Eating Manhattan

There’s a lot to eat in New York.

Well, there’s a lot to eat in just about any city (maybe not Darwin; that’s basically KFC, McDonalds and a crocodile burger place that smells suspiciously of chicken). But I’ve never been anywhere that food is so readily available. The hotel doesn’t have its own restaurant, café, diner or anything else that makes food, but every exit has a side door that leads into a restaurant. Or a café. Or a diner. Emerging onto the sidewalk and crash-tackling your way past the tour spruikers (“Getcha touaz, getcha hellycopta ridez, rightere!”) exposes you to the, ah, nutwagon: a hotplate-on-wheels attached to an inscrutable old Japanese guy busily scraping candied cashews around a bowl so old the sides have worn through. Past him there’s a hot dog wagon next to a halal cart (seriously, that’s what they’re called; it’s a thing here).  Cross the street to the pizza place with the dining room backing onto the subway (like, trains, not foot-longs), or go past that to the OTHER pizza place, where the pizza’s more expensive, but your drink doesn’t spill every time the Q trains hammers past on the way uptown. Keep walking, McDonald’s.  Then Wendy’s, TGI Fridays (awful name, worse atmosphere) and a Dunkin’ Donuts to top you up on sugar before you hit the M&Ms shop (it’s Pick ‘n’ Mix heaven in there. Provided you only want M&Ms. Stop short of the plastic toy ones or there’ll be tears). And on to Times Square, where the gigawatt jumbotron screens keep your styrofoam (seriously) tray of ‘fish on rice’ warm while they sear Nike logos into your retinas.

I didn’t try them all. But I tried a lot…

HOT DOG

Bread so light and fibre-free it gives pigeons the squits. A hot dog so overprocessed it was once in a pipe. Sauce and mustard barely distinguishable from congealed red and (ew) yellow cordial.

Even the napkin is artificially coloured

 DELICIOUS!

I don’t know why. But it was great. Sure, I was straight off 29 hours of alternately flying and sitting around a airlocked transit terminal, but this thing was GREAT. Cost me two bucks, threw it down in less time than it took to buy it and thought about going back for another one. I was walking past FAO Schwarz as I finished it though, and the lure of giant pianos and life sized stuffed tigers and bears and Rush Limbaughs was too much.

CHILLI DOG

An extension of the above. Take a hot dog. Add grated mystery cheese. Slop in a dash of so-so chilli and exchange for three well-worn dollar bills: 

Huh, wonder what I did with that top...

EVEN MORE DELICIOUS!

I couldn’t blame jet lag for this one. I was fresh from a walk through Central Park, and hungry thanks to spending the entire day meandering around The Most Amazing Art Gallery Ever. Whatever the reason, it tasted damn fine. Sure, there was sugar enough to keep a six year-old bouncing off the ceiling until high school, and the chilli was so rich it had a share portfolio, but whatever, shut up. Damn good. Pro tip: grab extra napkins. Or eat it naked and plan on a shower.

PRETZEL

Another New York staple. I grabbed one of these near the Brooklyn Bridge, one of my must-see sites for this trip. Subway down to Wall Street, quick stroll through the-where-the-hell-am-I district, pop out on the approach to the bridge. A wagon on the ramp blocked my path, so I figured on nailing a culinary mission as well as a geography one.

“Hey bud (‘bud’?), how much for a pretzel?”

“THREE!”

They way he said it gave me the feeling he wanted to behead me with a fishstick. I nodded and made the universal ‘I accept your price and wish to purchase said goods’ gesture. He did something out of sight and moments later a head-sized pretzel was thrust menacingly towards me. I took it, paid without breaking eye contact and backed away before hurrying onto the bridge.

Now, these things are around in Australia. In fact an old friend ran the first Wetzel’s franchise in the country. I had them several times: they were warm and stretchy and salty and as good as buttered bread straight out of an oven.

This. Was. Not.

The pretzel was sticky. Not like melted-butter sticky, more sort of tacky rubber cement-sticky. The weirdly opaque salt crystals looked like the fur that grows around old chemical drums. And when I took a bite, the texture was somewhere between stale candy floss and building plaster.

I managed three bites. Then I hurled the remains into a bin, scattering the pigeons looking for a snack. On their return, they stood on the pretzel while they pecked at styrofoam.

"Trials of the new road-surfacing material were going well, the pretzels showing no signs of wear."

KNISH

If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll k’now I planned to order one of these just for the pleasure of using the word. Say it with me now, k’nissssh. You can chicken out and pronounce it kerNISH, but if you’re Aussie, if you take the nasal twang seriously, if you’ve ever said the words Fnord or f’tang, you’re right there beside me, brandishing your three bucks outside Central Park and declaring “I’ll have a k<exhalethroughnose>NISH thanks!”

Bam, three seconds. Hot and foil-wrapped and steamy and what the hell did I just buy?

