From Pure Imagination
To the fires of Hell a-glowing.
While today doesn’t mark the literal beginning of this newsletter, it does mark the spiritual beginning of Big City, Little Friend! One year ago I was (lucky to be) thriving through my second layoff and I made a commitment to myself that I would spend my time doing all of the things I’d always wanted to do around NYC - I would ride the big bus, I would see the Empire State Building, I would visit places on weekdays to beat the crowds because I was unemployed and had nothing but sweet sweet time (and thankfully a decent savings)!
One day I took a trip to Corona Park and the Queens Museum with my friend Larissa and I told her that I was literally living my dream in the moment, being able to explore the city freely. She recognized my passion for learning and exploration and convinced me that my thoughts were worthy of being shared. I was incredibly reluctant (because who the fuck am I?), but now I’m incredibly grateful that she gave me the push and support that I needed. It was on that day a year ago that Big City, Little Friend was truly born and I’m not crying you’re crying!
1. Exploring 🛼
I know it can be a bit of a trek, but I promise you that the Queens Museum is absolutely worth visiting, especially because you can double up and spend time in Corona Park (which is one of my top parks). The museum will have some rotating exhibits, but three of their permanent collections are absolutely can’t miss - The Panorama of NYC, The World’s Fair, and the Collection of Tiffany Glass.
If you watched Pretend it’s a City on Netflix (or if you’re just a Fran Lebowitz stan), you might have seen the Panorama - it’s the scale model of the entirety of NYC and you simply have to see it:
The model was originally built for the 1939 World’s Fair and folks were able to take a “helicopter” ride around the model (now there are glass walkways). The team used aerial photographs, fire insurance maps, and a bunch of other city planning materials to create a 9,335 sq ft model built to a scale of 1:1200, where one inch equals 100ft (the Empire State Building is 15in tall). The model contains 895,000 buildings and every street, park and about 100 bridges. The model cycles through day/night modes and even has a tiny airplane that travels to and from LaGuardia Airport! As it stands now, the model isn’t completely accurate anymore because they mostly stopped adding buildings after 1992 (that’s why you’ll see the twin towers still there). Every so often someone donates money to add a new building, with some more recent additions being Citi Field, Yankee Stadium, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, and Battery Park City.
These days, Tiffany’s is mostly known for fancy jewelry in powder blue boxes, but the company was once very widely regarded for their fancy lamps! Louis Comfort Tiffany (comfort is his middle name y’all!), son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, exhibited his first lamp in 1893 in Chicago and people fucking loved them. The lamps were handmade with copper foil and colored glass, primarily by Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls. The colors that the girls were able to create with the glass were super unique and they provided a nice softening of the harshness of early electric bulbs. While The New York Historical Society may house a larger collection of lamps, what’s special about the Queens Museum’s collection is that they have some in progress works and Tiffany’s original factory was located barely 2 miles away, so the lamps have come home!
I also mentioned the museum having a great exhibit on the World’s Fair, which brings us to our next section…
2. Learning 🧠
NY has been host to 2 big World’s Fairs - in 1939 and 1964 (and one sorta fair in 1853) but I’m gonna focus on the 1939 one today. In 1935, a bunch of dudes formed the New York World's Fair Corporation with the hope of bringing NYC out of the Great Depression and into the "Dawn of a New Day" (the slogan for that year). Then Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, ever the opportunist, saw this as a great way to remove a giant ash heap from Corona Queens at the committee’s expense and volunteered the site, which would be turned into Corona Park after the fair.
The fair opened on April 30, 1939 and introduced a bunch of technological innovations. First off, the subway extended a special line that ran straight to the fair - The World’s Fair Line (you can see a car from this line at the Transit Museum). RCA introduced fucking television, broadcasting a speech by FDR and parts of the opening ceremony. Albert fucking Einstein gave a talk about cosmic rays. A time capsule was buried that can’t be opened until the year 6939 (you can still see it in the park). Westinghouse featured featured "Elektro the Moto-Man": a 7-foot tall robot that talked and "smoked" cigarettes. This was an event.
Though the park now famously houses the Unisphere (the big globe), that area was the site of the Trylon and Perisphere at the 1939 fair - two symbols that could be seen everywhere at the time. Their design was inspired by the Crystal Palace and Latting Observatory built for NYC’s very first World’s Fair in Manhattan in 1853 (this one was at Bryant Park). The World’s Fair exhibit in the Queens Museum has a bunch of artifacts with this iconography on it - anything from tickets, to buttons, to stamps, to dishes! Their design was meant to be futuristic and depict the World of Tomorrow - big Tomorrowland vibes. The Perisphere contained a diorama that folks could see called Democracity which depicted a utopian city of the future. I wonder if they predicted that everyone would be wearing crocs before Idiocracy did?
