Ramones – "53rd and 3rd" (1976)

53rd and 3rd, standing on the street

53rd and 3rd, I’m trying to turn a trick

53rd and 3rd, you’re the one they never pick

If you’re a regular reader of this wildly popular little blog, you know that 2 or 3 lines  knows pretty much everything there is to know about pretty much everything worth knowing about.

The burden of being the ne plus ultra of experts – “The Experts’ Expert,” if you will – is that I am constantly being asked for advice.

For example, I was recently asked for help by a DC-area fan who was going to New York City for the first time, and felt overwhelmed by the prospect of planning the trip. 

Here my recommendations for the perfect three-day visit to “The City That Never Sleeps.”  

How to Get There

If you live on the east coast, the best way for you to get to New York City is by taking Amtrak.  (Flying is expensive and doesn’t really save you any time if you live along the Northeast Corridor.  And if you’re thinking about driving into Manhattan, my advice is fuhgeddaboutit!)

Unless you’re made of money, just go coach on the regular Amtrak Northeast Regional trains.  Business class costs a lot more, as does travel on the high-speed Acela trains.  (The Acela can easily cost three times as much as a regular Amtrak train, and it saves you only about half an hour.)

Don’t expect a lot from Amtrak, and you won’t be disappointed.  Sure, the bathrooms are usually a mess and the food is pretty bad.  (Pack a sandwich or a salad for the ride – not only is the food on Amtrak bad, they often run out of stuff before you get to your destination.)

A Northeast Regional train pulling
into the BWI Amtrak station

On the plus side, you get more space for your luggage, wider seats and more legroom on Amtrak than you would have if you had flown – and the seating is two by two, so there are no middle seats.

Here’s a pro tip for Amtrak travel.  Pay the few extra dollars it costs for “Flex Fare” – that way, you can reschedule or cancel a trip at anytime prior to your train’s departure and get a full refund.  

Where to Stay

There are a zillion hotels in New York City.  Most of them are ridiculously expensive, and the ones that aren’t have the tiniest rooms you’ve ever seen.  I’ve been in rooms without windows, rooms where one side of the bed is against a wall (so a person sleeping on that side has to roll over to the other side to get out of bed), and rooms where there’s so little room between the foot of the bed and the wall that you have turn sideways and shuffle your feet to get from one side to the other.

On my last trip to the Big Apple, I stayed at the Blue Angel – which is a Choice Hotels property – in Midtown East.  

It was reasonably priced and the rooms weren’t too small.  There’s no free breakfast, no swimming pool, and no room service.  But it’s conveniently located within easy walking distance of two important subway lines, and it’s on a quiet street.

Day One

Your train will deliver you New York’s Penn Station.  If you’ve never been there, be prepared – it’s a more hellish place than you can imagine.  

If you took my advice and reserved a room at the Blue Angel, head straight for the A/C/E subway line and take the uptown E train to the Lexington Ave/53rd Street station – only five stops away – and walk two blocks to the hotel.  (Pay attention!  If you don’t, you may get on a downtown E train, or – even worse – an A or C train.)

You don’t need to buy a fare card to ride the New York subways if you have a contactless credit card – you just tap your card on the reader and push through the turnstile.  (Your credit card is contactless if it features a series of four curved lines resembling a Wi-Fi icon turned sideways on your the front or back.)

P. J. Clarke’s

After you check in, have lunch at P. J. Clarke’s, a storied old New York joint which is only a block from the Blue Angel.  Johnny Mercer wrote “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” on a bar napkin at P. J. Clarke’s, Buddy Holly proposed to his wife there, and Woody Allen spent a lot of time there in his younger days.  Also, it’s mentioned in a Truman Capote short story and Strangers on a Train, was a hangout for the Sterling Cooper crew in the Mad Men TV series, and was the inspiration for the fictional “Nat’s Bar” in The Lost Weekend.  

Don’t overthink things when you get there – just order a bacon cheeseburger like everyone else.  (Nat King Cole dubbed the P. J. Clarke bacon cheeseburger “the Cadillac of hamburgers” back in the fifties.)

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A lot of people who visit New York City spend a lot of money to get a view of the city from an observation deck.  The traditional spot to go for that is the Empire State Building, but guess what you miss by going there – you miss seeing the Empire State Building!  

There are some newer observation decks that are even higher and feature all sorts of extra bells and whistles – like the SUMMIT One Vanderbilt and the Edge at Hudson Yards.  

The rooftop bar at 230 Fifth

But I’m not a fan of heights, and I’m not a fan of spending money – so I recommend heading to 230 Fifth, a spacious rooftop bar that gives you not only a birds-eye view of the Empire State Building, but also a chance to gawp at the crowds of trashy-looking young people who come there to sip overpriced frozen drinks served in plastic bags with straws like a kids’ juice pouch.

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Next, it’s time to head to the Theater District to see a show.  You can choose a tried-and-true musical like Chicago or something more serious – the revival of Death of a Salesman would be a good choice.  

Theater tickets aren’t cheap.  Once you do a Google search to find out what is playing, you’ll be deluged with social media ads offering discounts for dozens of productions.  You can try the TKTS booth, or show up when the theater opens and hope you get a cheap “rush” ticket, but I recommend not wasting a lot of time trying to save a few bucks on ducats.  (If you’re that hard up for do-re-mi, you have no business going to New York in the first place.)

If you had a sufficiently late lunch at P. J. Clarke’s, you can get away with skipping dinner and grabbing a post-theater slice of pizza on a paper plate from one of the seemingly infinite number of pizza joints in Manhattan.  Sure, most of that pizza kind of sucks, but grabbing a slice is part of an authentic New York experience.

A New York City pedicab

The New York subway runs all night, so don’t worry about missing the last train back to the Blue Angel.  Alternatively, you can flag down one of the neon-lighted, music-blaring pedicabs that will swarm your theater when the play ends.  (Doing that is a dead giveaway to everyone that you’re a clueless tourist, but that’s already pretty obvious from the way you’re dressed.)

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In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll give you my suggested itinerary for the second day of your three-day New York City trip.

In the meantime, click here to listen to today’s featured song, which was released in 1976 on the Ramones’ eponymous debut album.

“53rd and 3rd” refers to the intersection of East 53rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.  (Always give the street number first, then the avenue number – not the other way around.)  

The song was written by the late Ramones bassist Dee Dee Ramone (né Douglas Glenn Colvin), and is supposedly based on his personal experience working as a male prostitute to support his heroin habit.  I’m not  sure if he actually solicited tricks at 53rd and 3rd – which is just a short walk from the Blue Angel – or if he just liked the way “53rd and 3rd” sounded.

Click here to order “53rd and 3rd” from Amazon.