October 24, 2007 - Receipt #5 – Souvenir Shopping in Rockefeller Center

October 24, 2007 - Receipt #5 – Souvenir Shopping in Rockefeller Center

I’ve come to the fifth receipt that I’ve collected since my wife IM and I started our four-day trip to Manhattan. After collecting our tickets at the Shubert Theatre box office, we exit the theater and walk along Shubert Alley between 44th and 45th streets toward 45th to the theater gift shopped named after the alley. We had given this shop plenty of business over the years—t-shirts from Cats, Chess, My One and Only, A Chorus Line and cast recordings of Nine, Starlight Express, Aspects of Love, Les Miserables, among other items. IM was looking for T-shirts for the grand kids, but realized that they would not recognize any of the shows pictured on the shirts on display. We leave the shop in search of a store with t-shirts showing action heroes—Buzz Lightyear, Spiderman, to be specific—two favorites of our young grand sons.

We walk back toward Times Square, picking our way through the crowds spilling off the sideways into the street and turn left on 7th Avenue sure we’ll find a souvenir shop overflowing with the types of T-Shirts IM wants. How the mass of humanity and stream of car, truck, motorcycle, and bicycle traffic manage to move and not collide with one another in the confined space of the square is nothing short of amazing. IM leads the way as we walk up 7th, heading directly into the oncoming flow of pedestrian, which give way just enough to allow her passage. I follow along in her wake occasionally averting the throng approaching me by walking in the street mindful of the IM’s blue-jacketed back off to my left. We reunite at 46th street and stand fast as other pedestrians dash between east-bound traffic along the street. When the light changes and traffic stops, we resume our trek seeing off to our left the souvenir store with the shirts we’re after on display in its window. Weaving our way through the flow of people coming towards us, we enter the store and IM finds the shirts she’s after.

After looking for something for the grand daughters, however, she becomes frustrated and decides to look elsewhere for everything. We return the shirts to their rack and exit the store merging into the flow of northbound pedestrians heading north on the west side of Broadway. On the east side of the street, Virgin Mobile has an drive-in theater size screen mounted one and a half stories above street level playing a rock video. Just south of Virgin Mobile, Planet Hollywood beckons pedestrians to escape the hustle and bustle of the sidewalk and join the hustle and bustle within. We continue on until we reach 49th where we turn right heading east to escape the crush of humanity we’ve been struggling against for the past five block. Moving along 49th toward 6th Avenue, the amount of pedestrian traffic has diminished to a far more reasonable amount: plenty of room on the narrow sidewalks along either side of the street. As we walk, we pass restaurants filled with diners—it’s the lunch hour—and make our way around patrons loitering in conversation on the sidewalk after finishing their meal or couples eyeing the menu posted outside before committing themselves to enter. It’s still dull and overcast and occasionally we feel drops of rain that abruptly come and go.

When we reach Rockefeller Center we walk around the subterranean patio restaurants below, tables and umbrellas deserted in the face of an overcast and chilly day. Diners in the enclosed Sea Grill Restaurant and Roc Center Café on either side of the open-air patio below deprived of a view to accompany their meal. We enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art store on the south east side of Rockefeller center and spend time looking at the paraphernalia the store had for sale. IM finds a doll for our eldest grand daughter and a T-shirt with a ballerina on it for our youngest grand daughter. I buy IM a Kaleidoscope and a DVD tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The store receipt shows the purchase took place at 1:49 pm on Friday May 18th. Another moment in time documented in print.