New York – Big bright lights, big bright city

It’s been nearly 2 months since I finished travelling, so it’s about time that I got round to finish writing about it. So much for my thinking I’d be writing on the road. Well I did, but then life got in the way like it has a bad habit of doing.

New York City was the last stop on my journey before returning to Europe and hitting the grim reality of London town. In a way New York was the perfect continuation to the fun, excitement and surprises I had in Montreal. And alongside the Canadian city, New York was also the one place in North America that really grabbed me as a city, visually and culturally – though as opposed to Montreal I was expecting that before getting there and it delivered on many levels above and beyond my expectations. This is all hardly surprising though, considering it’s New York and well, it’s New York. A city that still held incredible appeal even though I already ‘knew’ it from watching countless movies and TV series and listening to an unhealthy (if there is such a thing) amount of music.

At the same time, as much as I was looking forward to New York and I enjoyed it, I have to admit Montreal still remains as the highlight of the North American leg of my trip. I loved New York, and would go back in a heartbeat but for entirely different reasons, and I don’t think I could live there whereas Montreal is definitely a much more appealing city all things considered and one I could see myself move to for an undefined period of time.

Anyways, I left Montreal for New York with Lewis and Ben way too early on a Saturday morning in August – especially considering Lewis and I had basically had no sleep and we were just about to embark on an 11h train journey (cheap travel for the win baby). The train journey proved a bit of a challenge, not so much for the lack of sleep than for the insane bullshit at the border crossing, where we were delayed by a good few hours while border control played a game of catch the potential terrorist or whatever the hell it was. Lewis got ‘interviewed’ because his British passport stated he was born in Dublin, which made me laugh quite a lot considering my Italian passport states I am born in France but I guess those countries don’t quite register on the radar of ‘dangerous’ for U.S. border control. Must be the whole freedom hating thing. It’s got to be said that border control was by far the worse, with overly serious officers looking for any excuse to break balls and delay things. All was pretty soon forgotten with copious amounts of alcohol (mainly for Lewis as Ben was dozed up on sleeping pills and I was just lacking sleep) and a game of ‘pass the controller to fly the portable helicopter inside a carriage train.’

We made it into New York in the early evening and with no time to waste we dropped the bags in a place Ben was renting in Chelsea for the week, and headed out to the Low End Theory party at the Knitting Factory, which was playing host to Skream and Mike Slott. This was to be my first proper night out to a club since leaving Japan (not counting the previous night at Coda in Montreal, but that doesn’t really count for various reasons, including alcohol) and I’d been fiending to see Mike Slott for a while too. As with Montreal, arriving in New York late at night meant that my first impressions of the city were nightime ones as we walked from the flat to the club, getting slightly lost on the way. Still even though I was barely witnessing but a tiny fraction of what the city had to offer I was already getting pretty hyped within just a couple of hours – the architecture, the people, and above all the atmosphere just felt strangely familiar and at the same time brand new and fascinating. Familiar shapes and sights kept popping up everywhere, around the corner of the streets, in shops, in bars, as yellow cabs drove past. Much as had happened in San Fran, the familiarity came from media consumption and the exports of American culture I’d been consuming since I was a kid and yet it still had something new and exciting about it, even more than it did in San Fran.