Sadly, the Trylon and Perisphere, along with nearly every other building, were destroyed after the fair ran for two years. However, there are still some relics from that fair that have survived. Replicas of the Trylon and Perisphere are scattered throughout Queens. 8,000 benches were created for the fair and a lot of them were moved to Central Park. And while the Parachute Jump is now an iconic Coney Island landmark, it was actually relocated there from the fair!
Yet amidst all of this talk of brighter futures and whatnot, a few miles to the west in Manhattan, Madison Square Garden was host to a freakin pro-Nazi Rally in 1939, but that’s a story for another time.
3. What’s Good 😎
Every year the Bronx Zoo lets folks name cockroaches after their current or ex-lovers. According to the zoo: You don’t always have the right words, but you can still give them goosebumps. Name a Roach for your Valentine, because roaches are forever. How romantic.
Looking for some new books to read? The William Vale is hosting a Book Swap on Jan 26. Donate some gently used books and go home with a new to you read.
Winter in NY is hard because it’s cold AF outside, but Uncovermore shared a great indoor activity - Brownstone Jazz! A brownstone in Bed-Stuy hosts jazz performances every weekend and it look like an absolute vibe.
Last Place on Earth is hosting another Murder Mystery and this time it’s Valentine’s Day themed! The event is only $30 and it’s on Feb 3 - DM them and send a venmo to reserve your seat.
On actual Valentine’s Day Talea Beer is throwing a V-Day Bingo Disco. They’re promising beers, bites, and beats. While the event is free to attend, you’ll need some singles (dollars, that is) to buy bingo cards.
If the winter’s got you down, grab a ticket to Stay For Supper’s Seasonal Depression Soiree. The price is pretty steep at $150, but can you really put a price on fighting winter depression? You’ll get a whole ass dinner and drinks and there’s mention of a pickling workshop and mad libs?!?
I also want to remind folks that
still has a free 1 year subscription to give away! It’s one of my favorite newsletters and his series on mutual aid this month has been a goddam delight to read.
4. Watching🍿
For someone who doesn’t like musicals, I sure have seen a lot lately. I saw the new Wonka movie about Willy Wonka’s origin that literally no one asked for, but it starred Timothee Chalamet so everyone just let it happen. Now I knew this movie was obviously a musical but it got me thinking about the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory movie and how that movie is a fucking musical and yet, I love it. I brought this up to a bunch of folks and everyone similarly cocked their heads and said “huh, I forgot the OG Willy Wonka was technically a musical.” Why doesn’t that one feel like a musical in the same sense that Mean Girls or Wonka does?? Let’s discuss.
Wonka director Paul King explicitly said that Wonka is not a musical but rather a movie with music in it, but I respectfully disagree. I would classify the original film this way, but not the new one. One way that Timmy Wonka differs from Wilder Wonka is that all of the performances appear very theatrical, and by that I mean that they look like they were arranged and staged to, well, appear on stage. The town that Wonka arrives in looks like a stage set. Even though we see Wonka walk around a bit, the camera rarely actually follows him from one place to another; we’re in one place and then we’re in another and each place feels like it has distinct borders. Most of the songs start and stop rather abruptly and the world carries on afterward as if nothing terribly strange has happened. The music feels non-diegetic (not part of the film world) because I don’t believe any of these characters would actually break out in song. All songs in musicals feel non-diegetic to me because the characters often sing something and then just carry on with their lives, even characters who aren’t particularly singy.
The songs in Wilder Wonka on the other hand, absolutely feel diegetic to me in that they flow along both with the story and with Gene Wilder’s characterization of Willy Wonka. Do I believe that weirdo Willy Wonka would start randomly singing his deranged inner monologue during the boat scene? Absolutely yes. And it was established that the Oompa Loompas communicate via song, so it’s acceptable that they would sing about bad children being maimed. This feels much more natural and realistic to me than a bunch of sad indentured laundry servants busting into a lively song about being trapped in a never-ending laundry cycle. The songs in Wilder Wonka are less whimsical dreams and more external manifestations of the characters thoughts and desires so they feel much more intrinsic to the story (except Charlie’s mom’s song - that one blows).
In addition to the songs not quite working for me, I didn’t fully buy into the world that Timmy Wonka built. I can’t tell if I’m getting old and this is a natural progression or if the world around me truly is getting worse, but the way CGI is being used in movies is just bad lately. Audiences can tell when the actors are walking into an actual candy wonderland or simply throwing amazed looks at green walls. The world felt less like an everlasting gobstopper and more like a fluff of cotton candy that would disintegrate if anyone looked too hard.
