“I’ve always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born. Far, both geographically and spiritually. To leave it behind … I feel that life is very short and the world is there to see and one should know as much about it as possible. One belongs to the whole world, not just one part of it.”
– Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
New York is a strange and beautiful place, one which has a visual palette ranging from the grandiose to the downright ugly. It is the confluence of every part of the world, the cacophony of the aspirations of millions brought to life. The architecture the most eclectic and grandiose; its arts the most sought after and aspired to; its views the most photographed, painted and shared; the bravado of its citizenry without peer. Everything about it invites hyperbole. To walk the streets of New York is to stand at the top of the world, to be among the epicentre of ambition, of creativity, of power, of money, of art, of culture. One cannot help but gaze, dumbstruck at every turn: mostly in awe of the sheer scope and beauty of the place; sometimes in revulsion at that to which it contrasts. It has been written about in close to innumerable forums and ways. I spent two weeks there in mid-October 2015 and have a handful of reflections of my own.
Getting there: not half the fun
Fairly indicative of a Melbourne to LA flight are the volumes of long, unexpurgated films on the inflight entertainment. Among the choices wereThe Godfather Part II (202 minutes) and Gone with the Wind (238 minutes). You could watch both films twice and still have three and a half hours to burn. But flight stories are done. Initially, you need to plan ahead for your long journey there. We left at 1.00pm in the afternoon, and were in Los Angeles 14 or so hours later. After being rushed through customs, we transferred to a connecting flight to New York, and touched down five and a half hours after the fact. By the time the cab got us from JFK to our Airbnb place in Williamsburg, I had been awake for the better part of 27 hours.
It was *literally* a case of no sleep ‘til Brooklyn.
Whatever your remedies are, take them. I’d embrace chemical assistance but nothing works. Someone of my height does not bode well for Economy Class seating, even with the surcharge for exit row legroom. I sat next to a recently de-listed AFL player who was 10 cm taller than me and about 12cm wider. He was in no way self-aware of his vast dimensions and took up as much space as his brawny appendages would allow.
Walk
When you get to New York, there are a couple of things worth knowing. The subway system is fast, cheap and efficient (not clean, but fast and cheap). Having said that, walking is amazing as far as experiences go. Almost everything you look at is worth photographing and every view is spectacular. Walking these streets, parks and bridges is a remarkable testimony to the fact that generations of artists, writers and filmmakers have found inspiration simply walking the footpaths (sidewalks) in front of the remarkable and diverse architecture. It would be a challenge to walk around for an hour or so and not hear the voice over intro to Woody Allen’s Manhattan.
A small giddying glee grips you every time you see the Empire State Building, surely one of the more remarkable and awe-inspiring buildings in the world. It’s hard not to look at it, from close to any distance or angle and not be impressed by its vast scale, moved by its art deco beauty and intimidated by its greatness. Great in every sense, figurative, literal, pejorative.
Everything that you look at years to be captured, photographed, remembered. It is a city of literally infinite images. Sadly, most of the people visiting would rather take photos of themselves, capturing not that which makes the place great, but pictures of those who seem to only want to bear witness to themselves enjoying what can’t be seen. If it can’t be shared on social media, what purpose does it serve even being there?
Central Park is everything you’d want a city park to be. And in a city with real estate as sought after and pricey as it is, the fact that the park exists and continues to do so, unabated, uninterrupted by progress and development over so many years is testimony to the fact that while the city may be the epicentre of global finance, its residents and city officials continue to have and display an ever-present sense of civic pride. It’s a beautiful thing. The best bit, for this writer at least, is the Bethesda Fountain. The story of the original fountain of Bethesda in Jerusalem goes – according to scripture – that the angel Bethesda descended from the sky in the middle of the market square. The spot where her foot brushed the ground, there sprang a fountain. The good book would have us believe that whoever bathed in this fountain would be cured of whatever ailed them. When the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, the fountain went dry. According to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, ‘Legend has it, though, that when the millennium comes, it will flow again.’
‘This angel. She’s my favorite angel. I like them best when they’re statuary. They commemorate death but suggest a world without dying. They are made of the heaviest things on earth, stone and iron, they weigh tons but they’re winged, they are engines and instruments of flight.’
And, speaking of public art…
There is a monument to the sheer raw, unbridled, and ungoverned animalistic brutality of American capitalism – found in the financial district near the New York Stock Exchange. The iconic market bull. On a cool Saturday morning, the statue was unrecognisable for the swarm of Chinese tourists taking pictures of it. Those ensuing pictures would have been of other people taking pictures; the bull itself invisible beneath the throng of snap-happy tourists. They swarmed on it like ants at a picnic. It looked, from afar, to be the victim of a large pack raping, which, given the current state of US-Sino finances, was disturbingly apt.
The finest bookstores I have ever browsed are here.