Experimental nibble at what appears to be a deep-fried pastry case. Rumour confirmed: lobbed in the fryer about two hours earlier based on the texture. A little chewy-stale but clean and hot and retaining at least a memory of crispness. Press on deeper: squishy off-white interior. Smooth, creamy…potatoey? Ahh, and stringy-cheesy! Oops, bit of foil there: wait for teeth to stop singing, peel back and lunge at its steaming heart.

Good, good, good.

Look, it’s basically mashed potato, wrapped in dough and deep fried. But…yeah, hot and squishy and easy to eat and just what I wanted after a day of staring at mammoths and giant Egyptian statues and endless broken pots covered in naked orange Greek guys. I strolled along the path watching joggers puff by and trainers bark at their victims to do ‘One more! Come on, push it!’ and a bunch of people play what looked like American football with a bean bag, and enjoyed every bite of my deep-fried carbohydrates. And dammit, I would do so again. Maybe once my arteries unclog.

CHICKEN GYRO

There’s some linguistic shenanigans around this name. In Adelaide we call it a Yiros (pronounced YEE-ross). Perth they’re kebabs (pronounced “Uhhr f#$k I’m drunk. Let’s geddakerbab.”). Darwin I think they were chiros (chEYErows). Probably a common ancestor there. Except for kebab, but…yeah, Perth. We’re a long way from everything out there, and we kinda lose touch. (Anyone know any other names for them?)

Anyway, I went one of these after the Guggenheim letdown (see, there’s a great name for a greasy snack. Or an absinthe hangover cure). There was an Indian chap running a cart who looked less militant than Pretzel Guy, so I thought I’d chance it. There was a process: chicken was chopped, bread was warmed and salad was fetched from the bowels of the cart. Moving away from that challenging metaphor, I accepted his calm offer of ‘Hot sauce?’ and took the proffered meal, along with the phone-book ream of serviettes included.

A bad photo of a good meal

Of all the food cart challenges, this one was the closest I had to a genuine meal. Fresh, hot pita, smooth not-too-sweet garlic sauce, well-cooked chicken and salad with enough crunch to announce its presence over the other ingredients. The hot-chilli cohort amongst my friends would scoff at the ‘hot’ sauce (warm at most), but it added just enough tang for my liking. I orbited the Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis reservoir in the prescribed anti…sorry, counter-clockwise direction as I worked my way through it, pausing only to take scenery photos, capture errant warm sauce globules and fish out the last morsels of tasty from the bottom of the expertly-folded wrapper. All things considered, it was the finest work of art I experienced that day. Sorry Frank.

THREE-EGG TURKEY OMELET

That’s how it’s advertised on the menu. This was my first New York breakfast, so it gets a guernsey. I joined the rest of the hotel patrons in the Lindy café, the bar-cum-diner in one of the retail nooks on the building’s Seventh Avenue frontage. Of immediate interest were the staff: rather than the disinterested twenty-something girls an Australian equivalent would hire, every waiter was an old guy. Two were black, one was Hispanic, one was constructed entirely of wrinkles and bonhomie.

“Café?”

I looked around, wondering if wrinkle guy was asking me to confirm our location, but the proffered pot answered my unasked question. I got through two and a half refills by the time my omelet arrived (it was actually quick, but I was thirsty and damn he was handy with that pot).

Meh. Fruit with it though.

It was…adequate?

The ‘turkey’ was some sort of sausage, sliced and fried to a dark brown that masked any clues about its identity or origin. The omelet was a little overcooked for my liking, and perhaps could have used some cheese or something else to lift the flavour. But the toast was hot and fresh and it came with some sort of creamy butter stuff that added something more than just cholesterol to the experience. I didn’t eat anything else until about  four pm that afternoon, so clearly it did the trick. But for fifteen bucks I could have done better. And so could the cook at Lindy’s.

Pro tip: the closer to the hotel, the more likely they’ll take advantage of your price-and-quality ignorance. Stretch your legs, folks. Earn your breakfast.

TOASTED BAGEL

It’s a bread roll. Moving on...

"Dear Jewish community: what exactly is all the fuss about??"

PIZZA

You hear a lot about the ‘New York Slice’. It’s an institution or something, just like everything else in this city. There’s takeaway pizza in Australia but, much like zombie plague, you either get the whole thing, or none at all. New York is different (the pizza, not zombie plague; that works the same). Here’s how to get some:

Go to the pizza counter. A sweaty bloke who’s rolled around in flour a bit will gesture with a canoe paddle and say something. It may sound like ‘You killed my father. Prepare to die’, but remain calm. Inspect the array of pizzas on display and select one or two you like. Varieties will always include cheese, two cheese, three cheese, spinach (seriously, six pizza places and they all did spinach. Popeye would be bench-pressing cement trucks after lunch here), pepperoni, some mysterious thing that looks like lily pads on a white pond ( I have a terrifying suspicion it was Four Cheese plus spinach) and an assortment of vegetarian abominations. Point if you’re not sure, or tell him what you want. He will reply with his postal address in Naples, use the canoe paddle to pick up a slice from each of your selections and fling them into a furnace. Wait nearby while he loudly declares blood feud on other customers. Then watch his move: open furnace, extract slices with paddle, fling deftly onto paper plates hopelessly unprepared for a) heat, 2) grease and d) the weight of the mozzarella. Nod and smile as he shouts his children’s recent school grades at you, then head for the counter to pay.

