behind the counter – a Latino man serving traditional Jewish foods in an establishment run by Asians, how New York! – took a big spoonful of one of the salads, lathered it onto a slice of baguette and handed it to us. “Baked salmon and whitefish salad,” he grunted. “You’ll love it.” I did love it. I had come all the way from Brooklyn with the intention of getting something more standard, like a bagel with lox and cream cheese, and maybe trying something else on the side, but one bite of that concoction and my mind was made up, and before I knew it I had ordered baked salmon and whitefish salad on an everything bagel – and a quarter pound of pastrami lox on the side for good measure. The salty, fishy flavor of whitefish, which I had tried once or twice before elsewhere, was cut perfectly by the sweetness of the salmon, and the spoonfuls of mayo holding it all together didn’t hurt. I wolfed down half of the bagel before Jake and Margaret had even gotten their sandwiches, and spent most of the time they were eating agonizing over whether to buy something else. Jake, who was also given a sample of the salmon and whitefish, ordered the same, while Margaret got her “standard” order: pastrami lox with scallion cream cheese on an everything bagel. Oh, to be able to call that my standard! I thought jealously.
From Sable’s, we walked ten or so blocks uptown and jumped on the 4 train at 86th Street to head to the zoo. The “breakfast” food we had just eaten, which was rich enough to make walking feel like a crime, sat heavy in our stomachs as we wound our way, above and below ground, out past Yankee stadium into the Bronx. Jake and I, fascinated to have a local in her natural habitat, spent the trip peppering Margaret with questions about her childhood in the city, about recess in Central Park and the places that had been off limits, which ironically had been practically nowhere other than the 86th Street we had just come from.
When we got off at Fordham Ave, we wound our way east, through Little Italy, and made note of places to come back to on our way home: Borgatti’s Ravioli and Egg Noodles, Tra di Noi, Casa della Mozarella. Visually, it was all a bit disappointing, and felt very much like a relic, a typical Bronx neighborhood with some authentic Italian storefronts remaining, instead of a true ethnic hub like Chinatown. The financial strain of the place felt palpable: If Manhattan’s Little Italy was struggling, I thought, I don’t see how this place could be doing any better. As we passed hanging legs of prosciutto, big vats of creamy mozzarella and fresh loaves of bread, I was tempted to get a quick second breakfast, but thought better of it. We had a plan to stick to, and the food would taste better on an empty stomach anyway. So we crossed through the neighborhood, out onto Southern Boulevard, and found ourselves at the side entrance to the Bronx Zoo.
The Bronx Zoo is not particularly crowded in early March, as one might imagine, but the scene at the ticket booth was bizarre. It was completely empty. I felt like Claudia, in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, preparing for a night spent alone in the zoo. Besides the two teens inside the booth, and one Russian family on the other side of the turnstile, it was clear that March was the time to visit if avoiding crowds was your game. The weather was also perfect, and the air felt crisp on our faces, just warm enough to be comfortable in a light jacket but a bit too windy to stand still for long. We bought our tickets and set off in the direction of the Madagascar House.
Inside, beyond those plastic flaps, which I hate to think served as a last wall of defense against animal escape, were a variety of lemur exhibits. Lemurs, if you’ve never seen one, are adorable and monkey-like, and these ones were particularly spotless and fluffy as they swung from branches, climbed their netting cages and, in one very human display, sat against the base of a tree and napped. The three species of Lemur at the zoo – Ring Tailed, Red Ruffed and Coquerel’s Sifaka – were all pop culture icons, with the Ring Tailed the lemurs in the movie Madagascar, the Sifaka the lemur in Zoboomafoo and the Red Ruffed bearing a spitting resemblance, as Margaret pointed out, to Danny Devito. Like the Dory and Nemo fish at my hometown aquarium in Baltimore, the recognizable lemurs really stole the show, and even the one other mammal in the exhibit, the cat-like Fossa, was famously the villain in Madagascar. Fossas look like muscular sphinx cats, without hair, and given that lemurs are part of their natural diet, I wondered what it was like having the creepy predators a few doors down from our furry friends. Beyond those two species, there was a relatively boring snake and a crocodile, but no mongoose, to my disappointment, either because they truly didn’t have one or because the exhibit was under construction – I can’t remember.
After Madagascar was the sea lion pool, which we determined to be, after listening to a guide nearby, essentially an underwater harem for one particularly blubbery male, who swam in circles “barking” to let all the other, non-existent sea lions in the Bronx know that these females were all his. Watching a couple of them suntan on the rocks, I couldn’t help but think of the movie 50 First Dates, where Adam Sandler’s sidekick, Alexa, gets thrown up on by a walrus. We didn’t see any handlers in the exhibit this time.
From there we went to the Birds of Prey, followed by the Aquatic Bird House, which was like downgrading from a Ferrari to a go-kart. The birds of prey – think bald eagle, snowy owl and vultures – were really impressive up close and so much bigger than I would have thought, having never been fortunate enough to stand three feet away from one. Unfortunately, that proximity was possible only because none of the birds, by any stretch of the imagination, could have flown in their tiny cages if they wanted to. I couldn’t help but remember, as we looked at the Andean condor, what a local guide had told me on a trip to Chile, that condors will regurgitate their food in distress in order to become light enough to take off. Any bird required to make those sorts of calculations would have no chance of flying in a 20×20 cage. It seemed almost criminal to keep a bald eagle, that emblem of liberty, subdued on a tree branch all day. Even their meals, which I would have thought provided some excitement in the day, were laying lifeless beside them, absolutely untouched. Rats killed in cold blood… and for what?