Book Book (266 Bleecker Street between 6th and 7th Avenues) in Greenwich Village. It’s small, but there’s something spectacular about its selection. It was one of three bookstores I went into where I wanted to buy close to everything I saw. The other one was a place called Powerhouse Arena (37 Main St, Brooklyn), a lot of different titles, a lot of books about New York architecture and how the city has been used in film and TV. The Strand bookstore (828 Broadway) is intimidating in its contents. There’s no way you can walk away from the place without purchasing something – from the brand new to the pre-loved. The Barnes and Noble at 33 E 17th St is among the more impressive examples of that wholly impressive chain; multi-storeyed and stocked with stunning content. This one also has the finest selection of DVDs I’ve seen in once place, with the Criterion headquarters located in the same building it’s easy to see why.
The Great White Way
Once you get past the flash and mega-wattage of Times Square, there sits within the theatres of Broadway the most talented artists, actors and practitioners of theatre in the world. On this trip, we took in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder at the Walter Kerr Theatre. It was splendid, brilliantly done and very funny. Then, to the Eugene O’Neil Theatre for Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s superbly staged The Book of Mormon, and a slight change of pace was had at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Therese Raquin at Studio 54. Broadway theatres are among the more immaculate, beautiful places to see shows, although a man of my dimensions was never intended to be part of the audience. Especially at the Eugene O’Neil. More like Long Day’s Journey into Legroom, am I right, people? Huh?
Lessons learnt
There are many lessons to be learnt from having traipsed the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn for a fortnight.
Bed down every night in Brooklyn.
If not, visit Brooklyn. The heart of this newly gentrified borough is only one or two stops out of Manhattan on the L train. Bedford Avenue is a respite from the voluminous noise and insanity of midtown (which can be all a bit much once the afternoon rush hits). There’s little going on in Brooklyn, either in Williamsburg, Green Point, Brooklyn Heights or Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) that won’t make the trip worth your effort. Dumbo and Brooklyn Heights can be found via the A, C, 2 or 3 trains.
Avoid anything that has either food carts or souvenir stalls.
Yours should be an experience of travelling, not tourism. If there are crowds of people jostling for position for the best angle with selfie sticks, move on. The Dakota Building, sadly draped in scaffolding for restorative purposes, is one of the most awe-inspiring examples of residential architecture of its era anywhere in the world. And the outside of it is on free public display right there on Central Park West. It sits opposite a mosaic in Central Park called ‘Strawberry Fields’, commemorating the fact that John Lennon lived and died there. And because this draws tourists, it draws the peddlers. There was something entirely unsettling about street vendors selling t-shirts, picturing John Lennon in a ‘New York City’ t-shirt, being sold opposite the spot where he was murdered. It’s sights like these that make you turn on your heel and move on, knowing that a small, better part of humanity is dead too.
Avoid the street meat.
There are moments when you pass it that the aroma may hit you and give you the smallest measure of olfactory delight, but a second whiff will send you packing. Honey roasted peanuts smell tantalising from five paces, but will bring about a gag reflex within two. There are too many good restaurants to name; you can, in fact, eat three meals a day in a different restaurant, every day for a year and still not have experienced them all. Too many occasions for good food negate the need for anything sold from a cart.
Look up.
There is nothing on any given package tour that will be of any greater interest than simply observing and imbibing the beauty of New York’s finer architecture.
It’s these views which make it abundantly clear why New York has been a mecca for the creative for so long. The sidewalks, as they call them, the arteries of this place looking up at the ‘stoop’ houses. Some adorned with plaques of famous authors, artists who once lived there. A non-descript townhouse in Brooklyn Heights proclaimed to have been the one-time residence of WH Auden.
Greenwich Village, Soho, the East Village, and TriBeCa count among the best places to just hang out, eat, drink, read, whatever. It’s a beautiful, relaxed part of town. The cafes are great, the bars are great, there are clubs and bookshops and boutiques and bakeries. It’s among my favourite corners of the world.
Most tourists find their way to the Empire State for its stunning panoramas, but a better view is found at Rockefeller Center, which gives you what is a similar view, but has the Empire State in it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is worth seeing for its collection of art (obviously), but it also has a spectacular view from the rooftop bar, looking back towards the Manhattan skyline above the treetops in Central Park. Come for the art, stay for the view. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has a superb collection of art, among the world’s best. The Guggenheim is a work of art itself – seen in any number of films and TV shows, it’s a Frank Lloyd Wright building that’s wonderful to look at and be in. The exhibits may vary in terms of their engagement and quality. The Frick Collection on Fifth Ave is a stupendous place to observe art, and an insight as to how the super-rich lived in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Steel and coke baron Henry Clay Frick may not have been any measure of a decent human, but his cultural legacy is something to behold.
The New York Public Library is a beautiful building, was featured in the opening act of Ghost Busters, and on occasion has free public readings of authors of note. Seen on this trip: noted biologist, atheist, author, and bit of a tool, Richard Dawkins.
The National 9/11 Memorial had a massive task ahead of its construction – to honour those who perished, those who went into the buildings to rescue those trapped inside, those who took part in the recovery efforts, all the while doing so in a manner which was in no way exploitative. It benefits from removing the accompanying geo-politics (for the most part) from the exhibit, so what the museum boils down to is the sheer scale of the event, of the buildings, and the fact that almost every last one of those who died on the day were simply going about their work days. It’s invariably breathtaking in its scope, its simplicity, and the sheer volume of humanity involved.
