Hotel Pennsylvania and Other New York Stories

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Photo: Massimo Salesi/Shutterstock

Caught between the twisted stars, the plotted lines, the faulty map
That brought Columbus to New York

Romeo Had Juliette – Lou Reed

In March 2005, I took my dear old ma to New York City and we stayed at the now-demolished Hotel Pennsylvania on 7^th Avenue. It was the 10^th anniversary of my dad’s death, and as ma’s oldest and least favorite son I felt a moral duty to do something ridiculously grandiose to take her mind off it. Mine, too, for that matter. Dad had passed away suddenly while making me a cup of tea and his anniversary had been playing on my mind like unresolved trauma tends to do. On top of that, I’d also been going through some major Category A life changes. In recent times I’d been divorced, made redundant, and had a significant health scare. You could say I was experiencing a midwife crisis.

It was my first trip to New York, something I’d wanted to do ever since I was a Marvel superhero comic-devouring kid. In my defense, that was long before my childhood fixations took over Hollywood. As I got older, my I Heart NY tendencies expanded to include Scorsese movies, the city’s rich comedy heritage, and just about any band that ever played at the Bowery’s legendary music venue, CBGBs. Maybe one day they’ll all get to take over Hollywood, too.

Our plane landed in Newark and we took a train to Manhattan’s Penn Street Station. Right across the street was the Hotel Pennsylvania. “Is the hotel far from here, Thomas?” asked ma.

“It’s right over there,” I said, pointing at the hotel.

She squinted at me, giving me a look of bemused bafflement that I’ve become accustomed to over the years. “You’re a case!” she said with a chuckle. “Never mind, I’ll ask that young couple over there.” She gestured towards a young Japanese man and woman exiting the station who looked just as touristy as we did. “You should always ask people for directions when you’re in a new place, Thomas.”

Ma marched up to the couple and asked, “Do you know where the Hotel Pennsylvania is?” They looked at each other and shrugged apologetically. She asked them again, “Do you know where the Hotel Pennsylvania is?” but this time in a louder, much slower voice.

An NYPD cop approached. “What seems to be the trouble, ma’am?”

“Do you know where the Hotel Pennsylvania is?” asked ma.

“It’s just across the street, ma’am,” said the policeman, gesturing towards me. “Right where that guy’s pointing.”

These streets will make you feel brand new
Big lights will inspire you

Empire State Of Mind – Jay-Z

Even then, the Hotel Pennsylvania looked like a faded relic of a bygone era and everything I wanted New York to be. The lobby was huge – I mean, really huge – with a long wall of old-school payphones making a brave last stand against obsolescence. I felt like Cary Grant during the opening scenes of North by Northwest, which is a hell of a feeling. You should try it sometime. Like me, Grant’s hero in the movie arrived with a mother in tow, although the actress playing her was only eight years older than him. Different times, I suppose.

I lugged our suitcases across the lobby and checked us in with a front desk guy who looked disturbingly like Harvey Keitel. Of course, this being New York, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that this was actually, really Harvey Keitel and I’d stumbled into some deep cover Lee Strasberg Method Acting op. Who knows? Maybe they had Robert De Niro on staff as a chambermaid.

As I showed Front Desk Keitel our passports and filled in the paperwork, ma said “Thomas, tell the man to put me in a nice room.”

“You can tell him yourself, ma,” I said. “He’s right there.”

“I’ll make sure you get a nice room, ma’am,” he grunted. “That’s five nights, including breakfast.”

Ma nudged me sharply. “Thomas, ask the man if we’ll be getting breakfast.” Front Desk Keitel scowled intensely. Of course, the real Harvey Keitel would have done that, too.

I didn’t realize it then, but the Hotel Pennsylvania was positively steeped in history. In its heyday, guests included Fidel Castro and Harry Houdini, although not on the same night and presumably not with their mothers. It was also a popular venue during the big band era, with the Glenn Miller Band’s hit Pennsylvania Six-Five Thousand being one of those rare songs about a man’s love for a hotel’s telephone number.

The Hotel Pennsylvania was once known as the Stadler and – together with the city’s Waldorf hotel – inspired the Muppet Show’s misanthropic double-act, Stadler and Waldorf. That duo famously delivered snarky criticism of Muppet performers from the safety of their private box, which was quite a novelty in the days before Twitter and Rotten Tomatoes. It also hosted the world’s first Star Trek convention in 1972, although that was later retconned to 1997 by JJ Abrams.

