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Published: July 31st 2008
New York City is a somewhat one-way relationship. If you've had a friendship with an indifferent person who never calls you and you're the one who puts in the effort but never get it returned. You'll understand.
This city is massive. 1.6 million people live on 23 square mile Manhattan island, most of them are friendly, some are not. Arriving in the city is like walking into a giant movie set but it's all very real starting with the traffic jam we got caught in on Broadway.
We flew into sunny Newark airport at 6 in the morning. The flight across the states was long & cramped with no food. We had bad bagels and coffee for breakfast at the airport followed by the longest shuttle ride in history. We'd booked into the Candy hostel on the Upper West Side but a triathlon cutting across a street kept us cab-bound for another 90 minutes . As much as the triathlon inconvienced us, a 34 year old man swimming in the triathlon was stung by a swarm of jellyfish in the East River and later died.
We were dropped at the back entrance which had you believing it was a homeless
shelter. The front entrance was a dimly lit pen which felt like a refugee centre crossed with a Police Station holding pen. It was 10am and we didn't relish waiting until 3pm to check in. Central Park was only a few blocks away and it was warm enough for us to catch a snooze on the grass.
The day wasn't going well. At least we got some Jet-lagged sleep under the shade in Central Park. It must be one of the weirdest feelings I've had. Waking up thinking you're in the Auckland Domain but the foreign smells and buzz tell you otherwise.
Central Park is the antidote to concrete; you coulld easily spend 2 or 3 days taking it in. If money was no obstacle then living over and playing in Central Park would be fantastic. The 30 million you can pay for a penthouse suite in the Waldorf Astoria testifies to the park's value. We had the Candy hostel the look forward to. Then Jody saved us. Michelle's old friend and flatmate found out we'd landed and offered to put us up in her Greenwich Village walkup. Thank you, thank you.
After we'd settled in, Jody kindly
took us down the subway to the the best supermarket we'd ever seen. Whole Foods has got the nicest collection of food in one spot. America suffers from a healthy cereal shortage, obviously they don't suffer from a sugar shortage. Or they wouldn't put it on everything, hence the creation of Whole Foods. The 'Whole Foods' movement has really caught-on in NY. We were happy to oblige them and came out with some cool produce.
New York is the 'city that never sleeps' neither does the sticky heat when the sun sets. Everything is air-conditioned. Everything except outside and the subway stations. If it's 30 degrees outside add 5 for the station. When you get on then off the carriage it's the temperate equivalent of 2 steps forward, 1 step back.
The subway we loved. The millions who live here get around with ease & it's all because of mass transit. A $25.00 ticket each got us unlimited travel around NYC for a week. Although it probably wears off in the end there's a grubby charm about it all. I'll always remember the smell of wooden sleepers soaked in sump-oil & think subway. There's a wave of oily air
that is rammed down the subway into the station signalling your train's arrival. When you get on buskers good and bad, thread in and out of the trains at every stop. Making your trip a little bit shorter or longer.
Monday was a sleep-in and then we went off to the Natural History Museum up by Central Park.
Madame Tussaud's for animals and vanished ethnicities is what came to mind as we walked it's corridors. The Taxidermy was presented in tasteful dioramas of usually one animal species attacking another encased in a glass partition. 100 years ago President Theodore Roosevelt's hunting passion was exemplified in this musuem. Today, you wind up feeling a little ghastly and guilty for admiring the handiwork but it really is a must see. We only saw a small part of the exhibits. Give yourself 3 to 4 hours.
The Natural History Museum is part of an eclectic bunch of Museums on what is called Museum Mile. There's a Jewish Museum which happens to have a couple of great Pollock's & de Koening's on display. Also it was our first encounter with the passionate narration delivered by the guides we were to find at
all the museums. Some otherwise staid exhibits were brought to life by the staff.
Down a couple of blocks I found the Musuem of Design, unfortunately it was being renovated. The gift shop was open though & was well designed as you would expect.
The food in New York deserves it's own blog. You'll be eating and drinking a lot as NYC has a shocking lack of public toilets and park chairs. To sit down or relieve yourself requires buying something. The ugly side of the free market really shines in NYC. Back to the food.
Once again, one word...Joe's. It seems that all the eateries starting with Joe's serve good food. The Joe's Pizza in Greenwich Village; Not to be confused with Joe's Coffee in Greenwich Village too had great Pizza by the slice. If you like Pepperoni or Cheese you'll love it.
If you want Barbecue Meat Lovers, go to Pizza Hut. Joe's Pizza was about the only place I got served where the staff were surly like Danny De Vito in Taxi. I had watched Taxi growing up and thought NYC would be just like the TV show.
