When my previous employer sold our department to a direct marketing company and moved our offices to Hudson and Houston Street, the first thought that came to my mind (well, after “Thank GOD, this place was driving me CRAZY!”) … was cool new neighborhood! Located at the crossroads of Soho, Tribeca, and the West Village, our new ‘hood is replete with outdoor cafes, parks, and confusingly winding streets to explore. Unlike the rest of Manhattan, where the buildings are so tall you can barely see the sky, the buildings in our neighborhood rarely reach higher than four stories -- therefore there's a very open and inviting feeling to the area. When weather and our work schedules permit, Jerry, Stevie and I take to the streets at lunchtime to get fresh air and good food. Sometimes we get a lot more than just that.
The Cowgirl Hall of Fame has quickly become our Monday lunch destination of choice – it’s the one day of the week we splurge on a double-digit meal price because we believe in treating ourselves well on the gloomiest day at the office (and we usually have a lot to catch up on from the weekend.) Cowgirl tops our list because the décor is brilliant (white trash laundry strung from wires, old cowgirl photos and a curler-haired mannequin in a lawn chair are among the decorative draws of the establishment); the servers practically know us by name; and its location on Hudson Street is the perfect window from which to view the lives of the Greenwich Village passers-by. We ogle men and invent stories of the regulars we see walking the street each week – the old woman with the absurdly large sunglasses, the boy in the too-tight shorts, etc. On a Monday afternoon two months ago we were seated outside, chatting away, when suddenly we spotted a party of seven people joining the table behind us. Jerry’s dramatic gasp alerted us to the fact that Sarah Jessica Parker and Stanford from SATC were among the group. We desperately tried to spy on them without being too obvious or intrusive (ever the plight of the polite yet star-struck New Yorker), and realized that Heather Graham and a woman that Jerry insisted was Patricia Heaton (although I’m still not convinced it was her) were also among the crew dining beside us. It was a triple-word-score sort of sighting, not only because Sarah Jessica is second only to Madonna in Jerry and Stevie’s book of entertainment goddesses, but also because catching four (or three depending on who you talk to) celebs casually munching in the noonday sun doesn’t happen as often as non-New Yorkers might think. (In fact the closest I ever came was when I saw Danny DeVito, Catherine Keener, and Ed Norton at Tao in 2001.) We stayed an extra fifteen minutes picking at the ice in our empty soda glasses that day, glowing from the proximity of the stars.
Most of our lunches aren’t star-studded, however, which is why we’ve gotten into the habit of making regular people seem more interesting than they appear. Typically this involves Jerry saying something like, “Ya, we are visiting from Sweden, we lav New York Ceety!”, or, “I’m an actor and I’d love to tell you about it but I’m running late for my shift at the diner,” to which Stevie and I look around and laugh upon finding the people to which he is referring. Of course we never really find out if Jerry is right or not, but I’m inclined to believe that most of the time he is. Our personal tastes have started to form as well, especially in the boy-watching department. (Stevie likes the dirty boys, Jerry likes the preppy ones, and I like the guys who travel in packs or hang out with their grandfathers.)
Our voyeuristic little game is not limited to the human race. Stevie projects thoughts on the dogs of our neighborhood’s streets, usually musing, “I’m tiny!”, in a high-pitched doggie voice. He is clearly the Doctor Dolittle of the group, and our dog-watching has evolved to include those of the avian species as well. For weeks we spied Father Olsen Square from its bordering restaurants, mesmerized by the old timers that spend seemingly hours on end communing with the pigeons. Recently we started eating in the Square, and are quickly becoming the weirdos we’ve been observing all this time. We now call it “Pigeon Park” and have taken to giving the birds our bread scraps at the end of our meal. We deliberately try to throw crumbs to the plucky finches who, although one-fifth the size of the thirty or more pigeons around them, exercise aggressive Darwinian schemes to get as much if not more food than their feathered neighbors. We do our best to help them, and have as much fun watching the birds as we do the old humans surrounding them.
Last Thursday our voyeuristic tendencies hit an all time low. As we dined on Mexican in our street-level conference room, Stevie interrupted the conversation to point out that he knew somebody on the street. I turned around to see, and witnessed the beginning of one of the most interesting (and humiliating) lunch scenes to date. The guy Stevie thought he recognized was sitting on the sidewalk outside of the Saatchi building, dressed in black pants and a gray knit shirt, in conference with a blond boy in jeans and a retro shirt. Immediately Jerry observed, “Oh, they’re breaking up,” and indeed it looked as though they were. Blondie was leaning back on his arms in a hurt-looking sort of way, and the Saatchi boy, who we later dubbed “the mean one”, was leaning in, gesturing with his hands and frequently rolling his eyes. They fought on the sidewalk for a while and I moved to the other side of the table to catch a better view. As the fight wore on, Blondie and Meanie stood up, and Meanie tried on several occasions to check his watch and slowly walk backwards to the entrance of the building. But Blondie wasn’t having any of it, and grabbed Meanie’s arm in a pleading, pathetic sort of way. All along Jerry and Stevie were dubbing the conversation as if it were a foreign film – “How many time do I have to tell you, it’s over!”, “How can you throw everything away just like that?”, etc etc. Our view was as clear as if we’d been right out there with them, and our question of whether or not they could see us watching them was eventually answered, 45 minutes into the argument, when Meanie pointed in our direction and Blondie turned around and looked right at us. We quickly dipped our heads into our long-picked-over lunch remains, and blushed in the embarrassment of being caught red-handed. Blondie wiped a tear from his eye, Meanie huffed back to work, and Jerry ran across the street to determine whether or not they could have seen our faces (evidently yes, as clearly as we could see theirs.) We felt a bit bad, but gathered solace in the fact that we seemingly broke up the fight, and hopefully gave them some time to collect their thoughts for break up fight part two, should it happen to occur.
In short, our lunchtime observations make us feel part of the neighborhood, and give us something more to talk about than work and our weekends. Everything we see is right out there, on the public streets, for anyone and everyone to observe. Most New Yorkers – and I know I’m guilty of this as much as the next person – don’t pay an ounce of attention to what’s going on around them, particularly if they have somewhere to be (and five minutes ago, at that.) But our luncheon observations have opened my eyes to the craziness and diversity of this city and its human – and non-human – inhabitants. Just because we’re looking at it doesn’t make us bad. After all, we’re just opening our eyes. Everything else is up to them.
