http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/travel/36-hours-in-upper-manhattan.html
2014-10-01 08:22:28
36 Hours in Upper Manhattan
Museums and music, cocktails and cuisine, history and Hudson River views are all part of a weekend in this richly textured part of the city.
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In the 18th century, the northern half of Manhattan Island served as a bucolic escape for New Yorkers with the cash to afford it and the horse and carriage to get them there. It’s easier to visit these days (the A train to Harlem being the most famous of many routes) and easier to get around, with the city’s newfangled green cabs in abundance in neighborhoods where yellow cabs have always been scarce. There’s also a whole lot more to do these days. Harlem, the Dutch settlement that became the black capital of America, is in the throes of gentrification: a mix of old and new, from gospel-filled black church services to fine cocktail bars abuzz with young professionals of all races. Meanwhile, farther north, between the island’s oldest surviving house and its largest swath of never developed land, is a Latino neighborhood the likes of which you can no longer find south of Central Park. FRIDAY 1. Take the A train — but not to Harlem. Instead, head to the end of the line, the 207th Street station in the Inwood neighborhood. A few blocks west is a Manhattan you won’t recognize, although the Lenape people who once inhabited the island surely would. Inwood Hill Park is a vast expanse of Manhattan, most of which has never been built upon — 196 acres of ridges, caves and forest that occasionally break for vistas of the Hudson River and Spuyten Duyvil Creek. It’s also got Shorakkopoch Rock, where Peter Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan Island from the Lenape tribe supposedly took place. The paths are a loopy (and unmarked) tangle, so print out a  2. You don’t come to northern Manhattan for the Mexican food, even if La Condesa, a cozy, surprisingly upscale spot, can produce a heck of an enchilada. Instead, make a pre-dinner stop for the sophisticated margaritas (from $8.50), with several variations using house infusions, such as chipotle-infused mezcal with pineapple. 3. Washington Heights has been a predominantly Dominican neighborhood since the 1980s, which explains why Margarita Santana started finding a market for her home-style Dominican cooking in 1984. A few years later she opened Margot, a bright little restaurant with an outsized reputation among Dominican-Americans. Smiles fill in for the limited English of the staff, as your red-and-white checked table covering disappears under plates of Dominican steak with onions ($13) and stewed goat ($12) with sides of rice and soupy red beans, and fried plantains and anise-flavored yuca arepas. Ask for a beer and they’ll send you to the cramped, old-school bodega one block south; just step around the men engaged in boisterous conversation and pluck some Presidente beers ($1.75) from the fridge. 4. Washington Heights and Inwood have long been dotted with Latino nightclubs, but old-time merengue palaces have given way (in part) to the more modern loungey options. Apt. 78 is just such a place: a comparatively tiny but popular night spot whose name is a tribute to the defunct meatpacking district club Apt, and looks vaguely like the interior of a New York apartment. A very, very crowded apartment: The place packs in a youngish uptown crowd that likes reggae and hip-hop at least as much as Latin rhythms. Once April comes, though, the place to be is La Marina, all the way west on the banks of the Hudson. Whether the party is inside or out, everyone gets a view of the George Washington Bridge. SATURDAY 5. Serengeti Teas and Spices is the first stateside retail store for Liberian-born Caranda Martin’s tea company, and behind its carved mahogany and marble bar Mr. Martin and his staff might suggest their smoky Masai Lion’s Head black tea ($4) blend. They’re just as serious about their coffee, which they roast every other day. Forgo their pastry by sneaking in some warm, buttery, flaky rugelach ($1 each, hope for apricot) from tiny Lee Lee’s Baked Goods a few blocks away, where Alvin Lee Smalls has been making his “rugelach by a brother” since 2001. 