New York - Top of the Rock or Bottom of the Pile?

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New York isn’t a cheap place to sleep. If you want a room where cats can be swung, you have to pay extra. The Colonial House Inn on W 22nd St has rooms where cats can be swung , but they thud into the air-con unit on the follow-through if you’re not careful. The place had free coffee and snacks 24/7 in a really friendly atmosphere, with an occasional discernible homo-erotic charge in the lobby/breakfast area. The Colonial is in a good spot, with all-night delis on the corner of 8th Avenue at the end of the tree-lined road and is only a few blocks walk to Penn Station and the Midtown area of Manhattan. It was almost impossible to walk the 100 metres from the hotel to 8th Ave without seeing at least 3 separate young men (or sometimes women) with their (or their employer’s) groomed pooch in tow.

Round the corner on W 23rd St. is the Chelsea Hotel. It’s not open for business at the moment, but it’s still attracting people like me taking photos of the plaques to famous previous residents: Dylan Thomas, Mark Twain, Brendan Behan, Leonard Cohen. All perfectly well behaved hotel guests, I’d imagine. Sid Vicious killed his girl-friend Nancy here. I have a theory about Sid. He got so angry and depressed listening to Leonard Cohen singing in the next room that he relieved his boredom through homicide. Just a theory.















New York still hurts (not surprisingly) from 9/11. Like most other visitors, we were drawn to the enormous building site where a new set of World Trade Centre towers is sprouting. Most impressive place we visited was St Paul’s Chapel on Broadway, which miraculously was undamaged when the twin towers collapsed, despite the fact that the graveyard was filled with falling debris. The church was a rest and recovery centre for rescue workers and is full of messages of support for them from individuals and emergency services (fire & police) from around the world. The fact that this is the oldest building in continuous use in New York and was frequented by George Washington (see his pew!) now seems a bit insignificant. The FDNY and the NYPD are the national heroes now.




The NYPD lost a few brownie points last Saturday afternoon. The much reported ‘Occupy Wall St’ protesters got a shot in the arm when a planned peaceful but noisy march over Brooklyn Bridge resulted in 700 arrests. Many were led by police from the planned route on the walkway to use the roadway, thus stopping traffic and providing police with a reason to make arrests. The resulting publicity has led to an influx of donations and given impetus to similar campings-out and demonstrations in other US cities, including Boston. Fox News remains two-faced. Apoplectic, but grateful for the reason to be apoplectic.

Along with the Fantastic Mr Fox, the New York tabloid press is always good for a laugh. This week, the New York Post and to some extent the Daily News have had a good snarl or a sneer at (1) the Al Quaeeda chief ‘biting the dust’, or at (2) the hopeless Italian legal system (‘Knox out!’). Sports pages and several of

the front pages are this week plastering coverage of the play-off baseball games, as the New York Yankees (think Man U) try to reach the World series final. The best of 5 game series against the Detroit Tigers is currently poised at 2-2. Our hotel was too mean to provide the requisite live coverage, so I had to make do with the NYC equivalent of Jeff Stelling and his mates. Tickets for the Yankee Stadium games last weekend were a bit hard to come by, so we lashed out on an evening at a theatre in the YMCA on the west side of Central Park. There was no sign of giant gay construction workers doing musical alphabet stuff. Instead, probably because the play was ‘Freud’s Last Session’ (guess whose idea it was to go) , the audience included at least one Woody Allen sound-alike whom we overheard trying to out-namedrop his psychotherapist mate. The play held attention, although the final minutes, as poor old Sigmund coughed blood to signal he was near the end, was a bit of a welcome relief. The next afternoon we trotted around Greenwich Village, trying to spot Woody Allen or Bob Dylan. Neither of them was in the queue at the Film Forum when we checked in to see a new French film about Serge Gainsbourg. Lots of smoking, sex and alcohol, some good music and acting coming from the screen, and far too much popcorn being noisily shovelled by the Olympic popcorn mastication group sitting behind us. Psychotherapists on Sunday, popcorn junkies on Monday and a mixed bag of people at the New York Ballet on Tuesday. I’m not a ballet fan, and neither, apparently, were half the blokes sleeping around us in the very comfortable seats at the Lincoln Centre. Great venue, good music (Faure and Tchaikovsky). Despite that, I remain unmoved by the power of the ballet, despite the critical acclaim afforded to the production by my companion and, it must be said, by most of the other 2000 punters. At $31 a ticket, this was not a bad evening out. I don’t suppose I missed a lot of action on the bit of the stage I couldn’t quite see. There always seemed to be someone doing something similar on the other side so you could catch upon what you missed. Maybe it’s the symmetry that gets up my nose in ballet. You don’t get symmetry in football which is why I like it. You never know which way Messi’s going to go, which foot he’s going to shoot with or which way he’ll slot it past the goalie. Apparently they actually rehearse their moves in ballet......