"I'll have a slice of cheese, pepperoni and subway station thanks."

If you stay to eat, do not use a knife and fork. Taxi drivers with ‘Sopranos’ accents will appear from nowhere and devour you. The appropriate technique is to grasp by the crust, fold in half lengthways and consume it from the thus-formed spear tip, ensuring it is held low to ensure maximum cholesterol oozes onto each bite. Give it a few seconds to cool; the furnace is a pitiless taskmaster. If you eat on the go, follow the same approach, but do the ‘pizza navigation face’. Grasp, fold, raise to mouth. While crossing the street, tilt head back, eyes still forward, stick out tongue and engage the pizza tip with the tongue, then shuttle-dock it with your mouth. Your eyes will be horror-movie wide as you attempt to negotiate sidewalk traffic with two pounds of molten cheese attached to your alimentary canal, but do not be afraid. Others will allow you extra fighting room. Unless you bought vegetarian, in which case they deliberately  steer you into storm drains.

Oh yea, the pizza is pretty good. And ranges from wtf cheap ($1.50 for a pretty good pepperoni slice) to wait-what expensive ($6 for pepperoni and mushroom. The mushrooms were good, but they weren’t $4.50 good).

PASTRAMI ON RYE AT KATZ’S DELICATESSEN

This place is an institution. Again. The walls have photos of the cast of pretty much every gritty 1970s NY police drama, every whimsical 1980s rom-com, and a bunch of other shows, plus minor celebs like that Clinton guy from the show about the White House before Bush turned it into a war movie. I was under instruction to order a pastrami sandwich, so I lobbed just before lunch to try it out.

Madness. From the bloke at the door shoving a ticket in my hand, through the next bloke at the door warning they would trap my soul for eternity if I lost my ticket, through to the aproned mountain foghorning instructions from behind the counter. The place was wall-to-wall. And its location on Houston Street (SoHo by the way means ‘South of HOuston street’) means they had space: there are a hundred tables in there. I reached the front (i.e. the crowd forced me against the counter), where I shouted ‘Pastrami on rye with mustard please. To…’ quick look round, observe people piled three-deep on chairs, ‘…to go.’

A calm nod. He began slicing something in a curiously rhythmic manner. While still slicing, a small plate appeared on the counter, on which he deposited two slices of steaming flesh, black-crusted and glistening. Another nod. ‘To try.’

I tried.

Wow.

Pastrami, for the unfamiliar, is beef, brined, spiced, smoked then steamed for hours. It’s slightly purple with a black crust of spice. As presented by Katz's deli, it is the best meat I have ever tried. Tender to the point of flakiness, rich and faintly gelatin-sticky, just spicy and salty enough, there’s a textural joy and a confusion of flavours there that set it apart from the best steak. And I had a pound of it coming my way.

The black slabs are spice-crusted pastrami. That's a steamer full behind.

The ‘sandwich’ was in a bag with the (apparently) customary handful of pickles in minutes. I tipped, gave him my ticket to mark and made my escape, paying the door troll to gain my freedom.

One down side of Houston street, I discovered, is very few parks nearby. I found one next to a kids’ playground that looked straight out of the Sesame street credits and settled in next to three old Spanish guys, including the ubiquitous Angry Shouting One. The sandwich and pickles took up my impromptu backpack tablecloth nicely.

Cut in half, it’s still a two-handed job. Still plenty warm, the bread wash fresher than I was, the mustard was typical American-mild and the pastrami, which by some miracle of modern engineering, remained in the sandwich (I can see where New Yorkers develop the skills to make such big buildings)…where was I…oh, the pastrami. Yeah, hot and greasy and perfect.

I ate half, along with half of the pickles (there were six of them, each the size of a..hm, maybe not that comparison…the size of a pickle that is six inches long. Yeah). The other half went in my bag for later, and was devoured the next evening straight out of the fridge. As good as when I first bought it.

How good was it? On my last day I went back for another. Here it is:

Not a flavour out of place. This is good, good food.

It was  nice to soak up some of the vibe of the deli without most of the Village competing for the same air. The staff barely seemed to notice customers, working and shouting at each other as if we weren’t there. Most were old, all but one were men. And everyone seemed gruffly pleased to be working in the place that served me the best thing I ate the whole time I was here.

Katz's delicatessen, minus insane crowd. Look familiar? Imagine Meg Ryan, banging the table and screaming "YES! YES! YES!" at Billy Crystal.

