IF THANKSGIVING IS ABOUT FRIENDS, FAMILY AND FOOD…

 …NOTHING CAPTURES THAT SACRED TRIO BETTER THAN EL CONTENTO RESTAURANT IN NEW YORK’S HARLEM

Steve Wright with Yannick Benjamin -- Contento

A handful of things define my purpose in life and what gives me joy.

Exquisite food is on the list.

Travel to experience new place and people is right up there.

Design that is universal, inclusive, equitable, warm and wheelchair-accessible is on the mountaintop too.

I have had the great fortune to make friends, work on planning projects and sample unique cuisine of more world cities than I can count.

Yannick Benjamin -- Contento -- accessible outdoor dining

On the Thanksgiving weekend, I want to highlight Contento.

It thrives on fresh ingredients, fabulous seafood, a nod toward the cuisine of Peru, a world class curated wine list and access for people with disabilities – from the outside tables to inside dining to a lowered bar to a fully-accessible unisex restroom.

The cozy, convivial space is in a hip location – close to the northern end of Central Park and in the heart of El Barrio – the colorful, historic East Harlem.

Many people contribute to the amazing team that is Contento. Yannick Benjamin -- master sommelier, entrepreneur, activist and leader who uses a wheelchair for mobility, heads to collection of veteran restauranteurs. 

He’s always at the front of the house, recommended a daily special, pairing it with a rare and perfect wine, making sure everyone is comfortable and happy.

Steve Wright with Oscar Lorenzzi -- Contento

Executive Chef Oscar Lorenzzi oversees the compact but powerful kitchen – turning out fresh approaches to ceviche, wonderful grilled octopus and sinful olive oil cake with fresh berries.

The wonderful thing is that while many national publications have noted and praised the wheelchair access and inclusive design – they are NOT evaluating the hottest restaurant in town simply in terms of accommodating people with disabilities.

No, everything from the New York times to Eater has heaped praise on Contento for its luscious cuisine and notable wine list – by the bottle or glass.

On this day of thanks, I am thankful for counting Yannick and his team as friends.

Yannick Benjamin -- Contento -- accessible indoor dining

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 30

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The sun had begun to set on this wintry afternoon, bathing the Golden Horn in shadow. 

We stood in the terraced garden of a mosque, gazing over the landmarks of Istanbul — the red roofs of Cihangir, the 13th-century Galata Tower, one of the few surviving traces of Byzantium. 

We had been walking for more than four hours, across half a dozen neighborhoods, peeling away Istanbul’s tourist-friendly facade to expose the complex fabric beneath it. 

“That’s the beauty of living here,” Mr. Pamuk told me.

Then we descended along steep cobblestone alleys leading to the Ataturk Bridge, beginning the long journey home.

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 29

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He seemed to tense up slightly as we left the mosque and wandered into one of Istanbul’s hard-core Sunni neighborhoods. 

“We could be in a different country,” he said in a soft voice.

Salafist men with long beards and skullcaps sat on benches in tidy plazas; women in black abayas walked with their children down a cobblestone street past a madrassa, an Islamic school.

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 28

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Mr. Pamuk — fascinated and disturbed by the rise of political Islam in Turkey and the Middle East — based one of his most memorable characters, the terrorist leader Blue in his novel “Snow,” partly upon Mr. Mirzabeyogluna. 

Blue is an ambiguous figure: a charismatic intellectual who espouses a violent message, while avoiding direct entanglements in acts of terror. 

The cases of Mirzabeyogluna and Blue were similar, Mr. Pamuk said. 

“Some Islamists kill, but he didn’t, but he’s been locked up for a very long time.”

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 27

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We entered the grounds of the Fatih Mosque, built on the orders of Fatih Sultan Mehmed, the conqueror of Constantinople, starting in 1463.

It was rebuilt in 1771 after an earthquake destroyed it.

In a marble courtyard beside the massive pink sandstone mosque, considered one of the most graceful in the Islamic world, a wall poster caught Mr. Pamuk’s eye.

It demanded freedom for Salih Mirzabeyogluna, a radical Islamist and author of incendiary political tracts, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison on a terrorism conviction.

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 26

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A few steps away we ducked into Vefa Bozacisi, another of his favorite places. 

