A while ago my brother and I pulled together some ideas for exploration we can do while in New York. One of them was the idea of trying to have a slice of pizza each, in each of New York City’s five boroughs, all in one day. We tried it on April 23rd.
It didn’t work for lots of reasons:
The first place we chose (in the Bronx) was closed. That was not something we could have easily avoided, even as of this writing a few weeks later, it’s still listed online as open. I guess we could have called ahead to each place just to be sure, and if I were to try again I might do that, but neither of us thought of it up front.
We tried to balance “pizza that’s convenient for an itinerary taking us all over the city including out to Staten Island” with “really good pizza places.” Towards the end of the day even that fell by the wayside when we just went with convenience. Doing it again, I’d go with what worked best logistically and leave the “find great pizza” for a different type of expedition.
Starting from Columbus Circle I’d take the B/D to Yankee Stadium and find pizza — any pizza! — near there. Then the 4/5 down the east side to any of the trains going to Court Square/Queens Plaza and again find anything there. That would then put us easily on the G train to downtown Brooklyn for any slice we could find, followed by any of the trains to lower Manhattan for the Staten Island Ferry. There’s a pizza place a block away from the terminal on the Staten Island side. Finally the Ferry back to the 1 train, and a local pizza place we know after getting off at 50th St. It would kind of dampen the spirit of the thing because we’d barely be going into each borough, staying as close to Manhattan as possible to limit the travel time. But I think we’d do it, assuming we didn’t explode first.
But it was a fun trip. We got to some neighborhoods we don’t usually get to and we did have some great pizza. We still have plans for Staten Island.