Hi world! Chris here. I’m finally back and ready to entertain your time in quarantine by sharing my time in New York! I would have uploaded a normal post last week, but I got sick from this very trip (it wasn’t Corona as far as I know) and it made me lazy. I was also stressed as I’m sure everyone else is at this time and it really threw off any and all plans I had. However, it’s time for things to get back to “normal” so here I am. Please let this post take your mind off the world for a few minutes while you focus on Gatsby, the 1920s, and New York City (without the virus).

Everyone knows the Jazz Age for the iconic flapper girls and the ban on alcohol that spawned hundreds of wild, wild parties. Romantics would have you believe it was a time of glitz and glam for everyone that was beautiful and everyone that was young. Perhaps the most romantic of any of them was my beloved author F. Scott Fitzgerald. He lived with the true spirit of the Roaring 20s in his heart and he went out in the same blazing glory.

I’ve read a lot of his writing, but none can come close to the wondrous world inside The Great Gatsby. Full of drinking, dancing, driving, and devotion, it’s a novel that encapsulates everything Fitzgerald loved about New York in the 20s. Starting with Nick Carraway’s multiple walks through Manhattan.

As one of the most mentioned places in the novel (besides Gatsby’s house), the Yale Club is a necessary stop while tracing Nick’s steps through the city. If only he and Tom had made it there for lunch instead of meeting Myrtle and her gang for a night of illegal partying.

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However, without his day witnessing Tom’s adultery, Nick might never have allowed Gatsby to walk back into Daisy’s life. He certainly wouldn’t have woken up hungover and alone in Penn Station, realizing the truth of being “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” For a happier and less philosophical reenactment of this, you can look at the picture of me.

From Penn Station you can grab a train like we did to ride by Flushing Meadows. In Gatsby’s time this park was known more popularly as the Valley of Ashes. It’s exactly where Tom took Nick to meet his mistress for the first time. In fact, they were on a train waiting at the stop when Tom decided to skip the Yale Club for a day with his lady.

For a happier walk through Gatsby’s New York, you can’t skip a trip to the Queensboro Bridge. Even though the grates were in the way, it was still easy to see why Fitzgerald wrote that “the city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” With the cars going by on one side and bicycles whizzing by on the other, it was almost as thrilling as speeding along the bridge in Gatsby’s great yellow car would be.

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To add a little of the class that Gatsby was so desperate to emulate, stop by the Plaza for some Fitzgerald Tea in the Palm Court, the same place where Nick had tea with his almost lover Jordan Baker. But maybe almost lover is taking it too far as even Nick admits “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”

For us, neither famous golfers or up-and-coming brokers, tea was a little too expensive. We opted for pictures and food from the several restaurants downstairs. However, the Rose Club also has a Gatsby hour for anyone over 21. It’s actually a place that Fitzgerald visited with his wife in real life as well.

Keeping on the trend of higher society, the Grand Central Terminal is another great place to take in New York. It’s not necessarily meant to be high-class, but, compared to the other terminals, it looks that way. It also houses another 1920s club called the Campbell Apartment. After all, you can’t really relive the Jazz Age without at least one drink.

That being said, if you want to get a real Gatsby inspired experience, you have to make a stop at one of New York’s speakeasies. Hidden underneath the Gin Mill, we found one that even had a live jazz band, a real tribute to the 1920s. Of course, it’s not necessary to drink as hard as they did then. After all, “it’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people” and even though it was the day after my 21st birthday, that’s certainly how we acted. For the actual day of my birthday, we did something a bit different.

Up and down the coast of Long Island, wealthy families spent fortunes building mansions that would stand through history. Fitzgerald spent the summers of his youth on this Gold Coast and the beautiful world that it was stayed with him forever. It’s no surprise he used this as the inspiration for the old money neighborhood of East Egg where Tom and Daisy lived across from Gatsby in the new money town of West Egg.

Because we came so early in March, most of the mansions weren’t open for the tourist season yet. Because of the Corona Virus, those that were open wouldn’t let anyone in. However, we were still free to walk around outside and wonder at what it must have been like to live there. Even though it wasn’t Gatsby’s house it was fun to imagine it was “his blue gardens [where] men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

The house had a beautiful backyard garden with a view overlooking the bay. I couldn’t help but still try and find Daisy’s green light across the water. Of course there was nothing to see but the water and the boats. If only it had been that way for Gatsby, he might have ended up a little better. But that’s not the way the book goes. It makes its point in the tragedy of it all, the necessary ending that “we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

I hope this post was a nice distraction that kept you occupied for a bit. I know I appreciate that you took the time to read it. If you need anything else to do, find a copy of The Great Gatsby and read that. It’s amazing and you can do it while you’re at home still.

If you made it this far in the post be sure to leave a like and a comment letting me know what you think! It’s only been a few weeks since my birthday so let your like be a gift to me. I’ll try to get my next post out on time next week in return.

Until then, stay extra safe out there!

Citation for the Quotes

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004.