A Slice of Big Apple August 2, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Cars, Destination, Hotels, Italy, Motel, New York, Restaurant, Travel Clinic, Travelling Bag , trackbackSix gritty months of fumbling with biros and over-read text books in a level tedium were wiped out. Wiped out by a five-hour flight to a city where riding the subway is an act of hedonism, and where the pollution on the streets works on the brain like speed, driving people scrambling to the summits of New York City’s towers of granite and power.
`The movies are true,’ screamed my eyes from the back of the yellow can which I took from the airport. I rattled in the corner of the great plastic sofa of a back seat. Monster cars sharked past, the cluster of Wall Street skyscrapers loomed; an elite of big names at a very mixed party
Freeway became mapled streets, buildings flattened into the four- storeyed Victorian Brownstones ofBrooklyn. The cab driver dumped me outside my home for the next three months. I dragged a bloated suitcase into the basement flat. Fans were purring; it smelt of mouldering heat on city rain.
So, I was going to be living in a district with a Wholeperson’s Clinic, and a Funeral Home up the street. Around the corner was a Hardware Store selling Croak-a-Roach and Roach Motels. Next door to that I could buy carrot cake ice-cream. Compliments took the form of,
`Hello Mommy, I’ve got hurting in my bollocks,’ yelled from a passing Oldsmobile as I trod the sidewalk.
TV told me about the victim of child molestation who claimed, ‘I owe my analyst my life’.
It showed sport in Super Slo-Mo, and got ‘Close Up and Personal’ with the stars. I was mesmerised by the prime-time show, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. One episode of this told the story of the bus boy from Ohio who bought an Italian baronetcy, owns three islands in the Canaries and is now the world underwater backgammon champion.
Equipped with such information, I decided it was time to hit the streets. First I went under. Dark, damp, noisy and stifling, the subway is an assault on each of the senses. It has an all-pervading stench of goat and rotting peaches. Even for the natives it is a point of pride to understand the system. Seeing me in a state of bewildered angst, they would come up and intone directions in a rhythmical and mysterious language.
`You take a D train down to De Kalb, Switch to a Double R, QB, or four . .
Surfacing from this Kafkaesque dungeon you can be sure only of confronting the unexpected. Nothing specific epitomises New York; its essence is extremity, and diversity, packed into the highest possible density.
My first shot of Manhattan was on emerging from the subway on to Fifth Avenue. I looked up at a sheer sheet of glass and steel, one of the 1930s Rockerfeller buildings. Indifferently magnificent, it sneered back at my eager. camera lens, which could only fit in a pitiful few floors. The scale was intoxicating. Everything big. Fifth Avenue, sliced right down the centre of the island, felt liberatingly airy because of the gigantic proportions of every shape and space. Brash and confident as an arrogant all-American jowl. Looking down one of the Avenues is like looking at the inversion of a sunset. The outsized buildings march into infinity in shades of grey to mauve, blurred by a haze of fumes.
Pick a different subway stop. Washington Square; Greenwich Village, the part of New York which stays up all night and starts waking up around midday. A couple of middle-aged men with bluish legs were roller skating along the middle of the road. In the square a Quaker choir was performing, and old men in heavy overcoats were in uproar over a game of chess. Some man came up to me and asked,
`You wanna smoke?’
He proceeded to roll a joint, smoke it, produce juggling equipment and give a dazzling, impromptu performance.
I walked East to Astor Place, where the streets are paved with people sitting next to, and selling, their household rubbish. Perfectly safe, until I strayed a few blocks in the wrong direction and found myself, the only female, in a street lined with male prostitutes.
`Sexss lady?’ hissed one through a gold tooth. The nearest subway entrance was blocked with trash. The place stank of violence.
Take an Uptown train to Columbus Circle; Central Park. I dodged herds of joggers, cyclists, people playing croquet, baseball, and walked into the theatrical bustle of an operatic cast preparing for an open air performance of Madam Butterfly.
Back Downtown, to Canal Street, where I found Chinatown, with the second largest Chinese community in the West, 30,000. I wandered into dusty, pungent shops selling live chickens, and dried snakes for rubbing into bruises. Pagoda-topped callboxes melted into the Mafioso restaurants of Little Italy, and the warehouses-turned-artgalleries of Soho.
Carry on down to the tip of the island; Wall Street. I bounced off fat people in double-breasted pinstriped suits, and strode beside young execs and briefcase-bearing, silked women, into the World Trade Centre. From floor 110, the highest point on the island, I gazed back at the midtown outbreak of skyscrapers, the Chrysler and the Empire State in their midst. With the edge of the island visible on either side, Manhattan sits in murky river, an absurd chunk of metropolis looking like a Gothic spaceship working up to an explosive departure from the planet.
New York is criss-crossed all over with fine dividing lines. As well as the grid system of streets, there is a territorial grid which is equally apparent. Starting exactly two blocks down from where I was living, there is a Hispanic neighbourhood, run down and emptying out. Ten years ago it was full of Italians, who, when the Hispanics moved in, drove through and shot from car windows. It was obvious when I missed my local subway stop. The line went on into a big Jamaican area, and I was the only white left in a full carriage. Feeling ridiculous, I took the next train straight back.
`This is a city full of alienated people,’ my landlord told me. The blacks and Hispanics who live on the poverty line, in slum ghettos, feel alienated; so do the predominantly white middle classes in their `good’ districts, he explained. Not surprisingly, one common feature New Yorkers share is paranoia. I soon developed their reflexive habit of checking behind whenever someone walked towards me in a fairly empty street. Some people carry a ten dollar bill, to keep the potential mugger happy and stave off an angry attack.
Rent is high, accommodation scarce, and the chances of getting a knife in the stomach far from slim. The rats in this race bite back harder, and hungrier. Compensating for its disadvantages, New Yorkers live the city for all it’s worth. The energy gets to you like a wire spring inside, being wound tighter and tighter the longer you’re there. Once revved up to the standard, frenetic pitch of activity, one day becomes a limitless bank account with which you can do everything . . . and anything.
I met a boy in his mid-twenties, from Kentucky, who had come to New York to set up as a dentist. Down in Kentucky they call NY the nation’s brain drain. He gave me two good reasons for moving to the city. He told me,
`I like to party.’
And then later, ‘I like nice things.’
This is the reason why he chose to do dentistry rather than Art Restoration, despite the fact that,
`I lury Russian icons.’
Doing it his way, he can make lots of money as a New York dentist, and buy a few nice icon things for himself. Such candid consumerism made a refreshing change after the squeamish English double stand over money. Money is the law of life there, which has to be lived by. No use in nobly pretending it doesn’t happen. Rather than remarking on seasonal changes in the surrounding foliage, the majority of New Yorkers whom I met would relish a detailed discussion about the subtle fluctuations in Real Estate Value.
New York is a city of dreams. The dreams rely in part on the dreamer sustaining a faith in the American ‘ethos’ of freedom and liberty. Liberty, that is, to be ‘like the bus boy from Ohio, liberty to realise any dream, be it at the expense of others, which, in this land-ofthe-free, it inevitably has to be. Lack of adequate welfare services — health, housing, education — demonstrates the lack of sympathy for casualties. After all, they started out from the same nest of opportunities as the rats who are now fatter.
At the mouth of New York city harbour stands Liberty. She has welcomed the oppressed and disowned of the world to this paranoiac dreamscape for nearly a hundred years. This summer she was torchless, covered in scaffolding and swathed in white canvas. At night, lit from within, she looked like a stricken ghost, fleeing the city of glittering towers.
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