Did you see what she did to him, did you hear what they said?
Just a New York conversation rattling in my head

New York Telephone Conversation – Lou Reed

After checking in, we made our way to the elevator. As the lift ascended, some smartly dressed people were having smartly dressed conversations on their cell phones. I just stared at the elevator doors. As we reached the seventh or maybe eighth floor, there was a break from the chatter. A slender silent interlude, a moment of quiet. Ma turned to me and asked, “How are your bowels, Thomas?”

“They’re, um, OK I suppose,” I answered awkwardly.

The next morning, I was awakened by a commotion outside my hotel room. Dressed in a bathrobe and slippers, I opened the door only to find a film crew in the corridor. They were shooting an episode of Law and Order, and apparently, one of the neighboring hotel rooms was the scene of a fictional murder. As a Richard Belzer fan, I asked one of the crew if John Munch was investigating. “Sorry, sir,” she said. “He’s in the other show.”

That was my first morning in New York.

This ain’t no Mudd Club, or CBGB
I ain’t got time for that now

Life During Wartime – Talking Heads

I tried to take my ma to all the places you should take your ma to in New York. With hindsight, I probably should have written a book about it, maybe called it something like Places You Should Take Your Ma to in New York, but this was 2005 and the world wasn’t ready for the grown-up-with-parent travelogue genre. That would have to wait until after the global banking crisis, the subsequent redistribution of global wealth to billionaire charlatans, and the rise of the political idiot class.

We visited the Empire State Building and I took her to the observation deck, but it was a foggy day and you couldn’t see much besides the occasional skyscraper tip breaking through the mist. It was like concrete and steel whack-a-mole. We took the Staten Island Ferry and got a good view of the Statue of Liberty, then later that evening caught a Broadway show. It was Spamalot with the original cast, including Tim Curry as King Arthur and Niles from Frasier as Cowardly Sir Robin. It remains my favorite live musical theatre experience from a list that isn’t particularly long. I took her to Central Park, and we wandered around Times Square where she accidentally collided with Sylvester Stallone as he climbed out of a limo by Planet Hollywood.

Ma’s always been fiercely independent, so one evening she decided to go off alone in search of a bingo hall. “It’s all I have to look forward to,” she said sadly. “It’s all I have to look forward to” is a stock phrase of my ma’s used to describe a wide variety of things, all of which she looks forward to. I decided there was no point in telling her that I’d already checked my Lonely Planet guide and was pretty confident there were no Gala, Mecca, or Top Rank bingo halls in New York, not even in Brooklyn. I figured it was best if she found out for herself. Maybe she could ask that young Japanese couple.

While she was searching for a bingo hall, I caught a gig at CBGB’s back when it was still a venue and not just a t-shirt brand. The next morning, we had breakfast at Tom’s Restaurant as part of a deeply personal Susanne Vega/Seinfeld pilgrimage combo. This was, after all, the Tom’s Diner Vega originally sang about in 1987, and its exterior was used for Seinfeld’s fictional Monk’s Diner. Later that day, I visited the site of what used to be Ali Yeganeh’s original Soup Kitchen, the inspiration for Seinfeld’s famous Soup Nazi episode.

See, I told you.

The downtown trains are full
With all them Brooklyn girls
They try so hard to break out of their little worlds

Downtown Train – Tom Waits

Ma was keen to go on a guided bus tour, which wasn’t a bad idea. I tried to book one with Kenny Kramer (the real-life inspiration for Seinfeld’s hipster doofus next door, Kramer), but it was fully booked or too expensive or both. I can’t remember. I found another tour bus company, and our tour guide was a wisecracking guy from the Bronx who resembled a middle-aged Beastie Boy. As the open-top double-decker bus passed Columbia University, the tour guide endeared himself to me forever by saying – with a perfectly straight face – how the campus had recently been in the news after an accident involving a high school student and a radioactive spider. This was like a nerdy verbal masonic handshake, so I reciprocated and asked him if he could tell me the whereabouts of the Baxter Building. “It’s two blocks east of Avengers’ Mansion,” he said with a wink.

I took my ma to several Irish bars, or – more accurately, I suppose – bars that identified as Irish. I was always quite progressive like that. On our final evening, we visited one on West 33^rd Street, where I ordered us a pint and a half of Guinness. She was in her late 60s by then, and even though she’d spent most of her adult life in England, she never lost her strong Derry accent. This was catnip to the predominantly Irish-American bar staff and clientele who treated her like a rock star. “The young people, they all love me, Thomas!” she said gleefully.

I let her bask in the attention, slipped out front, and lit a cigarette. I was soon joined by a nicotine-craving motley crew consisting of an off-duty cop, a Wall Street banker, and a construction worker. It was the closest I ever got to joining the Village People.

