"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…