The first few days after Low End are a bit of a blur as I explored the city with Lewis, Ben and another friend in between bouts of getting severly drunk and wasted at night. The result was that my first few days in town felt very surreal as we walked and cabbed around town, went shopping and explored areas around the places we were staying in/crashing at in a mixed haze of being hungover and excited. It was like a crash course of sorts on Manhattan, the opposite of a tourist tour, though we did do a few obvious things like Times Square and the Rockefeller building. I gave up on visiting the viewing deck at the top of the Rockerfeller as soon as Lewis and I arrived in front of the queue. Ben and his friend were already up top so we headed out to Times Square ahead of them. The combination of the cab ride from Chelsea to the Rockerfeller and the walk from there to Times Square was the first real feel I got for Manhattan’s much vaunted ‘size,’ the sheer impression of ‘big’ the skyscrapers give you as you walk around, head tilted as far back as you can trying to take it all in. I’d very briefly visited New York City as a kid when I was 10, on the way back from Disneyworld, but all I really saw of Manhattan and the city was through the windows of a cab and a quick stop at a restaurant and it was pretty impressive especially for a young, easily impressed mind. 18 years later, the feeling hadn’t changed one bit, and was only made all the greater by being able to walk around the streets and realise just how true the cliches about New York are. This whole thing with buildings had already started the day before when we walked down Broadway, Fifth Avenue and a few other shopping spots, but these were nothing as impressive as the area surrounding Times Square further up Manhattan with its collection of skyscrapers and their mirror-like exteriors. The feeling of size the buildings give you blended in with a sense of deja vu from having seen those skyscrapers, street corners and shapes so many times on TV and yet having never experienced them in real life before.

Times Square was also a bit of a let down, especially compared to its equivalents in Tokyo like the areas around Shinjuku station or Shibuya’s Hachiko crossing. Maybe it was the various works ongoing at the time of my visit that took away from it, but by and large it felt a lot less impressive than I had expected. It is just as much of a capitalist frenzy as the Tokyo areas I’ve mentioned, but its impact was a lot less. The bright neon lights, skyscrapers, theaters and other elements just didn’t hit me in the same way that Tokyo had hit me when I first visited it. Maybe it’s because Tokyo had somehow accustomised me to similar sights, I’m not sure but while I enjoyed the visit, Times Square just didn’t feel like the highlight it was ‘supposed’ to be I guess.

I also spent a fair bit of time around Greenwich, Soho, the East Village and the Lower East Side in those first few days, with the latter being by far my favourite area. The beautiful weather definitely just added to the pleasure of walking around town, taking in the strange surrealism of some of these areas with ‘quiet’ streets, quaint shops, eateries, bars and streets lined with trees. The impression was similar to what I’d felt in Montreal: a sense of history, mixed with a real sense of ‘neighbourhood,’ especially in the Lower East Side and parts of the East Village. There was plenty for the eyes to be attracted by, from the architecture to the shops and people. It wasn’t until later in the week when I met a few more New Yorkers and chatted to them that I came to realise just how ‘cleaned up’ those parts of town had become. Still on first impression, it was like being in a really nice suburban area or something similar, but knowing that you were still just in Manhattan minutes in a cab from the madness of it all. As I would continue to discover throughout the week, Manhattan’s various neighbourhoods are all incredibly unique and different, some even widely opposite. This isn’t that different to other huge cities I’ve lived in, but in Manhattan it feels a lot more pronounced in a way. Tokyo or London have it, but in ways that feel less apparent, more normal. In Manhattan the differences you can feel between one neighbourhood to the next, whether driving through or walking, were just a lot more obvious, something you might have had to drive or walk a lot longer for in other cities like London or Tokyo.

Architecture wise, New York was as much of a visual pleasure as Montreal, and to a lesser extent San Fran. Where Montreal was all classic architecture, remnants from its colonial past and a mixture of old world and new world, New York was obviously a lot more modern and yet still offered stark contrasts. From the impressive and deeply fascinating gothic and early 20th century elements of the Chrysler building to the more recent, clinically cold skyscrapers around the Rockerfeller center, the more classic and slightly Victorian buildings and churches of Chelsea or the low, brick buildings of the Lower East Side. Everywhere I looked and turned, there was always something catching my eye making me stop, from the obvious sights to the lesser obvious ones.

