The answer: a dystopian, abstemious hell in which we successfully follow through on each of our New Year’s Resolutions, thus depriving ourselves of all of life’s guilty pleasures.
How boring…
This was clearly not the goal of City Dusk's first-ever “New Year’s Vices: The Seven Deadly Sins,” a seven-venue cruise through Manhattan that, like any war (or battle with the phone company), began with venomous wrath and ended in submissive sloth.
Wrath
The day began at the Fencers Club (119 W 25 St., 5th Floor), where we watched the nimble-footed Olympian Keeth Smart spar (and lose) to another of the club’s talents. Club director Liz Cross gave us a run-down of the facilities, eloquently enumerating the club’s multifarious programs, many of which offer bargain prices for area youth. The packed club pulsated with excitement, as in-house celebrities (including one Hungarian women’s fencing champ) contributed big with enthusiasm and charm.Gluttony
Our next stop was the sensational Kang Suh (1250 Broadway at 32nd St.), a legend of the Korean barbecue scene, where the succulent fare was cooked to perfection right in front of our eyes on a grill artfully built into our table. The spread, which included the flavorful Mandoo Gui dumplings and Soon Doo Boo soup, stretched far beyond our appetites into a zone reserved for belt-loosening hedonists and the food connoisseurs who love them.Greed
A quick subway trip later and a jigsawed jaunt through several blocks of snow-pillowed Greenwich Village, and we emerged indoors at the Cooper Classics showroom, where we were given a tour of a number of sleekly restored antique cars the jewels of decades past. The showroom's representative regaled us with stories about the company’s fabled history, telling us about cars that had changed hands five or six times before landing back in their original owner’s eight-car garage several decades later, cars so in-demand they bypass the showrooms altogether and cars that are purchased not simply for their storied antiquity but also because they’re large enough to fit the kind of tall humans in circulation on our planet these days.Envy
We next snapped photos in front of Palazzo Chupi, Julian Schnabel’s wonderful architectural anomaly at 360 West 11th St. Craning our heads upward, we blinked our eyes furiously to deflect snowflakes, standing in awe of this colossal, Italian-styled palace built atop several stories of the least conspicuous building in the neighborhood – like an oriole perched on the head of a pigeon.Lust
We wasted no time in arriving early at The Pleasure Chest (156 7th Ave South), an elegant upmarket shop selling such things as sex toys, pornography and sex-themed greeting cards. Store personalities Brandon and Lucy gave us an almost medical symposium on the exciting array of insertable objects, including a candid (and lust-inducing) insight into their own particular pleasures.They spent a profitable amount of time on the various vibrators – vibrators “as seen on TV”, vibrators with lifelike veins and angles, vibrators that will even sync to the beat of your iPod (honestly). The store’s motto should be some cross between, “We have everything short of a vibrator that can make you coffee” and “We are so upfront about our sexuality that it’s time you, too, talk about your orgasms in public.” No pressure to buy or to divulge anything sexual to the store clerks, but it might be more enjoyable if you did.
Sloth
Our final stop was at games haven Fat Cat’s (75 Christopher St.), where we drank from several exotic beers on tap, including the delicious Belgian pale ale Delirium Tremens, and lay for massages by two of New York’s finest massage therapists, Johanna and Dave (imported for the occasion and welcomed by the good people of Fat Cat). Later, we headed to the game area, where we amused ourselves for several hours by playing ping pong to our heart’s content.Want to join the next day of debauchery? Check out City Dusk's schedule of upcoming walking tours of New York City. These are tours designed for locals, not tourists, and feature quirky and unique itineraries like this one created by About.com contributor John Keller.
