The City (New York, USA)

 

As the bus drove across New Jersey we could see the skyscrapers of Manhattan on the horizon. The bus dumped me right in the middle of the city and I made my way via the subway across to Brooklyn where I found the apartment I was renting in a slightly dodgy neighbourhood. It wasn’t as bad as the one in Philly, but I expected to be mugged at least once in my two weeks here. I rented it off a black musician named Shel, who used to be Princes keyboardist.

New York has five ‘boroughs.’ These are Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island. During my time I would explore all of the boroughs. I stayed in Brooklyn because that’s where the cheapest accommodation I could find was and it had good subway connection to the rest of the city, especially Manhattan.

 

From the time I decided to put NYC on my itinerary I knew it was going to be one of the highlights of the trip. I had great expectations for this city and it exceeded every one of them, making it one of the best places I’ve ever been.

It seems everywhere you look in this city there is something recognisable from TV or movies. Street names, neighbourhoods, buildings – I feel like I was finally in the world that I had been looking into from the outside all these years. So many TV and books and movies are set here that even the most commonplace sights or landmarks have been romanticised and glorified. And then there is the important sights, like the Statue of Liberty which I visited in my first couple of days, taking a boat out on the harbour for a view of the statue and the endless skyline in the background, which are every bit as glorious as they have been made out to be.

On top of that is the fact that New York is pretty much the capital of the world. New York leads the world in finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education and entertainment. It is the beating heart of the modern world.

Manhattan alone has so many neighbourhoods, each one with its own distinct characteristics, not to mention all the neighbourhoods across all five boroughs. This is a big and complicated city, so I had to be strategic about which parts I saw. I did a lot of walking here, getting to know different parts of the city on the street level, and I calculated doing 15kms on an average day. My shoes couldn’t handle it, the rubber sole getting thinner and thinner by the day.

One of the first things I did was cross the Brooklyn Bridge from downtown Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan, also known as the Financial District.  It took about 20 mins to walk from one side to the other, views all the way up Manhattan, with its endless supply of high rises forming a greyish skyline to the horizon. I would cross this bridge ten times during my time in New York, sometimes in the misty rain when cloud covered the tops of the skyscrapers, sometimes in clear weather so you could see all the way out to the Statue of Liberty and the New Jersey shipping Industry in the distance behind her, and sometimes during the evening when I could look up towards midtown and see the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, two of the most identifiable buildings here, lit up against a dark sky.

I went to the top of the Empire State Building and the Rockefeller Building, both having great views over the city.

 

In Lower Manhattan I wandered down Wall Street and past the American Stock Exchange, saw the famous ‘raging bull’ statue, and the site where the World Trade Centre towers stood. This area had been transformed into the 9/11 Memorial Park, the footprint of those old buildings forming the outline for two big waterfall pools. It was pretty crazy to think that I was standing on the site where those towers collapsed 13 years ago. One of the newest buildings down this end of town is the One World Trade Centre, which really stands out.

 

In Midtown I sat in Union Square to watch the punks and suits share a bit of park space, and wandered up past the Flat Iron Building, the sharp cornered building that used to be the world tallest. I visited the New York library and Grand Central Station, both impressive buildings.

 

Times Square is a highlight, filled with thousands of people, enormous billboards and screens, bright lights no matter the time of day, yellow taxis zooming around, and people in super hero costumes. An exciting place, for sure, reminded me of Hong Kong and Tokyo, the amount of neon being used.

Times Square is most famous for its Broadway scene. I went to see a play called ‘The Cripple of Innishman,’ at the Cort Theatre, and it was one of the best things I did in New York, not just because I had great seats right near the front (that I got for 50% off – but still pricey), but also because it starred Daniel Radcliffe, the guy I have been watching play Harry Potter in that movie series that started when I was eleven. It was great to see him up there doing his thing, and it made me realise that to be up there onstage, in this city especially, you need to be really good.

 

And then there is Central Park. Jesus Christ, I have never seen anything like this. A whole section of the island, a big rectangle, has been left as park land, filled with lakes, a big dam, patches of woods, bridges over creeks, meadows, big rock outcrops, playgrounds, a zoo, baseball fields, and just a lot of open space. It’s an enormous area, and it took me chunks of several days to cover it all.