Come here, try this. You will leave happy.

EVERYTHING ELSE

Not all the options are junk, signature food or outrageous carnivorous indulgences. There are enough people here that the retail market can cater for just about any taste. If only one in a thousand Manhattan residents was a gluten-intolerant vegan Muslim, there’d still be around thirty of them in every square kilometre. That’s enough for someone to decide it’s worth offering a halal tofu salad or whatever on the breakfast menu. Ratchet that back to slightly more probable food proclivities and you’re seeing a lot of vegetarian, kosher, wheat-free, nut-free, lactose-free and anything else-free choices. And if what you want is as simple as a fruit salad for breakfast, you don’t have to go far.

No turkeys were harmed in the making of this breakfast. Several melons did have a pretty bad day.

 I squeezed in my Central Park jog on Friday morning. Afterwards, while stumbling around looking for a subway to take me back, I decided to sort breakfast on the way. The first open door I tried had fruit salad, watermelon, mango, cereal cups and fruit-yoghurt-muesli cocktails for something like three dollars. I’d done enough mostly-melon-anyway fruit salads by then, and I felt like I’d earned a minor indulgence; I went the latter. So at 8.30 am I’m in shorts and Mossimo T-shirt and ten-year-old Nikes, herd-surfing down Broadway as I tuck in to my watermelon and granola and full-cream yoghurt, sweat still dark on my collar, heart still ticking up just a little from the track and feeling like everything I’d done so far that day was as natural as breathing taxi fumes in this place.

New York might make it easy to stray to the deep-fried side, but it makes it just as easy to go the other way. And by the look of the text-walkers and coffee-sippers and I-hope-he’s-on-the-phone street shouters I saw on my yoghurt stroll, they’re right with me on the salad thing. The food here is everything from appalling to amazing, and as healthy as you want it to be. I just wish I could figure out who’s eating all those pretzels.

I'm sorry Frank

The Guggenheim was a disappointment.

I expected this:

A sixty year old art gallery; more 'modern' than anything since.

...and this...

Note the paintings: a popular feature in most art galleries.

...and this.

This SHOULD greet you as you enter, and accompany you on the journey up. It's what i sought: a space designed so that one skylight illuminated every rounded corner of the public space.

 Instead I got this:

Pretty!

 

...and this...

Um...also pretty!

 ...and this

"Spock, meet me on Deck C, corridor 5. Someone has stolen the Rembrandts!"

What you're seeing on the colourful ones is screens across the open spaces of the spiral. The blank wall on the right in the bottom shot is the back of one of them. Pretty from the lobby, but hideous from the, you know, gallery bit. And yes, there are meant to be paintings and sculptures in the spaces around the edge.

I have James Turrell to thank apparently. A ‘light installation’ artist. Seems like a nice guy; takes some lovely pictures, but all I see is this wonderful building, turned from an architectural temple into a giant pastel screen saver for people to fall asleep under. And I’m sorry, staring up at plain colours projected onto screens while lying on the floor of a world-famous museum might seem quite zen, but to me it was like nodding contemplatively while Rolf Harris slapped a doodle onto the back of the Mona Lisa.

"Hm, yes, hm. Fascinating the way the artist has juxtaposed red and, uh, more red on the background red. To me it's a statement about man's inhumanity to...wait, what was I talking about?"

The paintings were still there. The side galleries displayed them in an adequate space, and having Steve The Guy Who Knows About Paintings And Stuff with me was great. Still hot and cold on Picasso I’m afraid; there’s some of his work I just don’t get. But I went there to see a building, inside and out. And some bloke had thrown a sheet over it and pointed mood lights at the walls.

I bought Guggenheim coffee mugs in the gift shop on the top floor. I don’t need mugs, but it felt like an appropriate reminder of an inspiring opportunity missed.

A piping hot cup of disappointment

 Next trip for sure. Provided mister Turrell has packed up his cellophane and glow-sticks and moved on.

New York: preconceptions, misconceptions, observations

Being the set for more movies, TV shows, novels and radio plays than any other city on Earth gives New York a public image well beyond first-hand experience. Some of what people believe about this place is true; a lot of it is not. Some of it was, but has changed since Sex and the City/Seinfeld/Cosby went off the air. And big chunks are just plain wrong. Here’s a selection:

Steam comes out of the road

It’s true, it really does. It’s a warm early autumn here and sights like this are common.

I intend to use this as the basis for telling my nieces the subway trains are pulled by dragons, but the truth is slightly less awesome. Only slightly though - the city actually makes steam and pipes it around to heat and cool buildings. There’s no constraint on its use for these purposes; some buildings also use if for cleaning and disinfection. In essence, it’s possible to add steam to the ‘water, power and gas’ connected to a building and do whatever the heck you like with it. Technically you could use it to power your very own Steampunk battle armour, but there's probably something in the fine print about that..
They’ve been doing it since the New York Steam Company started in 1882, although the big power company ConEdison now running the big kettles or whatever that keeps the steam coming.  It’s not meant to come out of the roads, but where water hits the hot pipes, or the pipes themselves leak, you get sights like the one above. I guess theoretically you could lay a shirt across one of these vents and really nail those creases, but I can’t imagine New York traffic looking too kindly on it.