Luckily, any morality creeping up in the three of us was held at bay by the flamingos and other ridiculous species housed in the Aquatic Bird exhibits, which could have appropriately been called “Why God?” instead. All of us were shocked, truly blown away, by the height of a flamingo’s legs and by the length of their necks. Stretched out, they must have been ten feet tall, serving no clear biological purpose other than to shove their heads into the mud, expose their meaty bodies, and wait to be eaten. They seemed to have zero awareness of their surroundings, and were hardly interacting with each other at all, instead running through an endless loop of stretching their necks to full length, flapping their wings, and sticking their heads underwater. I can’t remember if they made any sounds, because the three of us were voicing over the scene with obnoxious Brooklyn accents: “Hey Sal, come get a look at this guy! His neck is so friggin’ short!”
Beyond the flamingos, the rest of the exhibit was just as bad: puffins, greasy penguins, and a mustachioed pigeon unattractively named a tern. Part of the problem was that the building, with so many wet, unwashed birds inside, smelled awful, like mildewy feathers, and didn’t feel remotely clean. Even the puffins, which I usually like to watch swim around, just looked old and yellowed, like the off-white hair of a cigar smoker. The birds are so non-threatening that the exhibits had no real barrier to escape, since, as various signs pointed out, “these birds find nothing appealing about the dark hallway.” Neither did we.
We also saw grizzly bears, the famous red (and lazy) panda, some bison and far too many snakes in the reptile house. We missed out on the tiger, dholes, which are like Asian foxes, and the gorillas, all of which were “weather permitting” exhibits and which helped explain why the zoo was so empty. None of the concessions were open, either, so it really did feel like we had somehow been allowed in by accident, and all the buildings had been left unlocked. We also, by that point, had wracked up somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand steps, and were ready to sit down, even if our stomachs weren’t yet fully prepared to be plowed with cheesy dough.
A place to sit down meant we were looking for one of two things: Italian meats or pizza. The meats we found at Joe’s Deli, where 187th Street intersects Crescent Avenue, and our first stop post-zoo. I had heard about Joe’s from my friend Eric, whose only piece of advice was to “get the truffle sandwich” and whose food opinions I trust above anyone else’s. Inside the store, chalkboard menus were everywhere, on each wooden beam and refrigerator case, but seeing no mention of any truffle sandwich (and with the same anxiety as at Sable’s) I went with a traditional Italian cold cut and some octopus (pulpo) salad on the side. While in line, we were startled to hear a man, who I presume to be the owner, yell “MATZ? Matz is what you get at a Jewish deli, in soup. We sell mut-za-relle here!” at a poor woman from somewhere like Iowa, who was suddenly regretting her decision to search for something “authentic”. An equally aggressive sign above the counter read, in anticipation of disgruntled regulars: “If you’re mad about the bag charge, blame De Blasio!”
Having seen the carnage at the front of line, when it came time for us to pay we did so as unassumingly as we could, taking our food to a table at the far end of the store, and avoiding eye contact with the generalissimo behind the counter. We even refrained, against our worse judgment, from making too many jokes, lest Big Tony hear them and knock us out cold with a firm salami. We actually ate mostly in silence, spending the time instead convincing ourselves that we were hungry enough to keep eating. The sandwiches were really good – not exceptional, but definitely good – and the crisp Italian bread and fresh meats, while not necessarily worth the long trip to get them, were well worth the detour on our longer adventure.
After Joe’s, we decided, ignoring our groaning stomachs, to get pizza down the street at Antonio’s Trattoria. I can’t fathom why we felt we needed another meal or how we each ate two slices of pizza (and an entire bread basket), but something about leaving Little Italy without it seemed like a mistake. I’ll leave it at this: the pizza was good, but in no world should good pizza require a two hour trip, not for a New Yorker. So I’ll come back for the lemurs, and grab a sandwich to go, but the pizza will most certainly be skipped over. Plus, we were so stuffed and repulsed by food that we decided not to buy any ravioli at Borgatti’s on the way home, which I regret more than ever as I sit here, quarantined, desperate for some quality Italian.
With a few weeks hindsight I have to say: I continue to be surprised by the quality of adventures I can have in my own city. What started as a spontaneous idea became something much larger, and on the ride back to Manhattan the three of us were silent, exhausted after five to six hours on our feet and lethargic from so much gluten. For others on the train, the ride into Manhattan was routine, the beginning to a night out or a shopping spree in Harold’s Square, but for us, it was reminiscent of a trip back to the hotel, after a long day of sightseeing and tourism in a foreign country. I felt as I always do in those situations: glad to have gone, but desperate to just be home, or back at the hotel.
I have always considered myself a traveler, and while that used to mean daydreaming of transatlantic flights and cheap Thai beers, lately I have found myself wanting to explore more of my immediate surroundings. Manhattan is amazing in itself, but the city’s proximity to so many unique places – Manhattan Beach, Bear Mountain, the George Washington Bridge, Flushing – makes long-distance travel seem like an unnecessary delay in the gratification I get when I discover a new place. Why fly when I can bike there instead? And if so many tourists are flocking to the city to explore, then maybe there is some wisdom in simply following their lead and exploring it myself. For those who are wary of local travel, or who prefer the idea of a far-off destination, I say: give it a shot, check out the lemurs.