Just Long Enough: 48 Hours in the City That Never Sleeps

Baz Luhrmann once said, “Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.”

We didn’t move there. We gave it 48 hours. Turns out, that’s plenty of time to understand exactly what he meant.

The moment we stepped out into the city, New York introduced itself the way it always does — loudly, and without apology.

No fresh air here. No trees softening the edges. Just noise stacking on top of noise: horns, sirens, someone’s music bleeding out of a passing car, the low mechanical groan of construction that never seems to stop. The smell hits next. Not terrible, not great. Just unmistakably urban, unmistakably New York.

We’d only made it a few blocks before I turned to Mark and said it for the first time. “Walk sign is on, you go. Walk sign is red but no cars coming, you go too.”

He laughed. I said it at least four more times that night. It became our trip motto.

We landed on a Monday. A premiere Tuesday night, flight home Wednesday afternoon. Less than 48 hours, total. We’d never done a turnaround this fast, and honestly, I wasn’t sure it would feel like enough.

It felt like enough.

That first night, we walked toward Times Square, mostly just to look for photograph opportunities. What we found was loud and unruly in a way that surprised even us, the energy felt cranked up past its usual setting. Turned out Game 3 of the NBA Finals was happening that night, and a chunk of the city had clearly decided to make an event of it.

We tried to walk away from the chaos, heading toward Bryant Park on the theory that it would be quieter.

It was not quieter. We just hadn’t realized Bryant Park had its own watch party going.

I don’t know anything about basketball. But I can read a room, and in this case, a few city blocks, and what I read said: this is going to be something, win or lose. Buildings around us were lit up in orange and blue. Cop cars lined the streets. The crowd had an edge to it, that specific kind of loud that makes you stay alert without quite admitting that’s what you’re doing.

We took our photos of the lit-up skyline and got out of there.

The next morning, we turned on the news and got the rest of the story. Fights. Police cars getting stood on and damaged. Arrests, in the exact blocks we'd been standing in the night before. The Knicks had lost, and the crowd was not happy about it. Though I'd bet there were a few brave Spurs fans in that crowd somewhere, poking the bear.

Tuesday, we walked. A lot.

Here’s how it works with us: we’ll both just stop, mid-stride, completely at random, because one of us has spotted something. For me it’s usually just a building, a shadow, a weird little detail. For Mark, that’s where the real work starts. He’ll see what I saw and then find the angle, the crop, the version of it that actually makes a photograph. I notice things. He turns them into something.

We started the day walking through Central Park, which everyone tells you is the quiet, green escape from the city. It’s green, certainly. Quiet, not exactly. It’s still New York in there, just New York with a little more grass and a few more trees. People everywhere and the city’s hum never fully fading. It’s the closest thing to peaceful you’ll find here.

From the park, we kept walking, and that’s when the fire escapes took over.

They’re on almost every building in this city, iron lattices of stairs and landings bolted to the facades, climbing six, eight stories up. We’d walked past hundreds of them without really seeing them. But the light that day was doing something specific, throwing shadows across the ironwork in a way that Mark couldn’t stop noticing. He hadn’t planned to photograph fire escapes, but the city just kept handing them to him, over and over.

Eventually we made it to Chelsea Market, an old factory building turned food hall packed with vendors, food stalls, and people moving in every direction. The energy is part of the appeal. So many interesting little shops and food vendors, each one pulling you in for a closer look.

We stumbled onto a tahini based fudge that stopped us in our tracks. Rich, dense, slightly nutty, the kind of thing you don’t expect to find tucked into a market stall and then can’t stop thinking about. It was, hands down, one of the best bites of the whole trip.

It’s also wall to wall crowded, every direction you turn. Worth it, but plan for the crowds and go in with an appetite.

From there we walked the High Line to the Vessel. The High Line was non-negotiable for us. We’d walked it before on a previous trip and it’s one of those things we’ll always go back to, an old elevated freight rail line reimagined as a long, narrow park running above the streets, plantings and art and views you can’t get from the ground. It’s still busy, because everything here is, but being above the noise instead of inside it changes the whole feeling.

The Vessel was the other end of that walk, and we’d pre-bought tickets to go inside.

The last time we were in New York, the Vessel and the entire Hudson Yards area were still under construction, just scaffolding and promise. Now it’s finished, and it’s something else. A 16-story copper structure made up of 154 interconnected staircases, nearly 2,500 steps, all built around a central void. From a distance it looks like a honeycomb. Up close, it’s not really about the view from the top. It’s the structure itself, the repetition, the angles, the way the copper catches the light differently depending on where you’re standing. You can climb up into it now, and we did. Mark spent most of it looking at lines and geometry rather than the skyline. Which, honestly, is the more interesting way to experience it.

Tuesday night was the whole reason we’d come to the city in the first place.