New York is just like in ‘Friends’!

First disappointment: Friends was filmed in LA. Second: apartments that size in Greenwich Village are nooot affordable for waitresses, struggling actors, palaeontologists, second-string chefs or masseuses/taxi drivers/buskers/whatever the heck the ditzy blonde did. Maybe the other guy could afford it, not sure. Regardless, New York is expensive. A clique of dreamy-eyed twenty-somethings couldn't live there and still have time for zany hijinks and sitting around drinking coffee while they reflect endlessly on their relationships. Although you do see people just sort of sitting around in coffee shops a lot. That may be their jobs: see below (standing around).

"Monica, look! Ugly naked guy is outside, taking photos of our suspiciously affordable apartment!"

 Friends was goofy fun. But I suspect it was about as New York in character as Gilligan’s island was Caribbean. There was the odd scene-setting shot, but it was just a backdrop for some funny, clever dialogue and the usual hook-up, break-up, make-up formula that is every sitcom since I Love Lucy.

Manhattan traffic is bad

This is terrifyingly true. If there’s a square met…sorry, square foot of road, it’s being used for something. Street vendors park their carts close enough to clip the mirrors of tourist coaches. Pedestrians creep out to the tyre…sorry, tire marks before the lights change, then saunter across just before a yellow taxi missile runs the light. Giant buses span whole intersections for two changes of lights (I witnessed this tonight: the correct New York response is to hammer on the windows and shout "Move the f%$#ing bus, a$$hole," then walk around it anyway). Cars constantly stop in the middle of crossings, pedestrians flowing indifferently around them until either the lights change again or the car in front moves on three more feet and they can edge out of the way.

Manhattan streets: largely indistinguishable from car parks.

And people use their horns. All. The. Time. Someone a bit slow? Honk. Passing? Honk. Bike in your lane? Double honk. Like the song on the radio? That’s a honk. Just because? You better believe that’s a honk. There are signs around the place that say ‘Don’t honk.’ I’m fairly sure it’s perceived as a challenge to their civil rights; if anything it’s louder where I saw those signs.
Weirdly, entire stretches of bitumen madness occasionally empty for no apparent reason, at which point thousands of people seem to erupt from nowhere and wander across slowly in some sort of ‘take back the road’ gesture or something.

The subway is scary.

Nope. It’s awesome. Fast, clean, CHEAP and so far completely safe. Peak hour or mid-morning, I’ve always found a seat (though I’ve given it up to others several times), and I’ve never seen anything that would make me think twice about using it. I saw graffiti once in a station; a magic marker declaration that ‘Duane loves Chelsea’ (unclear whether he meant the district, the soccer team or a young lady), but it was gone the next day. Duane is clearly a fickle fellow. Grand Central Station frightened me a bit, though mainly because it took me three attempts to find an exit that didn’t take me to other train lines, ticket vending machines or high-end retail outlets. I envisioned spending the next decade there, surviving on gourmet cheese, meats and seafood cooked over a shopping trolley grill.

The '4' train uptown. No, that's not the Dalai Lama. He's a bus guy.

New Yorkers are rude, arrogant, uncaring etc etc.

Sure, most of the folks I’ve dealt with have been selling me something. But I’ve seen everyday interactions every…well, day, and having seen both New Yorkers and the good people of Perth’s outer southern suburbs go about their lives, it’s the latter that leave me despondent about human nature. I’ve heard three conversations that suggest relationships were in trouble (they seem to be VERY frank about their feelings here), but people smile and thank you when you hold a door or give up your seat, they’re all excuse-me and by-your-leave when you interact casually in queues (I’ve queued a lot this past week) and the folks I’ve asked for directions have done everything short of offer to carry me there. I’ve steered away from the guys in one shoe bellowing at signposts and the wild-eyed street vendors fighting over the best corner to sell their leatherette designer socks, but everyone else has been fine.

Americans are all fat.

Completely untrue. The thing that first struck me when I arrived was how fat they aren’t. Sure, there was the odd time I expected them to demand I bring them Solo and the wookie, but most of then are indistinguishable from the average Australian. The blokes? Often fit, commonly tall and…yeah, jut blokes. The women? GORGEOUS. It’s probably part of the being-single effect, but I see attractive women everywhere on the street. Maybe it’s different elsewhere in the US, maybe the fat people don’t get dressed and leave their apartments across from Monica and Rachel much, but from the evidence of my own eyes, Americans are no more or les fat than Australians.