Founded in 1876, the shop, a cozy establishment with leather banquettes and antique mirrors, specializes in boza, a fermented wheat drink that originated in southern Russia. 

Mixed with water and sugar and sprinkled with cinnamon, the creamy, butterscotch-colored concoction is served in glasses that were lined up by the dozens on polished wooden counters.

Beside shelves of pomegranate vinegar, a case reverently displayed the shop’s most valuable heirloom: a silver boza cup used here in 1927 by Kemal Ataturk.

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 25

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Beyazit Square, a windswept plaza behind the book bazaar, abuts Istanbul University, formerly the Ottoman Ministry of Defense compound: a sprawling campus of brick-and-stone buildings and newer, slapdash structures behind a monumental entrance gate.

The plaza seethed with protests, riots and army killings during the 1960s and 1970s.

Mr. Pamuk was enrolled at the journalism school during one of the most turbulent periods, but while his friends were risking their lives facing down soldiers, he spent most days reading at home in Nisantasi.

“I was an ambitious, brainy guy, and university seemed like a waste of time to me.”

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 24

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The tale was a historical romance set in 15th-century Anatolia, the vast hinterland east of Istanbul. 

His friends frantically typed sections of the story, and Mr. Pamuk raced to this post office and handed the manuscript to a woman behind the counter just hours before the deadline.

 “The next day I received a note from her, telling me, ‘You paid me too little,’ ” he said, gazing at the main, gazebo-like kiosk beneath the atrium’s soaring central dome, where the moment played out.

“But she’d understood that I was ambitious, submitting a literary work, and she paid the postage on her own.”

One month later he learned that he had won the contest. “So I love this place just because of that,” he said.

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 23

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Not far away was another symbol of Ottoman hubris: the monumental central post office, opened in 1909, shortly after a military cabal of Young Turks seized power. 

“Now it’s just a local branch,” he said with an ironic laugh, sizing up the arched entryway and the cavernous, nearly empty atrium. 

It has deep associations for Mr. Pamuk.

In 1973, at 21, he had just dropped out of architecture school to devote himself to writing. 

Afflicted by self-doubt and parental skepticism, he decided to test his abilities by entering a short story in a local magazine competition.

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 22

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The autobiography, published in 2001, brought Mr. Pamuk’s life story up to his decision to become a writer in 1973 and captured a very different time in the city’s history.

“The city was poor, it wasn’t Europe, and I wanted to be a writer, and I wondered, ‘Can I be happy and live in this city and realize my ambition?’ 

These were the dilemmas I was facing,” he told me.

“When I published it the younger generation told me, ‘Our Istanbul is not that black and white, we are happier here.’ 

They didn’t want to know about the melancholy, my kind of dirty history of the city.”

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 21

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In “Istanbul,” Mr. Pamuk captured the melancholy, or huzun, that infused the metropolis during his boyhood, when it was still suffering a long decline after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

He described “the old Bosporus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter ... the old booksellers who lurch from one financial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to return.”

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 20

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Within these few square blocks, the Ottoman rulers commissioned grandiose palaces and other buildings that proclaimed the durability of their empire. 

“The whole bureaucracy was here,” he said, pointing out the Sirkeci train station, a classic example of European Orientalist architecture, with colored tiles, Moorish-style archways and twin clock towers, which opened in 1890 and served as the final destination of the fabled Orient Express. 

The age of grandiosity didn’t last long.

When Vladimir Nabokov alighted here in 1919, he found “a city in ruins,” Mr. Pamuk said.

“There was no physical destruction, but this place used to get the riches of all the Middle East and the Balkans, and then it all vanished, and it was reduced to poverty.”

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 19

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On the south side of the Golden Horn, we pushed past crowds in the Baharat spice bazaar, and emerged on a busy street in the Eminonu neighborhood.

In his childhood, Mr. Pamuk was fascinated by stories about the Ottoman sultans and pashas who ruled from this quarter of Istanbul, the site of rebellions, coups and secret jails where fearsome punishments were meted out.

“One place in Eminonu was especially constructed for what was known as the Hook,” Mr. Pamuk wrote in “Istanbul.”