There are two particular architectural elements (if you can call them that) that, from the moment I stepped out into the Lower East Side on the sunday morning after our arrival, formed a sort of recurring theme throughout my time in New York and never stopped making me smile and take notice: fire escape staircases and water tanks. Which I guess aren’t the things most people might go for, but personally these two things are incredibly tied to New York in my mind and in a strange way they both are some of the things I associated the most, probably subconsciously, with the city even before I’d visited it. Staircases because of TV series and movies: all the chase scenes I’ve witnessed across them, the shots of buildings covered in them and just countless scenes based on or around fire escape staircases. Water tanks because of comics, especially more obvious ones like Batman or Spiderman, and the countless fight scenes were a water tank would get smashed through or hurled towards innocent bystanders, or just used as a background prop. As I stepped out into the Lower East Side that first morning one of the first things I saw was a set of fire escape staircases over a building across the road, and straight away it hit me. A few minutes later as we walked around the neighbourhood I lifted my head and saw a water tank and I laughed out loud, much to the surprise and confusion of the person showing me around. Again it wasn’t until I saw that water tank that the significance of both these simple ‘props’ of New York City hit me and made me realise just how much I felt I knew the city even before I’d set eyes on it in the daytime. For the rest of my time there I kept smiling everytime I came across a water tank or staircase, observing the slight differences between and just how these simple elements blend into the architecture and the skyline of the city.

I got my first taste of other boroughs later on that first day after walking around the Lower East Side, with a quick drive across Williamsburg Bridge and some time spent looking at Manhattan’s skyline from the Brooklyn side of the river, in what was a park area that felt strangely like London’s Shoreditch, with warehouses, old brick houses and a sort of anything goes feel to it. Looking at Manhattan from afar for the first time was surreal, picking out familiar building shapes as well as realising just how different it looks in reality from the media images I had inside my head. One thing that struck me that morning was the imposing sight of the brick projects alongside the East River Park, and it kept feeling odd even when I cycled past them later in the week and around others up and down Manhattan. In a way I guess I just never expected to see that type of obvious project-like building in Manhattan, again because of preconceived impressions and images of the city, and it only added to the stark differences I felt between the neighbourhoods during my time there.

I moved to Brooklyn half way through my stay in town, spending an even four days in downtown Manhattan and four days in ‘suburban’ Brooklyn and giving me a bit of an insight into the differences between the two boroughs. I wished I had been able to visit more of the boroughs but aside from seeing them from afar, driving through or seeing pictures I didn’t visit any other borough properly apart from Manhattan and Brooklyn. The friend I stayed with in Brooklyn was in one of the nicer parts of the borough apparently, near Prospect Park, and as I walked around on the first few days and chatted with her it struck me just how similar that part of Brooklyn felt to the more upmarket and pleasant neighbourhoods of London, with tree lined streets and old, terraced houses with back gardens touching on each other and creating nature enclaves of sorts in between streets. My friend’s house happened to be one of the oldest in the neighbourhood, and it was interesting to see the various architectural elements that make up parts of Brooklyn, from the quiet suburban areas with terraced houses to the more rundown areas alongside the river, with its warehouses and old buildings, and the more modern buildings and streets around parts of Flatbush Ave.

Again, after meeting some New Yorkers later that week in Brooklyn I was told just how ‘cleaned’ up and changed Brooklyn had become, made into a sort of very nice and pleasant suburb, in the same way that it feels nice and cleaned up when you walk around certain parts of West London and Chelsea (the London one). But where Brooklyn differs is that within that same nice suburban part of town, and around it, are really vibrant and happening pockets of life, with shops, eateries, and more. I spent a couple of nights out in Brooklyn and while it isn’t the big bright lights of downtown Manhattan it still has plenty to keep you entertained and merry till the early hours, something the nicer suburbs of London, and most other major cities I’ve been in just don’t have. As my friend commented on a few occasions, in the last few years Brooklyn is being turned into a mini Manhattan of sorts, which has its drawbacks and benefits. Personally from the perspective of someone who passed through town for a week or so, Brooklyn areas like those around Prospect Park and around the bottom of Flatbush Ave. have a certain lowkey, quieter vibe to it that’s just as appealing, if not more than the busier and more in your face parts of downtown I visited at night. Special mention to the shopping street we walked through on one of the nights out in Brooklyn with Ben’s friend, and which felt like a standard high street in a non descript British town, which was totally unexpected and absolutely surreal. I have no idea what the name of the street is, but it’s very near to Junior’s on Flatbush Ave. We walked through it late at night and it was ridiculous just how similar the street felt to your standard British high street, with shop fronts and buildings completing the illusion in a slightly scary way.

