Hello from hot, sticky Brooklyn! It’s 95 degrees today, and I’m reminiscing about my first heat wave in the city, my relationship with New York, and…sandwiches.
Heat wave nostalgia
Seven years ago, I moved to New York City for college as a heartbroken eighteen-year-old in the middle of a heat wave. My dormitory was built in 1907 — a stately brick building lined with limestone columns. It would’ve been terribly charming had it not been terribly hot and without air conditioning. I lived on the sixth floor, and I remember waking up drenched with sweat in the middle of the night. I’d take an icy shower and crawl back into bed with a cold, wet washcloth draped over my face. The washcloth served two purposes: to cool me down and to create darkness. I wasn’t used to the fact that, even when I closed the window shades, my dorm room didn’t fade to a familiar pitch black. The city found its way through the crevices, street light slipping through. Oh, and the sirens! It would take years for me to find comfort in the weeeeee-ooooo weeeeee-ooooo wails of ambulances and fire engines, on their way to help someone.
One thing I did love about that dorm room was the fact that my window faced an apartment building, separate from the university. There was one apartment at eye-level where an old man lived, seemingly by himself. I would see him going about his life, talking on the phone, reading a book, heating up a microwave dinner. He had his daily routines and stuck to them, and he just seemed comfortable — with himself and with his life. I know these are broad assumptions about someone I never met or even crossed paths with outside, but it was comforting to watch someone peacefully inhabiting New York while I flailed.
Now, I feel closer to the old man than to my eighteen-year-old self in terms of my relationship to this city. With each year, I find more to love about living here, and I better understand what I need to glide through the chaos. The illustrator Mari Andrew has this lovely depiction of a city before and after you live there.1 Before you live there, a city is an empty map. Lonely and mystifying. After you live there, it’s awash with associations and memories — places you saw something crazy or ate something delicious or kissed someone new. Seven years in, my map of New York is technicolor, and I now have an air-conditioned apartment.
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What I would add to the New York Times list of iconic New York City sandwiches…
The New York Times recently published a feature in the food section called “57 Sandwiches That Define New York City,” which was so charming and playful, and reminded me that this city really is a sandwich town. You can tell that the writers were having fun as they waxed poetic about lox and focaccia and pastrami. It made me laugh to realize that most of the sandwiches listed were familiar to me — proof that I’ve been eating my way through New York City for a WHILE now. Today, just for fun, I’m sharing five sandwiches that didn’t make the list that most definitely define my New York.
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