Café Sabarsky
We begin our day with lunch at Café Sabarsky, which adjoins the Neue Galerie on Museum Mile in Manhattan. Or rather, we begin our day by waiting in line at the popular Café Sabarsky, which takes no reservations. The expected one-hour wait passes quickly as we people-watch and enjoy park views.
Inside the café we are transported to early 20th-century Vienna. With banquettes upholstered in Otto Wagner fabric and a grand piano in one corner, with every seat taken and a bustle of wait staff, the room serves as a reminder of how artists and intellectuals used to gather at the time.
The café serves purportedly the best wiener schnitzel in the city along with an impressive array of German/Austrian desserts and rich kaffee creme.
Tickets to the café enable entry into the Neue Galerie, three floors of primarily German and Austrian Expressionist art, including Gustav Klimt’s Woman in Gold. We get around the gallery fairly quickly, and it is well worth the visit.
Cafe Sabarsky
Detail of Berlin Street Scene by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Dashwood Books
New York City is full of small, independent shops (still), and after the Neue Galerie we head downtown to Dashwood Books, a basement-level store on Avenue A in the East Village that deals exclusively in photography books. We buy an oversized volume for our nonexistent coffee table and then head to the mother of all New York book repositories, the New York Public Library.
Dashwood Books
New York Public Library
When visiting the NYPL, we always pop into the Rose Main Reading Room, the largest uncolumned space in America, but our real destination is the Polonsky Exhibition on the ground floor. It features rotating selections from the library’s vast collection of treasures that connect our species’ first written words to modern-day media.
While seated at this desk, Charles Dickens may have written chapters of Great Expectations.
Leaving via the front steps of the library and crossing Fifth Avenue to 41st Street, we mosey down the sidewalk enchanted by bronze plaques underfoot. Each rectangle speaks to us from a different author, all the way to Park Avenue (actually, they are meant to lead you from Park Avenue to the library).
A word is dead/ When it is said,/ Some say./ I say it just/ Begins to live/ That day. —Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), “1212”
Bookmarks
We follow these plaques one block to Madison Avenue and our final destination (completing today’s art-and-book theme), the Library Hotel. The hotel, whose name trades on its proximity to the NYPL but doesn’t resemble a library at all, has a nifty little rooftop bar called Bookmarks.
New York hosts loads of glitzy rooftop bars, but this one is our favorite with its open-air seating and stone parapets. Drinks in hand, we time-travel back to the 1920s.
The Bookmarks bar atop the Library Hotel