Where the journey IS the destination.
Taking the Roosevelt Island Tram is an act of the purest form of tourism. There is close to nothing of any interest on the island itself, so it becomes one of those things where getting there is all the fun. Not half, all. The cable car offers a unique perspective on a section of the lower east side, the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, 1st and 2nd Avenues, as well as the physical mechanics of the cable structure itself – this is a stunningly impressive piece of engineering. It takes something like three minutes, is a minor event vis-à-vis ‘rides’, and once you get to the island, the only thing to do there is realise there’s nothing to do except get on the tram and go back to 59th Street.
Everyone has different ideas about what to do while they’re there. All I can say is, visit the buildings. Look up at them, be they iconic like the Empire State, the Chrysler, Rockefeller Centre, the Flat Iron or the New York Stock Exchange, or if they’re just part of the standard stoop houses in any of the neighbourhoods or boroughs. Just look. It’s a city of beautiful buildings. And a city where everything costs something, just looking is free.
Eat, drink and be merry
There are fine places to eat all over New York. If you’re willing to head over to Brooklyn, they’re just as good, and the views can be spectacular. But there’s a hell of a lot to choose from. If you ate breakfast, lunch and dinner at a different restaurant every day for a year, you’d still not cover it. I’d say, go to a deli, either the famous Katz’s (205 E Houston St, where Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally), or the Carnegie (854 7th Ave, where the cronies and agents told stories in Broadway Danny Rose). That one was closed for renovations when we were there, but the one next door? The Premier Deli Café (856 7th Ave). I had a Reuben sandwich there that may have been the most delicious thing in the history of the world. My arteries screamed in pain, but dude. So worth it.
The Food Hall at the Plaza Hotel.
A food hall? Really?
Seriously, it was fantastic. Taking its cues from Harrods in London, there’s 21 places to choose from with every conceivable taste catered for. Baffling to recommend a food court, but there you go.
Beer, and lots of it
Mugs Alehouse: 125 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn.
Great selection of craft beers on tap at reasonable prices.
TØRST
615 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn.
An even larger selection of craft beers, in 5, 8 and 12 oz glasses.
Some of the prices are a trifle hefty, but among their ales was a whiskey barrel-aged stout which was 19.2%. Staff can be a bit haughty, though.
Jones Wood Foundry
401 E. 76th St
Just stumbled onto this one. Nice cosy British pub. Chap from Brisbane behind the bar.
Palma
28 Cornelia Street Greenwich Village
Intimate space with excellent Italian food amid the nicest neighbourhood in New York.
Atrium
15 Main St, Brooklyn
Great place to eat a full, hearty lunch after you’ve thrown back a few coffees and cookies at One Girl Cookies next door.
“Atrium Dumbo is a seasonal French American restaurant in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn with an incredible wine and cocktail program!” they say. Fun fact: the best design for a restaurant logo I saw.
Devocion
69 Grand St. (at Wythe), Brooklyn (Williamsburg)
Best coffee, after an exhaustive search, and the one closest to home, as it were.
They roast on site, have plenty of space, a great staff and hangover-curing pastries.
Toby’s Estate
125 N 6th St, Brooklyn
Also good, and festooned with Australiana, for some reason.
Walter Foods
253 Grand St, Brooklyn
Fine menu, good tap list, good wine list, good staff.
The Bedford
110 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn
Bar and restaurant with very, very tasty items on the menu. Amazing burgers.
Scalino GP
659 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn
The guy who runs this place, he couldn’t be nicer or more enthusiastic about what he does. And to look at him, you’d think that on a quiet morning in early 1990, he looked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and decided: “Yep. This is my look, and I don’t ever want to change it.” The food, it must be said, while simple and straight forward, is ludicrously, offensively tasty.
One Girl Cookies
33 Main St (corner of Water), Brooklyn (Dumbo).
Tasty, tasty cookies, excellent coffee.
Brooklyn Bowl
Spectacular live venue, bar and bowling alley. A combination that works wonders in this particular context. There’s a cover charge, but it’d be worth it. The owner, Charley, may be one of the nicer chaps in New York City. Trey Anastasio from Phish was playing the night we went.
Minetta Tavern
113 Macdougal St, Greenwich Village
Book a table, have some amazing steak, a couple of reds and then go to the Comedy Cellar to see world-class stand-up. Jim Norton was playing there the night we went. Book at both places well in advance; can’t emphasise that enough. Two item minimum plus cover charge.
Balthazar
80 Spring St
Another place worth checking out, and booking in advance. Large, cavernous bistro with a straightforward yet superb menu. Pricey, but worth it.
Addendum
For a more comprehensive, and (let’s not deny it) better appraisal of the city that never sleeps, check out Alexandra Carroll’s book about New York, remarkably enough called New York.