Subsequently, Timothee’s Wonka was just a very bland watered down version of Gene Wilder’s (we don’t talk about Depp’s Wonka). Timmy Wonka was a hopelessly naive little boy that everything somehow kept working out for, despite him not really proving his abilities to us at all (this feels like Timothee Chalamet’s career trajectory actually?). He kept saying that he was a great chocolatier, but we never really saw him learning how to make chocolate or demonstrating any sort of actual knowledge (he couldn’t even read for fucks sake). He was absolutely nothing without Noodle’s knowhow and the chocolate that he stole from Loompaland, which consequently ruined Oompa Grant’s life. In no way did I believe that Timmy Wonka was a chocolate mastermind; he was just an overly optimistic little boy who kept getting lucky. All of the songs were far too whimsical and hopeful and they made me miss the songs from the original about children being maimed. The reprise of Pure Imagination at the end was this film’s only saving grace but by then I was literally counting down to the credits rolling.
5. Noshing 😋
I feel like the cat’s out of the bag at this point when it comes to Rolo’s in Ridgewood thanks to Jeremy Allen White mentioning the place. I used to be able to get a walk-in at Rolo’s for dinner easily and now I have to make a fucking reservation. But this is truly a small gripe as some longtime residents of Ridgewood point to Rolo’s as the start of gentrification in the neighborhood. Just yesterday Morscher’s Pork Store, a butcher that had been in the neighborhood for 70 years, announced it was closing (Tiny Arts Supply is having a fundraiser meal for them this weekend!). I recognize that I’m part of the problem here, but I’m choosing to place more blame on the actor with millions of followers and the landlords that are taking advantage and quadrupling rents. Thanks, Chef.
Anyways, Rolo’s is very good and steep prices come along with that, so this is not a cheap everyday meal. Despite that, Lorenzo and I have eaten here multiple times and I need you to know that their burger is probably the best thing on the menu. It’s a good ass burger and it’s not easy for me to say that because I absolutely abhor burgers that do not automatically come with fries. Fries are a human right and I get so fucking mad when restaurants make me add fries to my burger. I’m not not mad at Rolo’s for doing this, but I do feel like their fries and burger are good enough that I’ll give them a pass.
The burger isn’t super smashed because they cook it (and pretty much everything) in a wood-fired oven, but it still manages to have a nice amount of crispy bits. It’s topped with grilled onions that add a subtle sweetness to the meaty patty. But the pièce de résistance pickled long hot pepper served alongside. Something I love about Asian food that I don’t often see in American food (I’m generalizing here) is a variety and depth of flavor. Burgers are just meaty savory burgers or steak is just meaty savory steak or mac and cheese is just creamy pasta. The addition of the pepper here adds a brightness and tang to the burger that is a perfect compliment to its savoriness. It reminds me of one of my favorite Filipino dishes, dinuguan, which is a pork blood stew. It is incredibly meaty and savory, but it’s usually served with a long hot pepper that is absolutely essential for cutting through the heaviness of the dish. Same thing going on here and it’s such a small thing but it really adds to the burger. I like to cut up some of the pepper and put it on my burger, while also taking some pepper bites in between burger bites, but their head chef says the ideal order is “burger, pepper, burger, pepper, burger, pepper.” You do you, boo.
However, because the burgers are so fucking good, sometimes Rolo’s runs out of them. This happened to us once and we had to “settle” with ordering something else - we chose the two sheet lasagna and wagyu skirt steak. Wagyu skirt steak should never be bad and this one was obviously great. It was cooked perfectly with just the right amount of char on the outside from the wood-fired oven. The green garlic butter blob it was topped with was fabulous and excessive in the best way. Butter is the reason restaurant food is so much better than the slop I make at home and this butter was extra tasty.
When they first brought out the lasagna I’ll admit that I was underwhelmed - it was so thin. But it turns out that was the beauty of it because as a result all of the lasagna contained the crispy edges that are the best part of lasagna. When lasagna is too think it gets mushy and soupy and everyone really just wants a crispy corner piece anyways. Rolo’s recognized this and gave the people what they wanted!
Overall, there are no bad food options here. But if it’s your first time, get the burger. If it’s winter, finish off your meal with some of their housemade ice cream. If it’s summer though, take a walk down the block and get a scoop at Ice Cream Window instead (and get their Waldmeister flavor).
HAPPY BCLF BIRTHDAY! Who the fuck are you?! You are Eden Celia Seiferheld, damnit, and you can play blind surprisingly well!