All my impressions of the various neighbourhoods and areas I visited and experienced while in New York ended up being framed by the reality of gentifrication, something that pretty much every New Yorker I met talked to me about at one point or another. Being that this was my first visit I had little to reference my experience of the city against apart from the previously mentioned images, fake memories and preconceptions I had gained through media consumption and the export of American culture. What I learnt during my time there is that over the last ten or so years most of Manhattan and Brooklyn has been heavily gentrified (not sure about the other boroughs as I didn’t get a chance to visit but I hear this process has been ongoing in most parts of town) and turned into the kind of nice and safe areas I’d been witnessing during my stay. I was recounted various stories of how the Lower East Side used to be a lot dodgier, the kind of spot you wouldn’t stop in unless you felt adventurous or how the area around Prospect Park I was staying in used to be a lot less ‘upmarket.’ While it’s impossible to compare, one thing that I definitely felt during my time in New York, and which seems to be in direct relation to the gentrification of the city, is just how ‘safe’ it was. Again partly due to the preconceptions and images I had, I was expecting parts of New York to at least feel more threatening I guess, or just more ‘raw,’ like parts of London do, even close to the center. Instead I barely saw any violence or felt any threat during my time in town, and so it seems that the gentrification alongside the zero tolerance clean up of New York that was headed by mayor Guilliani have definitely resulted in a safer and nicer New York of sorts, at least in the areas I visited. Whether or not that’s a good thing is a hard one to answer. Personally I really enjoyed my time in NY partly because it felt nicer and safer than I expected it, at the same time though that added a feeling of strangeness, something odd and it definitely felt like some of what I was experiencing wasn’t ‘quite right.’ When I was back in London a week later, walking around my old haunts in the eastside of town, the same feelings I always had while living in London were still there – dodgy back streets, dimly lit, looking around to see who’s around etc… it isn’t the nicest feeling, but it’s a part of the city, especially cities like London or New York. I loved Tokyo because it felt safe and after ten years in London I was tired of not feeling safe at times in my own neighbourhood. In NY as a tourist it didn’t really bother me but it did feel strange to not have the same kind of feeling I was used to from London in a city that was so similar in many ways, especially considering I felt it in San Fran which was a surprise as I didn’t expected downtown San Fran to be like that. Even when I went out to various parts of south Manhattan that used to be dodgy and still had a certain aura to them, it was all relatively peaceful and uneventful. The gentrification of the city works both ways, it’s nicer for the tourists and the more affluent population, but it’s a bum deal for the poorer people being displaced and because it also brings a certain uniformity to different parts of the city that once upon a time were probably a lot more unique and vibrant than they are today. I still saw vibrancy and differences between neighbourhoods, but that’s because it was my first time in town and I was actively looking for it. I can see why so many New Yorkers deplored the gentrification in a certain way.

This whole thing about gentrification and uniformity continued to be made more evident to me in the last few days in town as I did various touristy things with Ben and cycled around town, continuing my own personal biking mission and using my time on the bike as the perfect way to see more of Manhattan and Brooklyn at a different level. It was through biking that I explored more of Brooklyn, discovering the more run down parts near the river, and saw parts of Manhattan in a new light, including the impressive projects near East River Park, both the east and west sides of Manhattan, which have pretty big cycling paths, and the Brooklyn bridge and the amazing views of the Manhattan’s skyline it offers in the day and at night. As a side note I was impressed as to how bike friendly New York actually was, with plenty of cycle paths in and around town, making for a nice contrast to the more hectic and slightly less bike friendly big streets in downtown Manhattan which felt a lot more like typical town centers where drivers and pedestrians always seem to get in the way.

