A Year In New York

As a Californian used to spending lots of time with trees, especially pine trees, New York City can be a barren place. These East Coast maples and elms have lost all their leaves. If it’s a pine smell you want, hail a taxi that has a tree-shaped air freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror.
Or you [...]

[Read more →]

The holiday season has been too a-bustle for me to blog about every store window that has turned my head. Now, two days before Christmas, allow me to present the best of the best: the display at the Bergdorf Goodman store on Fifth Avenue.
The designers ditched the egg nog and cherubic children — yawn — [...]

[Read more →]

The weathermen have described the snow and sleet this weekend as nasty, but that all depends on your perspective. All Friday I kept pressing my nose against the window and watching the snowflakes fall out of the sky.
This was my first New York snowstorm and I have been waiting for it like a seven-year-old hoping [...]

[Read more →]

For the second day, New York is under a gray blanket of rain. Nothing epic or torrential, just a dose. Half an inch every 24 hours. Call me in the morning.
The puddles at the curb are just deep enough to flood my shoes. Indoors, everyone’s jackets and umbrellas shed drops and leave a thin rivulet [...]

[Read more →]

The most thrilling part of my day in New York is often astride my bicycle, the Super Star, on the morning commute. It’s a great workout, the scenery spans all of Manhattan, and of course there’s the adrenaline rush that comes with racing transit buses
I thought I’d share the excitement with this handlebar’s-eye guide to [...]

[Read more →]

I have neglected to mention Thanksgiving and the utterly different side of New York I saw over the long weekend. I rented a car and took a five-hour drive upstate to Wellsville, New York, all the way to end of a dirt road where my friend Rich Shear owns a farm. I met Rich on [...]

[Read more →]

Last night I made my first visit to DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) in Brooklyn to see a documentary about building construction for the 21st Century. To get there, I walked from the York Street subway through a landscape that was unapologetically early 20th Century: narrow streets, industrial blocks now converted to lofts, [...]

[Read more →]

Today I experienced My First New York Rainstorm (the first cold, autumn one, anyway). I looked outside and thought: Can’t wait to get to the office! Rain is such an equalizer. You’re immersed in the elements like a hike in the forest, even here in Skyscraperland.
Every surface glittered and puddles built up at the curbs, [...]

[Read more →]

I’m happy to announce that a story I wrote about ice climbing made the cover of the latest issue of Sierra magazine. The story is part of a package of tantalizing winter trips, and my contribution tells of a lesson I took last March on the frozen waterfalls of the White Mountains, 371 miles’ drive [...]

[Read more →]