Rainbow Bagels, A Cable Car Ride, and a Front-Row Seat to Famous Fireworks

I started today with a trek to Brooklyn to one of the few shops open on the 4th of July — The Bagel Store, home of the original rainbow bagel. It’s conveniently right next to an L train station on Graham Ave.

The Bagel Store is home to the original rainbow bagel, yes, but also evidently the best rainbow bagel -- quite possibly the best bagel I've ever tasted, period. I ordered one stuffed with Funfetti cream cheese, which tastes exactly like one of those frosted pink or yellow sugar cookies with sprinkles, except 10x better. The bagel, unlike most so-called rainbow bagels, had a distinctive flavor, and wasn't just a colorfully dyed regular bagel. 1,000 thumbs up!

Next up was a visit to the Tenement Museum, which is about a 10-minute walk from my apartment in the East Village. It’s not a traditional museum, per se, because the only way to visit is by booking a guided tour in advance.

The museum offers several options that tell the stories of different people who lived in the tenements (otherwise known as apartments). I reserved the “Hard Times” tour, and walked through a 156-year-old, 325-square-foot apartment on Orchard Street where several generations of German and Italian immigrants once lived.

The tour focuses on two families who lived there -- the first in 1863 during the Great Panic, and the other in 1935 after the Great Depression. One fact that blew me away: The tenement building has burlap walls, and they found 22 layers of wallpaper — one for each family who moved in — in a bedroom (and 40 in the kitchen!).

I’ve mentioned this before, but New York City tour guides really know their stuff. This tour was particularly excellent, and was like listening to a feature story with a cast of colorful characters (my guide even elicited cheers as she told the story of the protagonist, Nathalie Gumpertz, a Prussian immigrant). It's hard not to root for Nathalie, especially when she got a job, despite not speaking English, to support her son and three daughters after her husband walked out on her! She later left a $1,000 inheritance to her daughters (the son had died).

It was eye-opening to see how subjective officials were about granting financial assistance to needy families in the 1860s. The list my guide passed around was marked with Ws for “worthy” families. Nuclear family, but the husband doesn’t quite earn enough to live on? You’re golden! $5 for you! Woman whose husband is in a maximum-security prison, or a divorced woman? No cash for you. The government also published and distributed pamphlets for women entitled “How to Keep Your Husband From Leaving.” Uuuuuughhhh.

So, back to Nathalie. Her husband, Julius, walked out the door and never came home one day during the Panic of 1873, meaning she had to find a job to support her three young daughters and son, despite her complete lack of English knowledge. She did. Then a relative of Julius’s died and left him $600 (that was like five years’ worth of rent back then), but she couldn’t claim it because, obviously, no Julius. So she went to court and had her husband declared legally dead — and got the cash.

She never knew, but the Tenement Museum later discovered that Julius had gone to Cincinnati. He was buried in a grave identifying him as “the husband of Natalie Gumpertz.” So he never forgot his wife, and outlived her by A LOT. He died in his 90s; she was 58 when she passed (probably because she was working so hard!).

In short, I'd highly recommend a visit to the Tenement Museum. Learning the specific stories of the lives of former occupants is fascinating, and helps bring the space to life when you can connect it to the specific people who once lived there.

After my tour, I took a train to the Roosevelt Island cable car station at 59th Street and 2nd Avenue. I'd recently learned that the four-minute ride over the Queensboro Bridge is free with an unlimited MetroCard (or equivalent to one swipe each way).

A tip: Definitely stand on the left side of the car for an unobstructed view of the East River (the Queensboro Bridge gets in the way on the other side). I got a gorgeous view of both the Manhattan grid and then the sun sparkling on the water, and definitely didn’t blast The Fray song, “Cable Car,” on my phone all the while.

You can either disembark at Roosevelt Island, or swipe back in and reboard the car back to Manhattan for a round trip. I’ll be back to Roosevelt Island to poke around at some point, but tonight I needed to take the 6 train back to the East Village before it got packed with fireworks crowds headed to Brooklyn Bridge.

Speaking of which, the famous Macy’s 4th of July fireworks are launched only about a mile from my apartment. I walked down to the show this evening, and scoped out a spot next to Pier 35 beside the Manhattan Bridge.

My favorite part was an element at the beginning of the show: The 1600-foot-long fireworks “waterfall” that cascaded from the Brooklyn Bridge (if you watched it on TV, you know what I mean). Super jealous of the people on the trains that passed over the Manhattan Bridge during the fireworks — that’d be a stellar view!

The show lasted about 25 minutes, and the technicians launched around 70,000 shells from barges on the river and stations on the Brooklyn Bridge. They fire more than 3,000 shells per minute!

After the fireworks, I walked along FDR Drive to Battery Park, where I caught a wonderful view of the Statue of Liberty looking out over the river. (This is not my photo, as my phone camera is pretty poor at distance night photography, but this IS the view.)

The Staten Island Ferry sign, unfortunately, had a burnout.

The Staten Island ferry is free, so I’ll definitely be back to take that ride. And you can look forward to me visiting the Statue of Liberty as well on a weekend day TBD in late July or August.

So glad I got to spend the 4th of July in New York City!