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.