Sting and Shaggy had brought a newly revised production of The Last Ship to the Metropolitan Opera House for a short run, and Mark got us tickets for my birthdays. The Met is not a small room. Tall, stacked with levels, the kind of venue that makes the evening feel like an occasion before a single note plays. We were in row X, with plenty of rows ahead of us and a handful behind, and we were perfectly happy there.

The show itself was good. What happened around us was something else.

As the rows filled in around us, we tried very hard not to look star-struck while Spike Lee, Lou Diamond Phillips, Bob Odenkirk, F. Murray Abraham, Michael Imperioli, and S. Epatha Merkerson took their seats like regular people going to a show. Joe Sumner, Sting’s son, was there with his family. And my personal favorite: Matty Maggiacomo, a Peloton instructor we genuinely love, had apparently also decided this was the place to be that night.

At intermission, I did something I almost never do. I got up.

Normally I just stay in my seat. But this was the kind of night where the lobby was full of people worth accidentally walking past, so out we went. I waited while Mark went to the restroom, casually scanning the crowd. He came out a few minutes later with a small smirk.

“I just brushed shoulders with Bob Odenkirk,” he said.

No conversation. No photo. Just a shoulder brush and a quiet internal screaming session. Honestly, that whole night felt like the most New York thing that happened to us the entire trip.

Wednesday morning, we set an early alarm.

Mark had been to the Today Show before. I hadn’t, so this one was for me. We found a Starbucks on the way and walked over to 30 Rockefeller Center while the city was still waking up.

It was worth it. Craig Melvin, Savannah Guthrie, Dylan Dreyer, Jenna Bush Hager, Al Roker, and Sheinelle Jones all came out, and most of them were genuinely kind enough to come over, talk to the crowd, and take photos with the small group of us that had gathered. We got a photo with Craig and a short video of Al giving us a fist bump.

Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell were also there, promoting their new mobile game. I’ll be honest, I didn’t grow up watching the show that made them a duo, we know Kenan from SNL. But they were warm and funny with everyone, took photos with the crowd without rushing through it, and somewhere in that nationally broadcast morning show, you could spot us standing in the background. We’re counting that.

Here’s something you notice in New York if you eat plant-based: this city has been doing it longer than almost anywhere, and it’s baked into the food in a way most places haven’t caught up to.

Back home, there aren’t always options for dairy-free cream cheese at a bagel shop. In New York, it was just there. On menus, without anyone treating it like a special request. We got flavored tofu cream cheese on our bagels and it was so good that I’m already planning to try making it at home. That’s not a trend. It’s history. Jewish dietary law has long kept meat and dairy separate, which is why New York’s Jewish delis and “appetizing stores,” the dairy-only shops that sold bagels, smoked fish, and cream cheese, developed alongside each other for over a century. By the early 1930s there were roughly 1,500 kosher delis operating across the city. That separation between meat and dairy is exactly why dairy-free spreads have such deep roots here.

And honestly, the bagels themselves are reason enough to go. Fresh New York bagels are next level, and if you only eat one thing in this city, make it that. A slice of pizza is probably second on the must-eat list, but if you’re dairy-free, that one takes more searching. The dairy-free pizza options are out there, but they’re not nearly as easy to find as a bagel with tofu cream cheese.

We’d looked into Eleven Madison Park for this trip, the restaurant that made history as the first in the world to hold three Michelin stars with an entirely plant-based menu. The timing didn’t work. There wasn’t a seating early enough to get us to the show on time. That’s a good reason to go back.

Tuesday night’s dinner was at PS Kitchen. We’d made reservations well ahead of time, and it deserves its own paragraph.

All plant-based, upscale without taking itself too seriously, and phenomenal from start to finish. Spinach artichoke dip to open. Mark had the “steak.” I had the lasagna. We finished with a blueberry lemon dessert I’m still thinking about. At some point mid-meal, we looked at each other and said almost the same thing at the same time: we really wish we had something like this back home.

We don’t. But now we know it exists, and that’s its own kind of motivation.

We landed on a Monday, packed two full days into less than 48 hours, and flew home Wednesday afternoon. In that short window we caught a skyline lit up orange and blue, wound tight and waiting for a final score. We walked the High Line and climbed into the Vessel. We found fire escapes worth photographing on streets we’d normally walk right past. We sat a few seats away from notable celebrities that were just there like normal people, like us, at a show that was the whole reason we came. We got a fist bump from Al Roker and a shoulder brush with Bob Odenkirk in a theater bathroom. And we ate the best plant-based meal we’ve had in a long time, plus a tofu cream cheese bagel that we will judge all others against from now on.

Not every trip needs a week. Not every yes requires a long runway. The gap between people who say “I’d love to do that someday” and people who actually go is usually just a decision, smaller than it feels like in the moment.

See the show. Eat the lasagna. Tap your credit card on the subway reader.

What’s the shortest trip you’ve ever taken that turned out to be completely worth it? We’d love to know.