I finally made it to Grant’s Tomb last week, crossing one more item off my NYC bucket list. It had been on my to-do list since college, when I lived less than ten blocks away but somehow failed for four years to muster the enthusiasm to visit.

I’m more motivated this summer than I have been during other times in my NYC residency, when the feeling of being here indefinitely made it easy to put them off for another day. Now that I have a sense that I’ll be leaving the city soon for an indeterminate length of time – which, in all honesty, could be as short as a month, who knows – I’m making more of an effort to see the city as a tourist would. Which is fun, even if I end up being a New Yorker for life.

Here are the other long-neglected items on my NYC (and environs) bucket list:

• Ride the Roosevelt Island tram
• Kuykuit
• Warwick Drive-In 
• Fort Tilden hike
• Vanderbilt Mansion
• slam night at Nuyorican Poets Cafe 
• The Museum of Arts and Design
• WD-50 (molecular gastronomy)
• a classic piano bar in the West 50’s that does singalongs
• the old Brooklyn Bridge station
• the Russian banya
• Spa Castle
• Sammy’s Roumanian

I’ve gotten it down to a reasonable size, I think. Here’s what I’ve crossed off the list in the past year or so:

• Dead Horse Bay, where I picked through trash/treasures from the 1940’s
• Jacob Riis Beach
• the Met rooftop installation
• Mmuseum
• Riverdale in the Bronx
• the Jazz Age Lawn Party
• various classic Upper West and Upper East Side diners
• Aquavit (more on that later)
• The Campbell Apartment in Grand Central
• a concert at Carnegie Hall
• the Moth Story Slam
• Top of the Rock
• Bushwick Open Studios
• a million rooftop bars

[Photo of Broadway Restaurant, one of the many amazing old-school diners where I’ve eaten over the past few months]