Joe's Coffee actually had really good American
style coffee, you can get a flat white easily though. This Coffee Shop on a leafy, quiet corner of the Village even had a park bench out the front where you can read the New York Times in serenity or engage with the local sitting next to you. Although not as outwardly friendly as San Fransicans, the locals were polite and helpful. Another notable dish was the 'Babishka' at Doma Cafe. Babishka is like french toast with maple syrup but with cream cheese in the middle - delicious. Most of the places we ate at were in Greenwich Village. The service was good, but there is a reptilian hipness emanating from many people in the Village including the wait staff. The service over in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) at Kasia's Diner on Bedford Ave was more earthy, the Pastrami on Rye was good and simple. Michelle had the Lox (Salmon) & Cream Cheese on wheatgrain which she liked. The Borscht (Cold beetroot soup) was a refreshing accompaniment.
Still on the food, don't ask about the provenance of the street corner hot dogs, you only need to know they taste really good. Street corner pretzels are rubbish however. Eating can become expensive
quickly if you have to have a proper coffee twice a day. I pity you hardcore caffeine addicts who need 5 cups a day. The filtered dog water they serve as coffee is worse than instant. Eating in a diner is an experience, you can mess with the menu as much as you like. When I waited tables I dreaded American's coming in and building their own dish.... all 8 of them on the table. In NYC it's your god-given right. Having said that you're meant to tip 20%. The booth seating and tweeness is somehow cool as you lay back eating whatever the hell you want.
Like everybody else New Yorkers love free stuff. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in Midtown is a scrum after 4pm on Friday afternoons when it's free. Otherwise you pay USD$20.00. You will see Dali's, Picasso's, Pollock's, Gauguins......The crowds will make you blase about these fantastic artists. So paying for it pays because it culls the crowd.
In modern times the firefighters of New York personify the hyper-patriotism of America. It may blind a population to injustices done in the name of 'freedom', but ALL the firehouses we walked past had memorials
Inside Statue of Liberty
Awesome! Looked like something out of the Rocketeerup for their firefighters lost on Sep 11 . You can begin to understand how they coped with the past and cope with the present 4000 dead, 30,000 wounded & climbing in the middle east.
The grand daddy of crowd pollution is the Statue of Liberty, booking in advance for the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island trip is essential in summer. We learnt our lesson from Alcatraz well. There's the security queue to board the ferry to Liberty island, shoes off please. Then there's the security queue to go into, up and around the statue. Luckily for us a couple gave us their tickets to go up. We soon found out why.
After shuffling along in the queue for 1 hour we came across another security checkpoint. At the height of the summer season they had 1 machine out of 3 working. If there is a sign that a nation is heading towards facism it should be queues run by these private sector goons and the terrible ersatz food served by the sole concessioneer on the island.
The Statue of Liberty is a remarkable engineering feat and a terrific PR home run for the USA. Just don't go in
the summer.
The flip-side to this Tour was Ellis Island. The immigration terminal was abandoned in the 50's after about 15 million people had passed through (2 % were refused entry) and was mostly restored in the 80's as a national park. The hospital area is still unrestored and would make a fascinating addition to the tour. The audio tour we took was poignant and informative. You could feel the ghosts shading the corridors you walked. Manhattan is a tough place to be when the exchange rate is bad. So how did people feel who were deposited in New York with hardly any money, little english and were far, far away from home?
We finished-off our Manhattan stay with a couple of activities. The Top of the Rock (Rockefeller Centre viewing platform) and the New York Punk Tour. I haven't been up the Empire State building; Michelle has and said the Top of the Rock is much better. I'll take her word for it. We went up and understood a little bit more about this city. If you think in grids and numbers you'll never get lost.
The view emphasises how integral Central Park is to the city.
The creative heritage that music has given New York got explained yo us by Bobby our Punk Tour guide. Tattooed and energised he gave us an impassioned tour of the seedy, exciting punkness of the Bowery, Alphabet City & the East Village. It's all gentrified now. But back in the day Joey Ramone, Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, Blondie, Joe Strummer amongst others lived and died here. Bobby was a font of knowledge and matched some album covers for us to buildings. Do this tour!
Our last day was a fiasco of detours and delays. The subway line out to JFK was broken. We got dumped off the subway halfway to the airport out in a place called Rockaway and in the pouring rain had to find a way out to the airport. You know you're in a slum when there's no taxi's around. We found a bus and had a nervous 45 minute ride out to the airport. Would we miss our flight? No! It's delayed 6 hours from the very same thunder storm we got caught in. Thankfully JFK is nicer than Newark and the KLM staff were helpful dishing-out food and updates.
We got on that plane
glad we'd been to New York City. If you go, give yourself 1 major thing to do a day. Time flies in this frenetic, bohemoth city.
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