THIS NEW YORK TRIP WAS MORE LOW-KEY than the previous trips Melody and I have made. Because Gwenna had moved there after graduating college last year, we now had a reason to take trips to the City-of-Cities every now and then. This was our first outing that was less about seeing big sites and more about just seeing Gwenna, and then finding random cool stuff to do.

Of course we also had tickets lined up for us all to see a couple of Broadway shows. That’s one thing that will never change.

One night we went to Greenwich Village for an evening of laughs at the Comedy Cellar. Fans of Louis C.K. and his TV show will know the place I’m talking about. The next day we checked out the Italian Renaissance wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There was a room devoted to an exquisite life-size marble of “Adam” by Tullio Lambardo, with a video display about the massive effort the museum made to restore this masterpiece after it fell and badly shattered in 2002 when the wood pedestal they were using suddenly collapsed. Of all the things! The restoration took 12 years and the result looked flawless to me when I examined it from inches away. Amazing.

After the Met, we crossed Central Park to seek out one of the surviving pieces of graffiti art painted by the famous (but never seen) Banksy during his month-long residency in New York in 2013. Every day for a month, he added a piece somewhere in the city, always done in secrecy. By now, much of his work had been either been cut out and taken into private collections or defaced by upset local graffiti guys and then painted over by building owners. To find this rare survivor, we ended up exploring several blocks on the Upper West Side. I love that kind of stuff. We found it on 79th Street on the side of a painted brick wall — a silhouette of a young boy swinging a big mallet at a real fire department valve like he was going to ring the real-life bell up on top.

Within a mile we had gone from Renaissance Italy to modern spray art. New York was delivering the goods. Later in the week we visited MoMA for an experience that combined music and costume art by the delightfully spacey and pixie-like Bjork of Iceland.

One day we followed Gwenna on an errand to Home Depot, which she explained was hidden away under midtown Manhattan. This I had to see! Right there amid the high-rises at Third Avenue and East 59th was the familiar orange sign and an escalator down. The store wasn’t as tall as a warehouse, but it rambled all over like a labyrinth and seemed to have most of the departments. We found the unusual light bulb that we needed and left happy.

Melody and I got pretty good at getting around on our own. We really liked having week-long subway passes, especially the way those passes opened up the city to us, because we could make trips as we pleased. (Tip of the week: get good at noticing which street corner is the correct subway entrance for your particular direction!)

Instead of navigating, I preferred to just follow my daughter as she led us on foot through her new city. I could turn my attention down side blocks and randomly pick out a building and then find something to admire about it. Perhaps it was a line of balconies reaching upward that jogged and became an offset line of another row of balconies that continued even higher. For a moment I was strangely happy that this building existed in the world. More so to see how it coexisted so easily with the rhythms of it neighbors. And there was an entire city of these buildings playing off each other like this.

It was a satisfaction I experienced earlier in the trip when we took a shortcut across Central Park and I found myself mesmerized by all the nighttime birdsong and the way the lights of the buildings twinkled through the trees as we walked. The city feels safe these days.

My favorite little adventure happened on our last day, when it seemed we had run out of things to do. It was shaping up to be a dud of a day when Gwenna suggested we “rush” for tickets to a Broadway show that night. We could pick any show we wanted. Excellent. I learned that all theaters open their box offices at 10 in the morning so they can sell any remaining seats for that day’s show. These are the seats off to the side, the seats that are split up, the seats that come with “partial views.” The price is deeply discounted (from $140 to $35 or so) and therein lies the sense of victory that made our adventure all the better.

People line up an hour or two early for this because these seats will sell out. Gwenna had us hedge our bet by getting in line at 8:30 in the cold of the morning at two different theaters. She waited in line for “American in Paris” (our safety choice) while Melody and I waited in line two blocks away for “Something Rotten” (our first choice).

At 10, when the lines started to move, texts went back and forth as updates. Gwenna reached the head of her line and was letting people pass while we moved very slowly forward in ours. Ten minutes later we got to our window and even managed to get three seats together by agreeing to sit in the box seats. Those are the seats in the private little balcony up and off to the side of the stage. We had such a close-up view of what was happening on stage that I didn’t mind that we missed seeing about 5 percent of the action at the far left. I’m now a fan of the box seats!

“Something Rotten” was brand new and hadn’t even officially opened yet. I guess that means they were continuing to tweak it by trying out ideas in front of live audiences. But it turned out to be fantastic — a silly romp that imagines the world of theater in the time of Shakespeare, in which the Bard is an egomaniac getting all the accolades while two playwright brothers struggle to cope by enlisting a soothsayer who tells them that “musicals” will be the way of the future and they should create one. Hilarity ensues. Good laughs throughout. A splendid way to pass an evening. And we got to take it all in from our little aerie hanging just above stage right.

And that, my friends, is how we do it in New York.

Steve McKee is a Benicia architect specializing in residential design. He can be reached on the Web at www.smckee.com or at 707-746-6788. This piece originally was published in 2009.

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