6. Get a flavor of the new and the old, the African and the African-American, on this 1.5-mile loop around Harlem: Start down Frederick Douglass Boulevard — known as restaurant row but also home to stylish but friendly shops like the Bébénoir boutique — then east across 116th to see signs of Harlem’s West African immigrant population (check out the Senegalese baskets in the window of Adja Khady Food Distributor). Turn up Lenox Avenue, past cafes and churches, then cut west on 125th Street, Harlem’s main drag — where American Apparel and the like have moved in but street vendors still sell Obama playing cards and “Kim Kardashian” scented oil. 7. Match your food with your art. In central Harlem, the Studio Museum in Harlem features artists of the African diaspora; from there head for a “gourmet soul” lunch, like the moist, pan-cooked catfish filet folded over a mound of crab meat ($14) at Billie’s Black. Or head east to Spanish Harlem, the spiritual home of New York’s Puerto Rican community, to El Museo del Barrio (showcasing Latino and Latin American artists) before a lunch of mofongo de pernil — fried plantains mashed together with roast pork shoulder — under the art-covered walls of La Fonda Boricua. 8. George Washington slept (and planned for battle) here in 1776, Alexander Hamilton dined here in 1790, and the man who shot him in a duel, Aaron Burr, moved in after he married its most colorful resident, Madame Eliza Jumel. Despite the characters who passed through the columned front entrance of the Morris-Jumel Mansion and the marvelous period furniture within, few visitors make it to Manhattan’s oldest surviving residence. Those who do should not miss Jumel Terrace Books, the by-appointment bookstore specializing in local history in the bottom floor of a nearby brownstone. Its main attraction is the owner, Kurt Thometz, who lives upstairs and may know more about uptown than all of his books combined. 9. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk were among the regulars at Minton’s Playhouse in the 1940s, and the spot is often credited as the birthplace of bebop. It closed in the 1970s, but a new Minton’s has just been born in the form of a white-tablecloth club, a project of the former Time Warner C.E.O. Richard Parsons and the Southern cuisine innovator Alexander Smalls. Its jazz ambitions are decidedly retro: The snowy-haired house band, some of whom played at the original Minton’s, is delightfully old-fashioned. But its culinary ambitions are forward-thinking: cremolata crusted grouper with braised young spinach ($36) or sweet potato ricotta dumplings with Tokyo turnips and coconut collard greens ($28), for example. 10. Noisy beer garden? Intimate cocktail hideaway? See-and-be-seen scene? The new Harlem has bars for all moods. Bier International has long wooden tables and a beer list that’s heavy on the German but with choices from exotic lands like Corsica, Kenya and the Bronx. 67 Orange Street is a tiny hipsterish joint with very serious bartenders creating $13 cocktails with names like Cleopatra’s Lust and Manhattan After Dark. Or go to the go-to, Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster, not yet three years old and already practically a Harlem landmark, or head for Ginny’s Supper Club speakeasy underneath. SUNDAY 11. Visiting a Baptist service, with ministers preaching, gospel choirs grooving and animated congregations matching them step for step has become a staple of Harlem tourism. Skip the lines by attending the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ with Harlem Heritage Tours; the $39 package includes a neighborhood tour afterward, given by either the energetic Neil Shoemaker, who is a native Harlemite and won’t let you forget it, or Andi Owens, an 85-year-old guide with at least one clever quip for each of those years. Or head to the Convent Avenue Baptist Church and ask if you can sit with the congregation. 12. At first glance, you might think that Harlemites pack bright, cheery Lido for Sunday brunch for the $13 bottomless mimosa. But the real highlight is the food. Sure, all the regular hollandaisey, pancakey items are on the menu, but this is also an Italian place, so try the pumpkin ravioli drenched in ginger cream, drizzled with balsamic syrup and sprinkled with sage ($18). Or compromise with an Italian-brunch hybrid: the buttery egg panini with goat cheese, bacon and tomato ($13). 13. Fort Tryon Park has commanding views of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades, but is best known for the Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art housed in a monastery-like building with three cloister gardens constructed in part from architectural elements from medieval structures transported across the Atlantic. Within are sculpture, stained glass and illuminated manuscripts, and perhaps the Met’s most famous medieval works, the Unicorn Tapestries.