There are some odd exceptions here. The housekeeping staff in the hotel are, with one male hispanic exception, enormous black women. It’s like it’s a job requirement. Maybe they got a discount run of uniforms and had to hire people to fit them; whatever the reason, they’re all of a type. Conversely, the guys who run the millions of halal food carts are skinny as hell. It’s pretty odd, given the air they’re breathing probably has more calories than a Katz pastrami on rye, but to a man (and they’re all men), they look like they spend the day hawking chilli dogs and lard shakes, then go home to carrot sticks and tap water.

Times Square is crazy.

Times Square IS crazy. But having been through there between the hours of 11am and about 10pm, Im yet to figure out why. There are enormous screens with ads for…I dunno, stuff on them, there are crowds milling about in every square foot of open space, there are cartoon characters writ large and posing for photos with anyone who strays within selfie range. But as for any attraction beyond that? I dunno, I just couldn’t see what people were sticking around for. There’s a big sort of stand thing with room for a few hundred people to sit and stare at the big billboards, but besides that there wasn’t a great deal on offer.

Posing with one of the hideous costumed freaks in Times Square.

I have a suspicion that most of Times Square’s appeal is its reputation. Tell someone it’s kind of a big deal and they go there to see what the big deal is. The crowds draw street vendors, performers and spruikers, the latter draw even more crowds, and suddenly you’re fighting your way past the Hulk, Iron Man, five Spidermans (Spidermen?) a VERY popular spandex-clad Batgirl and three or four horribly out of place Elmos and Cookie Monsters to see what’s at the eye of this human hurricane. As it turns out, it’s not much. But you’re there, you’ve come halfway round the world to see it, so you hand your camera to the person who looks least likely to bolt with it and add your own jumbotron-lit pixel to Times Square’s timeless image. Don’t stay too long though; the rest of the world is waiting its turn to find out what the fuss is.

Everyone is in a hurry

This was a little odd. Most folks ARE in a hurry, but there are a lot of people whose job appears to be standing still. They're usually serving some purpose by standing there, but I’ve never seen quite so many people whose job is pretty much that: standing. There was a woman standing at the counter in Macy’s, directing shoppers to the next cashier. Maybe in case they don’t know that ‘approach an available cashier’ is the step between 'select your goods' and ‘pay for them.’ There are people standing just inside JC Penny, smiling serenely when shoppers approach, then resuming a dull-witted thousand-yard stare the moment they think we’re not looking. I thought they would ask to see inside my bag, but they just smiled and looked slightly stoned when I made eye contact. A slumped old guy stands by the lifts in the hotel; a nearby sign instructs guests to show their room key as they pass him, but nobody I saw had the inclination to distract him from his Nokia 5210. The Metropolitan Museum was FULL of standing people. I thought their function might be to savour the art, but this is true only if one defines 'art' as ‘every well-shaped female backside that wanders by’. Actually, that’s…never mind. They did occasionally tell people not to get too close to the paintings (which I totally understand - there were unprotected Picassos and Rembrandts completely accessible to sticky-fingered children right there on the walls), but that was the exception. Aside from one particularly fierce tigress who snarled ‘Not too close; you sir, not too close!’ every time I peered at the giant dolerite statue that posed a far greater threat to my well-being than vice-versa, most of them just perved on the international smorgasbord of denim-clad bums meandering slowly by.

"Oh great, look what your careless breathing did to Hatsephut's nose!"

Here I feel compelled to point out I am ONLY returning to the MMA to further explore its fine collection of medieval textiles.

It’s just a big, dirty city.

Two out of three, sort of. It’s big, and it’s a city. And you could say it’s dirty I guess; bins often overflow, there are garbage bag piled up on street corners, cigarette butts and wrappers blowing around the streets and a patina of decay across a lot of the buildings. But every night the garbage bags vanish, in plenty of time for the next load to appear. The streets are swept (magically as far as I can tell; I haven’t seen an actual street sweeper yet), and the bins are emptied (manually by guys with wheeled carts; no trucks with hydraulic arms here).

Sure, it's garbage. But it's NEW YORK garbage.

It’s a big, dirty city maybe, but it’ a mistake to say it’s ‘just’ that. There’s every kind of life here, from the slouched troupes of trolley-pushing street people collecting cans and bottles, through the average ‘Noo Yawkers’ making their way to thousand-dollar apartments in million-dollar locations, right up to the mysterious back-seat occupants of the stretch limos and giant black SUVs that full-stop the long yellow sentences of midtown traffic. You can buy a fifty thousand dollar watch, then step out of the store and buy a three-dollar knish, you can pay two-fifty and catch the ‘4’ train to Wall Street, where forty billion dollars change hands every day. New York life stretches from the guy on the F train giving an impassioned begging speech (he earned my loose change), to the couple sharing a lift with me to the 86^th floor of the Empire State, debating whether to ask about holding their wedding reception up there, or just go with the garden party in the Hamptons. It’s the full spread of the social, economic and cultural bell-curves; and while there are good, bad and terrible neighbourhoods, while there are ‘our’ areas and ‘their’ areas, everyone comes together in the streets, the subways and the stores, and there’s room for everyone and everything.

