Wall Street and Dim Sum with the Weinfelds

January 31, 2010

Richard J. Garfunkel

We met the Linda’s cousin Natalie Weinfeld and her husband Lewis at the Jewish Heritage Museum today at 2:45 pm. We found a parking space on Greenwich Street, not far from the Customs Building and we strolled over to the museum to await their arrival. Unfortunately they could not find a space for love or money ($35) and we all concurred that paying $35 was confiscatory and not a great investment. The Weinfelds have sold their home in South Orange and are heading to sunny southern California to be closer their daughters, so this was a critical good bye for now. We decided to head to Chinatown for Dim Sum and Lewis took all of us to the Bowery and the Sunshine Seafood restaurant, where Dim Sum is their specialty.

We tried almost everything, within reason, on their rolling carts, and received critical advice from the Asian women who were sharing our table. After various portions of sticky rice, egg rolls, shrimp balls, wrapped shrimp, fish balls, pork on the bone, and other unnamed delicacies, washed down by Chinese green tea, we were quite satiated. 

They are heading west at the end of March and they’ll be missed. But they are both sick of the cold weather, the crazy expenses of the metro area, and inter-continental communication with their daughters.

After our departure Linda and I headed over to Wall Street to see my old office building at 40 Wall, which is now called the Trump Building. The only reasonable thing which was named after the vain, self-aggrandizing hustler was Disney’s famous duck! I had worked at Bache & Company as a junior stock analyst back in 1969. When it was built in 1929-30, the 927 foot edifice was supposed to be the tallest building the world. When I worked there, FDR’s youngest son worked there, and I was always sorry that I didn’t visit with him. I did get to meet FDR’s other surviving sons, Elliot, Franklin Jr., and James, but not John, who died in 1981. Across the street from the Federal Building, where George Washington was sworn in as president, sits the JP Morgan Building at 23 Wall Street. On September 16, 1920, anarchists exploded a 100 pound bomb at 12:01 PM, killing 38 people and injuring 400 others. I went over and looked at the side of the building where there are still holes in the wall from that blast. They were never removed.