Ben and I spent an afternoon and evening in Harlem towards the end of the week, which was both amazing and also added to the whole gentrification thing. Emerging from Central Park onto Harlem, the difference between the areas surrounding Central Park to the east, west and south and Harlem (which is to the north of the park) are just as striking as they are in other parts of Manhattan, and again my preconceptions were shattered as we walked around looking for a soul food joint called Amy Ruth’s which Ben’s friend had recommended the night before. I guess the obvious thing is that I expected Harlem to also feel more threatening I guess, though I don’t know if that’s quite right. Ultimately and probably more than any other part of town, Harlem really surprised me because it was really like nothing I’d expected – from the architecture, blending old and new in surprising ways, to the food, which was absolutely amazing, to the people who were incredibly warm and also full of surprises. We went to check out a free Stevie Wonder and Prince tribute concert after our soul food binge, which was being held in Marcus Garvey park. Walking to the soul food joint and from it to the park, I only saw a small part of Harlem, but what I saw of it was surprising, a weird mix of the same suburban elements I’d experienced in Brooklyn and more pronounced downtown elements, creating a weird atmosphere made only stranger by the sights of people in the street going about their daily lives and engaging in the kind of neighbourhood activities I’d seen on films and on TV and which only made Harlem feel more detached from Manhattan even though Central Park and downtown were a few minutes away in a cab. The neighbourhood activity I saw in Harlem, from people chatting in the streets, to old men playing chess, to guys fixing bikes on the side of the road, I also saw in Brooklyn, and at one point it actually really struck me as to how different it was from the kind of neighbourhood activity you see in London. Not only was some of it just as I’d seen in the movies, but it also all felt a lot more nicer and warmer than most of the London neighbourhoods I’ve lived in, including some of the more mixed and interesting ones like East Ham. In a sense, New York neighbourhoods felt a lot more human, a lot more like real neighbourhoods, something I have never really seen in London.

The concert was also an eye opener with regards to the feeling of community in Harlem, and just how warm and fascinating its people are. Over the course of a few hours I never felt such a feeling of community as I did sitting in the audience of this free concert, watching people dance, talk, eat, drink and relax together, interacting in ways I hadn’t seen since leaving London. While I had been to similar events in Tokyo and also in Vancouver, in Harlem the feeling that emanated from sitting in the audience, watching and listening was unlike anything before. The perfect example was seeing people form a huge dance line when Evil Dee (who was the DJ at the concert, and by the way I mean Evil Dee as a DJ for a free concert, how New York is that!?) threw on a Michael Jackson track. Everyone just came together and started line dancing of sorts, while others were clapping on the side. That’s when the feeling of community really struck me. Of all the things I experienced in my week in New York, the free concert in Harlem, and the time spent walking around the neighbourhood are by far among the best memories, especially compared to the more obvious tourist things. As with London or Tokyo, or any of the other big cities I visited and lived in, Harlem, Brooklyn, the Lower East Side and various other neighbourhoods were a lot more interesting and rewarding than any of the obvious tourist stuff, which is hardly surprising but still interesting considering the previously mentioned gentrification of town and the fact that New York is such an obvious tourist spot, that the big tourist attractions do hold a lot more sway than in other cities.