We had a good Saturday morning with Nic and Sara (ex-Winchester) at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. This is a great museum. Most people’s first experiences of New York focus on the leading icons of wealth, particularly of the last 100 years, with skyscraper mega-rich names like Woolworth and Chrysler, Rockefeller and Trump. The guide books invite you to marvel at these incredible buildings, along with the Empire State and the big hole at Ground Zero. This museum is about poverty. The Lower East Side has been first US home to successive waves of immigrants starting from nothing. Irish, German, Russian, Jewish, Italian, and others from Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The museum runs tours of one time-warped tenement house (97 Orchard Street) and in the neighbourhood. We stuck a pin in a list of options and signed up for the tour with an Irish flavour, complete with other

(American) visitors with Irish or German heritages. Our guide, a Peruvian, Renzo Ortega (surely should be O’Tega?) was brilliant. Along with making it clear why the Irish didn’t exactly love the English in the 1840s (you say potato; I say famine), Renzo evoked superbly the hardships of overcrowding, lack of money, food, health care and sanitation, to say nothing of discrimination, through the story of a particular Irish family who had lived (and some died) in the house in the latter half of the 19th century, following the potato famine in Ireland. It wasn’t a barrel of laughs, but gave us all a great understanding of how immigrant communities worked within and against the law (and still do). If you’re in New York, go there. Ask for Renzo. No fudge or tea towels in the museum shop. (Note to Nic and Sara: When you walked over Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon, did you manage to avoid arrest on Saturday, or did you ignore police warnings and carry on?)

We did the tour of the NBC studios, which occupy the lower floors of the Rock. The tour was frankly disappointing, although it would help to know who Dr Oz and Jimmy Fallon are. The rest of our group clearly did, and more than that, several were fans. The tour trades on the fact that people come to worship in the habitat of the TV celeb. ‘Jimmy sits right over there!’ . (Whoop!!! – from the bimbo on my left) Having said that, the tour group was generally unresponsive to the ‘Let’s have a great time today’ urgings from our all-too-slick-Icrackthatjokeoneverytour young guides, who were just too difficult to dislike. We walked the corridors and rode the elevators of NBC and sat in three (or was it four?) different studio audience spaces and stared in awe at where Johnny Carson had once had his desk. We looked in at the studio where Saturday Night Live had been broadcast the day before. I tried to imagine how impressed I would be if I’d been looking at the Jonathan Ross studio set the day after the show. Although I like JR quite a lot, I don’t think I’d be boasting to my mates that I’d seen his actual desk. I suppose we were hoping for a bit more TV history or ‘this is how we make TV shows’, of which there was very little. There was a good bit at the end where a bright young couple made a good fist of ‘reading the news’ or ‘presenting the weather’.

On Wednesday, we got the train from Penn Station and sat in enormous comfy seats to watch the Manhattan skyline disappear. By mid-afternoon, we’d found the hidden key to Nancy and Tom’s wonderful house in Charlestown, just across the Charles River in Boston.

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Photos

New York and the Blue Yonder
Looking North from Top of the Rockefeller Center