 

Other parks I spent time in include Bryant Park, a midtown lawn surrounded by office buildings and their high walls of glass, where I would often have lunch and a snooze on the grass, and the High Line, an old above the road railway track converted into a really cool garden path that weaves through the buildings of the city.

I walked along Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue – all these famous avenues with the most expensive real estate in the world, expensive high rise apartment buildings and street front stores such as the famous Tiffanies & Co.

New York would be a great city to have a lot of money to spend. The consumerism, the entertainment options, the restaurants and bars, and with enough money New York is said to be the only place in the world where you can make a phone call and get anything you want delivered to your door, anytime of day.

This is also a city that would be best shared with someone else, and I felt a little guilty that it’s a place Rin so desperately wanted to come and see and yet here I was doing all by myself.

 

I explored the trendy neighbourhoods of Greenwich Village (where Bob Dylan started out), West Village, the Meat Packing District and East Village. If I was going to move to New York this is where I’d go.

I went up to Harlem, a strong hold for black culture which was far nicer than I expected, but still with a few housing developments and city basketball courts for character.

Brooklyn in itself is a whole world. I could have spent my whole time exploring just this one borough. It taught me how many minorities live in this city, and make certain parts their own. (Over 800 languages spoken in New York!) The neighbourhood I was in, called Bedford-Stuyvesant (known as ‘Bed – Stuy, Do or Die), is the second largest African American conglomeration in the country (after Detroit). I walked up through a Jewish area, where it was mostly Hebrew as opposed to English on business signs and school buses. Down in the south of Brooklyn I walked along the big boardwalk from Cony Island, where I had a chilli dog overlooking the beach, to Brighten Beach, which hoists the biggest community of Russians outside the former USSR.  Wandering around, looking at people, hearing them talk, this was pretty apparent. It really surprised me how these people just stick to the few blocks that are ‘theirs.’

Other areas I explored in Brooklyn were Williamsburg, the hippest new college-area-without-a-college, filled with trendy bars and quirky café’s, and an army of hipsters. I did a big loop around some of the white and Italian areas, and through an industrial area which had a little river running through it that is supposedly 2/3rds full of guns tossed into it.

 

So what did I eat in NYC? Within 24 hours of being in New York I had eaten the key American city foods; hot dogs, street pizza, fried chicken, and burgers and fries.

 I hunted down the restaurant used in Seinfeld as Monks, and had a sandwich. Sounds pretty pathetic, but these New Yorkers are serious about their sandwiches, and they serve them packed with layers and layers of meat, dump a whole heap of fries on the plate and a big pickle. I also got addicted to what they call a Hero (a meat roll, usually pastrami or corned beef) at all the Deli/Grocer corner stores in my neighbourhood, and I started most days with a cream cheese bagel.

Also, there is actually street food in New York, and not just hot dogs and pretzels. These vendors set up outside office buildings and seel all sorts of great Mexican, Asian and Arabic food for cheap prices. I also found a ‘White Castle,’ – a fast food burger joint that’s sells bit sized burgers (I got 6) made famous by the ‘Harold and Kumar’ movies.

In Chinatown I had some great noodle soups and Singapore noodles – the latter, I had learned a few years ago in Singapore, being invented in America. Next to Chinatown is Little Italy, filled with expensive Italian restaurants, which I wandered but wandered back out of to go get a big, greasy slice of pizza served on a paper plate for $1 a pop.

In my explorations outside Manhattan I found what people were calling the ‘real’ Little Italy and Chinatown.

 I headed up into The Bronx borough and walked through a section of it, starting off in a pretty sketchy area with housing developments, ‘street crazies’, and a big, rusted out railway above the street, and working my up to the busy downtown area, low rise buildings and a rush of people and traffic, which reminded me of parts of Brooklyn. Between the two I passed along Arthur Street, known for its Italian community and their restaurant, bakery and grocery establishments. I popped in to one place and ordered a pasta off a guy who would have fit in in a Godfather movie.