And I thank you for those items that you sent me
The monkey and the plywood violin

First We Take Manhattan – Leonard Cohen

On the morning we were due to leave I found an envelope that had been pushed under the door to my room. I opened it up and saw a handwritten note. The penwork was neat and pretty and definitely not the work of a Y chromosome. If any of my fellow men are offended by this, then please let me know in writing, although I probably won’t be able to read it.

I soon realized it was a love letter meant for someone else and suspected the mystery author was French, Russian, or possibly Frussian. This might be due to its liberal use of the term “manly borsht baguette”, although I might be misremembering that. In any case, I quickly stuffed it back in its envelope, but not before other key phrases burnt their way into my retinas, including “Forgive me for not saying goodbye”, “By the time you read this I’ll be flying home”, and “I’ll never forget our night of wild lovemaking”. It can’t have been that great, I thought, or she would have remembered his room number.

I didn’t feel right about throwing the letter away, so I hopped into an elevator, headed down to the lobby, made my way to the front desk, and handed it over to Front Desk Keitel. Was he ever not on duty? I thought. If this really was Harvey Keitel you had to admire his commitment to researching a role. I explained the situation and what I saw as the futility of my gesture. I didn’t think a guy would report a missing letter he wasn’t expecting to get from a one-night stand to lost property.

“You’d be surprised,” snarled FDK, squinting and grimacing like a man who’d just received a lemon juice enema. In other words, just like Harvey Keitel.

I returned to the hotel room to grab my passport, suitcase, and mother. I took one final look out the window at Penn Street Station, Madison Square Garden, the hot dog stands, the yellow cabs, and the crowds of people urgently heading to wherever they were going. Some flakes of snow were drifting downwards. We headed to the lobby, checked out at the front desk, and stepped onto a 7th Avenue which was now waist-deep in snow. I didn’t think this much snow could fall so quickly, but I guess in New York even blizzards don’t have time for small talk. The Big Apple looked like it was covered in a generous layer of marzipan, and I half expected to see 1980s Kurt Russell on 7^th Avenue pass me by, riding an AT-AT. I’m talking, of course, about bearded, parka-wearing Kurt Russell from The Thing, not eyepatch-wearing Kurt Russell from Escape from New York. That would be ridiculous.

A small kid stands by the Lincoln Tunnel,
He’s selling plastic roses for a buck

Dirty Blvd – Lou Reed

We crossed a gridlocked street to Penn Street Station only to find that all train services had been canceled, including the one to Newark Airport. I hailed a yellow cab that wasn’t going anywhere. Against the stark white backdrop, it looked like an ice sculpture made of frozen piss. “Newark Airport, please,” I said, panicking. “We’ve got a 5 pm flight to England.”

The cabbie was an elderly Bangladeshi man with the sort of crumpled face that could run a lucrative side hustle as Rocky Balboa’s coach. “Good luck with that, buddy!” he laughed as the car lurched forward several millimeters.

Ma was starting to panic. “Thomas, tell the man we’ve got to get to the airport!”

“I just did, ma,” I said, losing the will to live.

Eventually, the traffic started to move. We crawled in a north-by-north-westerly direction, much like Cary Grant did in the 50s, but much slower. We approached the Lincoln Tunnel only to find it was closed due to what our cabbie described as “Goddamn bastard snowflakes.” It was the first time I heard that term used as an insult.

He told us the Holland Tunnel would be closed as well. “We gotta take the George Washington Bridge,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind getting to the airport next Tuesday.” He was laughing again, and so was my ma. He jerked his steering wheel to the right, invading the personal space of fellow road users, who honked their horns and shouted abuse.

No sooner had we started heading north along the Hudson River-hugging 12^th Avenue when our cabbie noticed something in his rear-view mirror. “The Lincoln Tunnel’s open again!” he shouted. I looked back and saw nothing but cars and snow. He found a gap in the central reservation barrier and pulled off an elaborate, hair-raising U-turn maneuver that would make the average Fast and the Furious set piece look like the work of a Sunday driver. Ma cheered.

He was right: the Lincoln Tunnel had reopened. We crossed it and headed south along the New Jersey Turnpike. Well, south-ish. Due to the snow, we took what felt like an erratic route – intermittently leaving and re-joining the Turnpike – but I was in no position to question his judgment. I caught glimpses of the Manhattan skyline, passed many industrial buildings, and began to feel a nagging sensation of déjà vu. I’d seen some of this scenery before. A Turnpike tollbooth, eerily familiar overhead signs, a distinctive-looking bridge, an abandoned Hydro-Pruf factory. Then it hit me: our cabbie had taken us on a meandering detour through the opening credits of The Sopranos.

“And that,” as I later said to the lady at the check-in desk, “is why we’ve missed our flight.”

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