Cities might not be to your taste. But if you think you understand them, if you think you’re jaded by city life, or you’ve never experienced it at all, come here, try this, discover the truth about Friends and everything else for yourself. It may send you back to your suburb, small town or sustainable straw-bale house in the marri forest as fast as Emirates can carry you, but it will open your eyes to what people can build, and what they can achieve.

And what I plan to achieve next is a steak dinner. More on that next post.

"Take a right at the Empiyah State"

It’s unfair to judge any city based on its airport. To me they’re a separate collective nation, more like each other than the countries in which they sit. Adelaide airport resembles JFK more than it resembles the city of Adelaide; Dubai International shares more with Singapore and Hong Kong airports than the cash-soaked desert from which it arose. So passing any judgement about New York on touching down is like judging a book based on the paper it’s written on.

Which is good, because JFK International conveys nothing of New York. I wa a tad nervous on landing; I managed to lose my pen somewhere between Dubai and the US (seriously, how the…) and they ran out of customs forms on the plane, so I arrived in the, um, arrivals hall with a vague unease that they would stick me straight back on the plane for not having a filled-in bit of blue paper. Luckily a chap in uniform (the first of many that day) showed me where to find a form, and I managed to borrow a pen from a German girl, who bolted for the queue and asked me to come return it to her there.
Naturally, by the time I was done she was already through customs. Common sense and a solid wall of well-armed uniforms kept me from trotting through and handing it back, so I waved to one of the enforcers in as non-threatening way as possible and he happily returned the pen. He gave it to the wrong person, but I felt like I’d pushed my luck far enough by then. As I discovered, there is no succint hand signal for “No, not the girl in the yellow hat, the one in the green scarf!” Luckily she turned around and noted my frantic gestures, and the situation was resolved.

Getting out of the airport was a three-stage process. Show forms, fingerprints and webcam mug shot (yeah, they don’t mention that in the brochures) administered by an overly chatty uniform. The conversation went thus: “Left four. Thumb. Right four. Thumb. Here (points to webcam). You’re done.”  Next gate: check bit of blue paper, dubious leer at my appalling handwriting (I hoped), another wave and on to a third customs human. This one actually took my blue bit of paper, then asked “What are you doing here?” Those exact words. The temptation to reply in my usual manner was mitigated by her relative advantage in semi-automatic firepower, so I simply said “Holiday!”

“For how long.” No question mark; it sounded like a statement.

“Two weeks?” I think I was making up for her not-questiony manner.

“In New York the whole time?” Theeere you go.

“Yes. Well…I think so?” I was the thickness of a customs form away from asking “Is there more paperwork if I leave?” but…yeah, automatic weapons, cavity searches, deportation to Detroit. You know. She seemed satisfied (though certainly not happy) with my reply, and waved me through to the outside world.

I made it out to non-air-conditioned space for the first time since around noon two days earlier. Sunny, cool; like a Perth day in autumn. Signs showed me the way to the trains, so with my little airport-to-Manhattan Google printout I headed out into Brooklyn.

Shuttle train. Nice clean station, not many people about. I stared at a map for all of five seconds before a large volume of African-American guide lady came steaming my way.

“Where you headed honey?”

“Oh, g’day! Manhattan?” For some reason I wasn’t sure if she would’ve heard of it. Also, ‘g’day’? Where the hell did that come from?

“Uptown? Downtown?”
“Seventh avenue and West thirty third.” Damn, I sound like a local.

“Okay sweetie, you’ll need the ‘E’ train. Catch the next one after this to Jamaica and change there. Get off at Penn station.”

“Train after this, Jamaica, ‘E’ train, pen station. Thanks.” They must name them after writing implements or something.

“No problem, you have a great day.”

My first conversation with a New Yorker. Well, an unarmed one. It was a positive start, and I felt pretty good getting on the train after next, getting off at Jamaica and heading for the ‘E’ train to crayon station.

I like New york subways better than London ones. They have the considerable advantage of not being crammed into a tube built two hundred years ago. Roomy, clean, air conditioned and graffiti-free, in every respect it was an improvement on catching the Armadale train out of Perth. Took a while to get from JFK to Manhattan, and by the time it clattered through the tunnel under the East River I was thinking maybe I’d emerge a little early and go for a bit of a wander across town.

Manhattan. Obviously.

