NYC Kaleidoscope

I just returned from a few very busy days in Manhattan. It’s true what they say about NYC being the city that never sleeps – it stays up all night honking its horn. This is a view from our 20th floor window of the Sheraton Manhattan. Seems like a lot of traffic for 6:30 on a Sunday.

I was travelling with the Apache, who has an uncanny sense of direction. In three days the only place I knew how to get to was Starbucks (probably because it was everywhere), but the Apache always knew where everything was, or at least where we were relative to everything else.

Going to New York City for the first time is kind of like meeting a celebrity. You recognize it immediately, it’s familiar, like you’ve always kind of known it in a theoretical sort of way, but suddenly it’s so real it seems unreal.

It’s hard to know what to blog about. I didn’t have one of those quintessential New York experiences like Megan’s. Mine was more of a kaleidoscopic blur of activity and imagery.

Here are some of the things we saw and did:

Times Square
Toys R Us
Ellen’s Stardust Diner (with singing waiters!)
Museum of Modern Art
Street Fair (just like shopping at the Ex, only you can get a massage from an old Chinese guy while he smokes a cigarette)
Top of the Rock
Central Park
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (I wanted to see their daguerreotypes, but, weirdly, my daguerreotype collection seems more impressive than theirs. They only had one on display and it was in the musical instruments exhibit.)
The Zoo (I shouldn’t go to zoos, they make me sad; this one was worse than average)
FAO Shwartz
The subway
Battery Park
Statue of Liberty
Ground Zero
St. Paul’s Chapel
Strand Bookstore (18 miles of books)
The Bodies Exhibit (which uses real dead bodies to illustrate anatomy)
Tall Ships
Walked back from the south end of Manhattan through these neighbourhoods:
Chinatown
Lower East Side
Alphabet City
Greenwich Village
East Village
Midtown

Here are some of my impressions:

A Whole Lot of City in a Very Small Space. For such a geographically small place (Manhattan is 12.5 miles long by 2 miles wide), it’s huge. It’s tall. It’s dense. The architecture is stunning. It’s so stunning, you can’t even register how stunning it is because it’s dwarfed and muted by all the other stunning architecture around it.

Glitzy Advertising. There’s wall-to-wall big and busy advertising. Most of it moves: it blinks, plays videos, rotates, scrolls, flashes, etc. Because there’s so much big flashy advertising, anything that isn’t big and flashy wouldn’t get noticed, so it all tries to out-size and out-flash all the other advertising. One billboard had a full-size SUV hanging off it. But in the chaotic sea of big flashy advertising, it just blends in. (It’s an ad for a movie, by the way, not a car). All the legendary lights and glitz of Manhattan – is it possible that it all boils down to just a lot of advertising?

Money. Money makes the world go round, but it makes Manhattan spin. Everything seems to be about money. From the purse stalls on the streets, to the Rolex knockoff vendors to the restaurants to the ubiquitous gift/souvenir shops, it’s all about money. You know how the National Gallery here in Ottawa has a gift shop? The Met has a multitude of gift shops scattered throughout it.

Even St. Paul’s Chapel, the little old church directly across the street from Ground Zero – the church that was untouched by the devastation all around it (not a single pane of glass broke, not a single ancient headstone toppled), the church that spontaneously became the heartbeat for volunteers and compassion and grief in the aftermath of 9/11 – it has a souvenir shop. Right in the main area, where the services are held. I wanted to feel what they were trying to make me feel in St. Paul’s, but the souvenir shop just killed it for me. (But I did have a lump in my throat at Ground Zero.)

Over-the-Topness. We saw a lot of stretch limos, but only one strech hummer. To turn at the intersection, it had to do a 5-point turn. It struck me as the ultimate symbol of excess in a city of outrageous excesses.

Things to Do. There’s no shortage of stuff to do. Even if you did nothing, you’d be doing something. There’s stuff going on all the time, everywhere. A lot of it is expensive, but you could easily be entertained in NYC for free, just by being there with your eyes open. I suspect I was so busy trying to take it all in that I missed a lot of the most interesting little stuff that was happening all around me.

Food. In general we found the food expensive and mediocre. But what they lack in quality, they make up for in quantity. We had a breakfast that was very expensive by our standards: $32 for bacon and eggs for two people. Here you get 2 eggs and maybe 4 strips of bacon. There you get 3 eggs and about 20 slices of bacon. It was crazy. It made me wonder if maybe the bacon was going bad and they needed to get rid of it fast. I’m sure there are lots of good, reasonable places to eat in NYC, but we weren’t savvy enough to find them.

Things that Aren’t. After we’d been there a day or so, we realized something unusual about Manhattan. It has lots of spectacular things, but none of some normal things. In three days of walking through the city, we never saw a single house. Millions of people live there but they don’t live in houses. Millions of people must die there too, but we only saw one graveyard, and it was the tiny touristy one at St. Paul’s. What do they do with their dead? (The Appache said maybe they just throw them in the Hudson River…) We saw just three schools, and they didn’t have names, just numbers. We only saw children playing in Central Park or in fenced parks. (If they don’t have houses, they don’t have yards, and if they only play in small fenced neighbourhood parks, then their whole experience of childhood would be very different from mine.) A drug store on practically every corner, but no gas stations. There didn’t seem to be any grocery stores, at least not the kind we have. Food stores and liquor stores were tiny and cramped.

Flagship Stores. But other stores were gigantic. We didn’t do any shopping, but we did go into two flagship toy stores just to see what they were like. Toys R Us has a ferris wheel in it. The most expensive thing we saw was an antique automaton for $80,000, at F.A.O. Shwartz.

Check out the Hershey Store, compared to the one I visited in Smiths Falls a couple of months ago:

Home. Monday morning we had breakfast, followed by a Manhattan, then boarded the bus for the 10-hour drive back to Ottawa – “the city that always sleeps,” said the Apache.

I didn’t exactly fall in love with NYC, and found it a bit ridiculous, almost a parody of itself. But I’d go back. There’s something about it that makes you feel you’re missing something all the time, that you’re barely scratching the surface, that you’re not getting the point, and that the real NYC is hiding on you. I want to go back and see if I can find it.