Didn’t See That Coming on the Upper West Side

by Yvonne Vávra

One of life’s sweetest pleasures is when a drawer breaks. When reality spills out of the filing cabinet we’ve built to keep it tidy. We file people away because it’s easier than holding the world’s full, chaotic complexity in our heads. But every now and then, someone refuses to stay in the folder we’ve put them in.

That’s what happened a few weeks ago on the corner of West 83rd Street and Columbus. A woman’s shopping bag couldn’t handle the stress anymore and broke just as she stepped into the crosswalk. Groceries everywhere. Apples rolled toward the curb. Dinner made a run for it while the light changed. A deliverista stopped, leaned his bike against the parking meter, and joined the woman in chasing apples. He pulled a sturdy bag from the back of his bike and together they packed the groceries into it. Then each went their separate ways.

I felt so joyful. Not only for witnessing an act of kindness, but because I’d watched a stereotype fall apart. In many people’s minds, delivery bikers have been cast as inconsiderate menaces to society. Watching this man stop to help a stranger reminded me that mental shortcuts may give us a sense of order in an overwhelming world, but they never do justice to the people inside it. Here was a man climbing out of the drawer he’d been tucked into. Here was proof that the world is so much richer than our anxious minds often allow it to be.

My groggy faith in humanity needed more moments like this. The problem is, they’re rarely the loudest stories in the room. Determined to pay a different kind of attention, I went through neighborhood online platforms, and there, tucked among the complaints and frustrations, I found posts that revealed the many ways neighbors show up and look out for each other.

One poster found a pigeon in distress on Broadway. She was already late for work and couldn’t help the bird herself, so she asked if anyone could step in and bring it to the Wild Bird Fund. Several neighbors responded, and while I never found out exactly what happened, someone wrote that they walked by the spot on Broadway a short time later, and the bird was gone.

Last week, an Upper West Sider turned to Reddit in search of a laptop-friendly place to work remotely. Within an hour, dozens of neighbors had turned the question into a brainstorming session, sharing thoughtful recommendations I’ll definitely be checking out myself.

Some cases are more urgent. One woman had just eaten her very first hamentasch and was instantly hooked. There was just one problem: it had been a gift at work, and there was no way of finding out where it had come from. Naturally, she posted a picture of the hamentasch, minus one bite, trusting that someone would know exactly where it came from and point her toward her next fix. Sure enough, identifying anonymous hamentaschen is a skill the Upper West Side possesses in abundance. Fairway, Hungarian Pastry Shop, William Greenberg, Zabar’s—the woman now has several promising leads that will either reunite her with her original hamentasch or spark a whole new obsession.

And then there’s the story of an act of kindness that changed lives a few years ago on Columbus Avenue and 70th Street. And we’re all still benefiting from it. It begins with two New Yorkers, both dealing with life’s curveballs.

Victor Neufeld had spent decades producing television, earning 23 Emmys along the way, and singing jazz whenever he had the chance. His wife had been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, and for many years, Victor cared for her until she passed away just as COVID hit the city.

Then, one day, while crossing a street on the Upper West Side, Victor was struck by a car and spent weeks in the hospital recovering from life-threatening injuries.

Meanwhile, Manny Colon, who had managed Bistro Cassis on Columbus Avenue for 15 years, was facing a crisis of his own. For years, Manny had managed life with an enlarged heart. Then his condition worsened, and he spent six weeks in the hospital connected to a mechanical heart before finally receiving a transplant. He then returned to work, and a little under a year later, Bistro Cassis was shuttered because of the pandemic, and its owner made the decision to walk away.

So Manny took over. He fixed up the space, breathed new life into it, and reopened it as Manny’s Bistro in the fall of 2020. But business was still slow.

Enter Victor, still recovering and finding strength and inspiration in his music. He’d heard from friends about Manny’s story and offered to sing at the bistro to help bring in diners. Every spring and summer since then, Victor’s jazz band has performed outside Manny’s on Sunday afternoons, never failing to draw a crowd. The way these two men, whose lives had been knocked sideways, found a way to help each other move forward—well, we’re dancing to the sound of that every Sunday from 4 to 7 p.m.

The deliverista, the pigeon rescuers, the hamentasch detectives, and Victor and Manny are all part of an Upper West Side story filled with care, generosity, and people willing to jump in. Next time our inner neighborhood grump is triggered, it might be fun to imagine that the person whose breath we could practically feel on our necks as they passed us a little too closely—one of those people!!—might actually be a hamentaschen hero on a mission to solve a pastry mystery for a neighbor. There might be more to their story. There usually is.

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.

This story was updated to reflect that Manny was connected to a mechanical heart for six weeks, not months, and that he returned to work before the COVID pandemic.

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