I'm glad I did. First glimpse of Manhattan from the ground was up from a subway station to a view of trees and towering buildings in a sunlit avenue. First Avenue to be specific. Which I now know means I’m on the right hand side. Avenues increase west, streets increase north. And traffic increases in every direction; how more New Yorkers don’t get killed crossing the road I don’t know. These people’s behaviour borders on suicidal when it comes to getting to the other side. There are no buttons to press; everything’s on a timer, and cars have to give way to pedestrians. They generally do too, though with a serenade of indignant tootling if the latter overstay their welcome on the bitumen by the least fraction of a second. I’m keen to avoid any Imperial entanglements, so I obeyed the signals scrupulously at first. That fell away when three cops crossed against the lights with a vaguely pitying glance back at me marooned on the footpa…sidewalk, and pretty soon I was charging across with everyone else the moment there was a break in the limousines, black SUVs and taxis.

I meandered a bit on my steady way west, rubbernecking at every street corner. I don’t sayit lightly when I claim the buildings are staggering; enormous monoliths carved of pink granite, steel and glass tributes to an art deco past, scattered architectural once-offs, clashing styles all jumbled together like the contents of a teenage girl’s wardrobe. Perth has some nice pointy buildings and some fairly tall glass boxes, but builders here have come at the task as if fifty storeys is a minimum for admission to the club. And I was staying a block away from the grandest of them.

I was all the way across to Third Avenue when a street vendor ABSOLUTELY INSISTED I buy a hot dog from him; I relented grudgingly, handing over the two dollars it costs to buy lunch here. My first New York meal; it was pretty good, frankly (you seeee what I did there).

Me with a hot dog. I'm on the right.

With that settled stodgily on top of two days’ worth of Emirates microwaved vittles, I pressed on. The next corner brought me face to face with a 'live toy soldier' outside FAO Schwarz, the world’s oldest toy stores (where Tom Hanks did the piano bit in ‘Big’, back when he made funny movies instead of incredibly depressing ones). It only took a few minutes and the sight of a life sized stuffed hippo (I think; or do they do soft toy versions of Rush Limbaugh?) to make me realise I needed to spend at least half a day there and headed out. Central Park was over my right shoulder when I emerged, so I meandered through a corner of it on my way west. Peering through gaps in the trees to the buildings beyond was surreal, like glimpsing a castle through mulga scrub.

This. Just this.

The lane-avenue thing let me down when I emerged from the park: the nice orderly ‘First, Second, Third’ thing had given way to ‘Lexington, Park, Broadway’, so I stopped to ask a police uniform how to get to the Pennsylvania hotel.

“Sure, yer nearly dere. Yagodown dat way, an’ turn right at the Empiyah State. Ya can’t miss it.”

I nodded and said thanks, not sure if he was giving me directions or reading me my rights prior to arresting me for calling him ‘mate’. Once my brain had picked some meaning from the burning wreckage of the english lanugage he hurled at me I headed down dat way towards the Empiyah State.

I missed it.

One hundred and six floors is a lot of building. But at street level, it translates into a café, a bank branch, several swinging doors of no great note and four similar doors innocuously marked ‘To observation deck.’ Nothing anywhere that said ‘Empire State’ or ‘Look up. Seriously, it’s pretty cool.’ It wasn’t until I was a little ways down and happened to look back that I noticed the extra hundred and five or so floors stacked on top of the fill-in-the-blank café.

The Empire State Building. Obviously.

Backtrack, turn left. Dodge the guy selling handbags, almost walk into his friend/rival selling wallets and key chains. Between the hot dog and pretzel/knish stand (I resolved to buy a knish, simply so I could use the word in context) and lo, the Hotel Pennsylvania. I glanced back before I went in…

Theeere you go

 The hotel itself is, at best, ordinary.

Points of note:

-fourth largest hotel in New York (1700 rooms)

-oldest continuously held phone number in New York

-immortalised in the Glenn Miller song (Pennsylvania 6-5000)

All very nice, but none that translate into, you know, a nice place to stay.

Points of lesser note:

-old

-poorly lit

-tired

-no restaurant, bar, free wi-fi, room service, or communal space of any kind.

-expensive.

I stayed in a London hotel back in 2006. Twice the age, a fiftieth the size, around the same price, but from the polished brass of the stairway carpets to the pressed-and-starched uniforms of the utterly indifferent breakfast waitresses, it was a neater, cleaner, more positive experience. The Penn actually staged Glenn Miller concerts in the '30s, hosted the very first Star Trek convention in the 70s, and includes Charlie Chaplin, Herbert Hoover and Doris day amongst its guests. But now it's old, dusty, a bit dark and just not up to it.

So why this place? Scroll back up and look at that picture again.

That’s out the side exit. Go out the front door: Madison Square Garden. Cross the road: Penn station and thence the entire subway network. Turn right and walk five minutes: Times Square. I could have got a better hotel for half the price in Brooklyn or Queens, but given the choice of the top bunk, the bottom bunk or the bunk in the middle of the toy store I went with the latter. I come here to sleep and blog. It’s all good. Although it’d be nice if the power points didn’t crackle and glow ominously when I plugged in my stuff.

First full day tomorrow. I think I should be jetlagged or something, but I feel great. Maybe I’ve been on New York time since I was a teenager.

Looking forward to my first New York Breakfast…