Stepping Into the New Year on the Upper West Side (With a Little Divine Help)

By Yvonne Vávra

December is such a show-off. It turns your head with all that jingling and twinkling until you’re merrily dizzy, pinballing between all there is to do and eat and buy and love. It’s so desperate for you to have a good time.

And then comes January, that threshold of a month when everything officially begins again, though nothing is quite taking off yet. The music has stopped, the lights are dim—it’s as if we’ve left the festive living room and are standing in the vestibule, coat half on, lingering before we push the door open and become functional again.

I don’t know about you, but once I take a break, I’m convinced I’ll never find my way back. I seem to need to be doing the thing in order to believe I can do the thing. So after the holidays, I was certain I’d never find anything to write about for this column ever again.

But then I took a breath and stepped outside. And sure enough, in a single day, I saw an unhoused Upper West Sider building a shelter out of four discarded Christmas trees in Central Park. I saw a couple making out in front of Gray’s Papaya (that smell is seductive). And I saw a woman losing it, trying to make it past the perpetually crowd-clogged takeout window at Parm on Columbus. She had every reason to—no polite “excuse me” will ever get you through the hungry, the excited, and the delivery workers with their helmet-covered ears.

We just have to walk through the doors for things to start moving again. And right now, we even have someone guiding us—a Roman god, of all things.

Janus, whom January is named after, is the god of beginnings and endings. He presides over transitions and journeys, sets actions into motion, and watches over doors and gateways, both literal and figurative. Walk into Fairway? He’s there. Subway turnstiles, Staples, sturgeon shop? He’s there. And if you’re fighting your way past Parm’s takeout window, he’s there too, trying his best.

Janus also holds the key to trickier transitions: new routines, new relationships, tough conversations—the two-headed god can help you create rituals to make the most of any movement from what was to what will be.

Two heads? Absolutely. In the arts, Janus is depicted with two faces: one looking into the past, the other into the future. He keeps both times in view, looking ahead without ever losing sight of what has been. Sounds like a true Upper West Sider to me.

Our collective fondness for nostalgia is part of why the Upper West Side has resisted change more successfully than many other New York neighborhoods. We keep businesses alive that have been here since the Great Depression. They’re like old neighbors, part of the character of the place, and part of ours, too. It feels personal when one of them has to shut down.

When Absolute Bagels closed a little over a year ago, it felt like the Upper West Side had lost a family member. In the words of Bagel Ambassador Sam Silverman, quoted in a recent Rag report, “People were sitting shiva for Absolute Bagels. That’s how meaningful it was.”

Then a new owner stepped onto the scene, with no connection to the old one, but promising New Absolute Bagels. All heads turned to the future. We leaned in, curious. In fact, we lined up around the block when New Absolute Bagels opened two weeks ago. The Rag reported a “joyful” and “elated” mood, with a “sense of hope and renewal” in the air. And, of course, plenty of reminiscing and comparing with the ghosts of bagels past.

So now we think about the old Absolute Bagels while eating the new Absolute Bagels, which seem just as perfect as the old ones. And that could absolutely be Janus at work—one face on the past, one on the future, keeping the neighborhood steady even as it shifts.

Change is in the air this year, and a lot of exciting beginnings lie ahead. With a new mayor, the city feels alive and ready to move. No matter how you feel about it, New York is taking a big step, and with it comes a surge of energy you can use to get your own worlds moving.

But not everyone might be up for crossing big thresholds. Some of us need a quieter journey this year. For these neighbors, I recommend a walk along the exceptionally beautiful doors of the Upper West Side, the literal ones. Pick any block—ours is a neighborhood of spectacular entrances. Janus could count his blessings keeping an eye on these knockouts, and hopefully, in return, he’ll see to it that our Upper West Sider who built a Christmas tree house finds a door to a real home to call his own.

Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

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