The Places In Between

New York is full of in-between places. I arrived ridiculously early (as usual) for a business event at the Financial Times last night (that’s me on the balcony, which offers a great view of the Freedom Tower), so I wandered around SoHo and the Village beforehand. It was a nice reminder that life doesn’t begin and end at destinations; it just happens at all the stops along the way.

I visited bookbook (think Hugh Grant’s shop in “Notting Hill”) and relived the increasingly rare experience of browsing at an actual bookstore. A little further down Bleecker Street, the doors opened at Our Lady of Pompeii, where there’s still an Italian-language Mass on Sundays. It was warm and welcoming inside, and stuffed with so many curiosities it was like a religious penny arcade. I couldn’t resist taking a photo of St. Lucy holding a platter of human eyeballs (in macabre artistic tradition), or of the ornate angel on the altar, holding aloft a white Italian Christmas light in imitation of a flame.