“Wearing nothing but the suit in which he emerged from his mother’s womb, the condemned was winched up with pulleys, skewered with a sharp hook, and, as the cord was released, left to drop.”

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 18

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A century ago, “all the boats that came from the Sea of Marmara, from the Mediterranean, ended up here,” Mr. Pamuk told me. 

As he relates in “Istanbul,” 

Gustave Flaubert arrived here in October 1850 for a six-month stay, stricken with a case of syphilis picked up in Beirut.

He still managed to frequent the city’s brothels and wrote about the “cemetery whores” who serviced soldiers by night. 

Another celebrated visitor of that era, the French writer and politician Alphonse de Lamartine, “described boys on the bridge shouting to the tourists, ‘Sir, give me a penny,’ ” Mr. Pamuk went on.

“Tourists would throw the money into the sea, and they would jump from the bridge and dive in and the money would be theirs.”

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 17

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Half a mile down the Golden Horn a new bridge has just opened, a sleek white span that partly blocks views of some of Istanbul’s grandest mosques. 

Like Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s aborted plan to raze Gezi Park in Taksim Square and put up a shopping mall in the style of an Ottoman military barracks.

The bridge project has divided the city largely along socioeconomic lines: The city’s liberal elite has strongly backed the preservation of its Ottoman-era core, while the mostly poorer Islamists have tended to welcome this sweeping away of the past.

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 16

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We continued across the Galata Bridge, the historic epicenter of Istanbul, stopping midway to admire the scene: tourist boats and pleasure craft floated down the Golden Horn, past the mosques of Sultan Ahmet on one side and the steep hills of Cihangir on the other. 

“This was originally a wooden bridge, and when I was growing up you had to pay to cross it,” he said, “but you could also hire row boats. 

I remember my mother taking me across by boat in the 1950s.”

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 15

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“I had little interest in Byzantium as a child,” Mr. Pamuk wrote in “Istanbul.” 

“I associated the word with spooky, bearded, black-robed Greek Orthodox priests, with the aqueducts that still ran through the city, with Hagia Sophia and the red-brick walls of old churches.” 

Legal disputes have kept this patch of waterfront property, where we were eating lunch, in limbo, resulting in a rare zone of neglect in the heart of the city.

It’s one of Mr. Pamuk’s favorite places. 

“All my childhood was like this, but will it be like this in 20 years? 

No way,” he told me, as we savored the maritime smells.

He is all but certain that the rapid gentrification of surrounding neighborhoods will eventually overtake this forgotten field.

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 14

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Across the inlet, in stunning contrast to the scruffy surroundings, rose the silver dome of Hagia Sophia, wreathed in limestone and sandstone minarets. 

Built as a Greek Orthodox basilica and opened in A.D. 537 and converted into a mosque after the 1453 Islamic conquest of Constantinople, it was secularized by Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founder, and turned into a museum in 1935.

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 13

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We stopped for lunch in the shadow of the Galata Bridge, a double-decker concrete-and-steel span, opened in 1994, with walkways, three lanes of traffic in each direction and tram tracks.

Plastic tables and chairs stood haphazardly on a muddy patch near the water, flanked by portable grills selling fish fillets on baguettes, garnished with paprika, chile powder and chopped vegetables. 

A stray dog, his ear tagged as proof of his government-issued rabies shot, lay in the dirt. 

“He’s a local monument,” said Mr. Pamuk, who was bitten by a street dog during an evening walk 13 years ago and had to undergo a painful series of rabies shots.

-Joshua Hammer

ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 12

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Tucked off one steep avenue is an alley of government-sanctioned brothels guarded by the police.

The Karakoy area conjures vivid memories for Mr. Pamuk of his childhood. 

He pointed out a row of bicycle shops, where his father bought him his first two-wheeler. 

A bit farther on is a passageway leading to the Tunel, one of the world’s oldest subterranean transit lines. 

The two-stop subway, built by French engineers, began in 1875 and still links Karakoy Square with the embassy district in the central Beyoglu district.

In its early incarnation the train consisted of a steam engine that pulled two wooden cars, with separate compartments for men and women.

“The empire fell apart, and there was no other subway line in Turkey for 120 more years,” said Mr. Pamuk, who loved riding the trains with his parents as a child.

-Joshua Hammer