When in the Flushing district of Queens, a place so dominated by asians that the streets are crowded with Chinese, Vietnamese and Taiwanese restaurants, grocers, barbers, etc, where even the McDonalds billboard looming above the street is in big Chinese writing with small English caption below, I had a great meal that I couldn’t even finish at prices I would have paid in China.

While in Queens I also checked out Flushing Park, which hosts the world’s biggest globe, created for the 1914 world fair. Here I wandered through a bit of suburbia and saw families out for the kids soccer matches. Queens has traditionally been middle class suburban sprawl from Manhattan and Brooklyn, but is now becoming a haven for ethnic communities, such as those from Asia, as mentioned above in Flushing, and from Central American and Arab countries.

What took me out to Queen was the baseball. I sat high in the stands and watched four hours of baseball – The New York Mets versus (fittingly) the Philadelphia Phillies. The Mets are kinda like the working man’s team, the eternal underdogs, whereas the Yankee’s are the best of the best, a holy entity for the majority of New Yorkers. The Citi Field ballpark was spectacular in itself and once the game got going it was pretty captivating.

I also went to Madison Square Garden to watch a game of basketball. It was a womens basketball match because the men were in the play offs and I don’t like basketball enough to pay for those tickets (in fact I don’t like basketball enough to pay for any tickets – Erin sent them through as a surprise one morning.) I watched the New York Liberty get crushed by Connecticut Sun, and the most interesting thing about the game was the quarter time singing and dancing, the national anthem, kiss cam, the T-shirt gun totting mascots, and bizzarely, fans chosen to play musical chairs in the middle of the court during time out breaks. Only in America would continuous entertainment be so well perfected. The arena itself was cool to see, lots of memorabilia from big events around the venue.

 

I journeyed to Staten Island one misty day to see what was going on down there. As it turned out, there wasn’t much going on down there at all. Taking the free ferry from Lower Manhatten and passing Brooklyn on one side, the Statue of Liberty and the industry of New Jersey on the other side, I arrived to discovered that Staten Island is not much more than a suburban stronghold where people can live quietly with convenient access to transport into the big city where they can work amongst all the noise and chaos. So close to Manhatten but Staten Island has a townish feel to it.

I did museums. The Natural History Museum, where I saw some pretty important fossils that I had been learning about for years at high school and uni (‘missing link’ species that confirmed Darwinism, ‘Lucy’ skeleton one of earliest humanoids, transect of a 1,300 year old tree, enormous meteorites, etc.)  It was unbelievable that so many of these extremely important scientific finds where right here, all of them original, and on public display. Standing there looking at  two sets of footprints on prehistoric mud that had dried to rock, from two of our earliest ancestors walking side by side, the furthest dated marker for how early humanoids starting walking upright, it was kinda like a religious experience.

 

I also went to the Museum of Modern Art, which at times blew me away and other times made me realise how fine the line is between what is acclaimed art and what is ridiculous. Here I saw the original ‘Starry Night’, which I’ve had in my room for a few years. I had less patience despite there being more to see in the Metropolitan Museum of Art which had art and artefacts from all over the world.

Of course I did all these special things and saw the famous places, but I also appreciated the streetscapes that weren’t especially extraordinary, and hadn’t been referenced on a show with a multi-million viewership.

I liked that the city had glamour and grit. Not as much grit as back in the 90’s I’m told, but grit enough to keep me intrigued. I especially liked the aesthetic of the bricked apartment blocks with the outside fire escape, and on the nicer side of the coin, the tree lined streets of Brownstown town houses with the walk ups.

After two weeks, I had done what I could. I was exhausted. New York is the quint essential city, and an exciting one to be in. I had leathertramped it good, explored parts of the city that felt like they could have been on the opposite sides of the planet, and seen places and sights I’d only ever before seen on a TV screen. Of course by this stage the rubber had melted off my shoes to the extent that, and I shit you not, my socks had been worn through on the pavement and I was pressing skin to concrete.

There was still so much I wanted to see and do here, to be amongst it all – the feel of the city, and to get to know it better, but my time was up. I resolved that I would be back before too long, and next time I wouldn’t be alone.

On my last night as I walked back across the Brooklyn Bridge, the final time after so many crossings, I looked up as I passed under the big archways on the Brooklyn end and told myself that next time I crossed I would be holdings Rins hand.