My husband and I celebrated a recent anniversary with a weekend trip to New York.  We share the same attitude toward that great city:  we like to go there, briefly.  And then, especially, we like to return home.

I was in my mid-twenties before I got a first-hand glimpse of New York.  A friend and I were on the way to Vermont for skiing.  We’d flown from Atlanta to Newark to see his family in New Jersey before we made our way north.  From the passenger-side window of the rental car, I gaped at the city’s immensity as we sped across the George Washington Bridge.  Overwhelmed by the vastness of those towering building-upon-building-upon-building streetscapes, stretching in opposite directions as far as I could see, I felt like a country bumpkin, through and through.  It was fine with me that we didn’t set foot on that intimidating pavement during the trip.  

The next year I began graduate study in art history at Princeton.   The University is situated in what I consider an ideal environment.  Its lovely campus, with historic collegiate Gothic buildings, forms the heart of a bucolic, graciously landscaped small town.  And it’s about an hour south of New York by train.  At the University Book Store, I bought Paul Goldberger’s “The City Observed” to begin to familiarize myself with New York’s iconic architectural monuments.  In those pre-internet days, it was a treasure.  

During my first semester at Princeton, I relished the opportunity to be in New York every week.  My “Art of Ancient Rome” class was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It was taught by Maxwell Anderson, early in his career, when he was the Met’s Curator of Roman Art.  He’d later be named director of the Michael Carlos Museum at Emory University, and then of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.   A couple of classmates and I would take New Jersey Transit from Princeton Junction to Penn Station.  We’d briskly walk the fifty blocks up Fifth Avenue to the Met.  The class extended past the time of the Museum’s closing, and it was a thrill to linger in that hallowed space after the guards had ushered out the crowds.  We also had the privilege of access to areas that were off limits to the general public.  To prepare for my term paper on the Boscoreale room of preserved Pompeiian frescoes, I was able to step across the velvet rope and take my time to closely examine the ancient paintings.   

Just as I loved being immersed in such unique surroundings at the Met, I was energized by the bustling atmosphere of the vibrant city.  But I was always relieved to arrive back in quiet Princeton.  That relief was particularly pronounced one evening when a fellow classmate and I fell sound asleep on the train, missed our stop, ended up in Trenton and had to backtrack.  

Throughout my years as a grad student, I was in New York on a fairly regular basis, but for day trips only.  I dreamed of spending the night in a beautiful hotel after a leisurely dinner, instead of rushing with a crowd of strangers to pack onto a grimy, harshly lighted New Jersey Transit train.   One December, I seized on a chance to do just that.  I planned what I hoped would be a very special trip to the city, complete with Christmas lights and a grand hotel, for my husband and me.

It turned out to be a memorable visit, but not in a good way.

In an upcoming post:  the story of that ill-fated trip.