New York was also the only stop on this mini world tour where I actually went and saw some ‘art.’ And by that I mean go into a museum or a gallery. The first art related thing I saw was in an unexpected spot, the New York Public Library. I went in with Ben to see something else, I think it was the edition of the bible they have in there, but in the process we found this amazing photo exhibition about the city and its various boroughs. It was a collection of 4 or 5 exhibits by different photographers arranged into one and offering some amazing insights into New York City itself but also into big cities in general, something I’m really fascinated with and which I indulged in to great extent on this trip considering I spent the majority of my two months travelling in cities. The one part of the exhibit that really struck me was a series of photos of New York subway carriages taken when they travel overground. Each photo depicts a random act caught by chance inside the carriage and which ends up grabbing your attention as soon as you view the picture, even though it isn’t highlighted in any way, it just jumps at you. In one shot, there was a busy carriage and through one of the windows you could see a couple kissing amid the carriage’s crowd, in another the carriage is empty save for one woman looking out onto the streets. It wasn’t that the exhibit was particularly amazing in concept or execution, but the way it worked as you walked past the photos and realised what the artist had done was amazing to me. It encapsulated something about big cities which I love: how people are in trains and the way in which train carriages exemplify the diversity of a city through a microcosm of activity and people concentrated in one small, contained space. The rest of the exhibition also contained plenty of interesting ideas and executions, and seeing this it only reminded me of how much I love photography and how powerful a medium it is, especially to convey ideas and feelings in a way words most often can’t.

And this was only reinforced a few days later when I went to the MOMA, only to find myself incredibly bored through most of its 6 floors, apart from one photographic exhibition and the Dali and film exhibit, which brought together all of Dali’s cinematic work as well as sketches and other pieces he created in relation to the work. Particularly interesting there was the short movie he worked on with Walt Disney, called Destino, and which I knew nothing of. It seems it’s been touring the world for a few years since it was finished and premiered back in 2003, based on the orignal sketches and 15 secs of animation Dali and Disney completed before the project was abandonned. It doesn’t seem to have been released officially yet but there are a few cam versions of it on youtube. I watched it twice, and it’s an incredible animation, short but so surreal and packed to the rafters with things to be read, or not. I guess it’s a perect embodiment of Dali’s quote, ‘I don’t do drugs, I am drugs.’ Apart from this though, the MOMA was a bit of a let down and only reinforces my feelings that a lot of modern art is pretty average, though there is some interesting stuff out there. It’s not like I’m into classic stuff either, just over the years I’ve come to realise that there is little modern art that really grabs me, whereas photography I now found to be a much more powerful medium especially in galleries or exhibitions. The MOMA itself was pretty interesting, a huge building tucked between 53rd and 54th, with a particularly interesting inside design/layout and outside architecture.

The last art related thing I indulged in and which was also a highlight of my time in town was an art/music installation by David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, called ‘Playing the Building.’ You can find some information about it in this Newsweek article, but basically Byrne turned the Battery Maritime Building, a gorgeous building and a remnant of a bygone era of ferries that connected Manhattan to the rest of the city, into an instrument by putting an organ keyboard in the middle of one of the building’s main rooms (which are pretty big) and connecting the keys to various parts of the building: hammers on radiators, pipes with holes in them, glass windows and more. People were invited to come and literally play the building, for free. I didn’t partake but I did spend a bit of time in the room just listening and it was a really surreal and interesting experience, a little ‘arty’ in some ways but very well executed.

New York also threw up some nice culinary highlights, some expected and others not so much. The soul food in Harlem was definitely among the unexpected ones. I’d never eaten soul food, and what we had was probably the best way to discover it, with ribs, chicken and the kind of side dishes I’d heard of in countless songs, movies and TV series but never actually experienced: collard greens, sweet potatoes and mac and cheese. Special shout out to the woman who looked at Ben and I with a surprised look on her face before asking why we were taking pictures of our food, only to end up agreeing with us when we said we were on holiday and wanted to ‘remember’ the moment. A more expected delight was cheesecake, which I sort of had at Junior’s, one of the city’s most famous cheesecake spots. I say sort of had as we actually shared one piece between 3 of us and it was already a bit too much. Another nice surprise was tacos in the Lower East Side, which at 3 am in an inebriated state were as amazing as the burrito I had in the mission district in San Fran, the kind of quality Mexican take away food you’d be hard pressed to find in Europe. New York definitely continued the whole ridiculous sized portions thing, with people in most of the spots I ate in taking food away in doggie bags, because let’s face it you’d have to be a serious eater to finish most of these portions on the spot. And actually that was one of the weird things about New York this time around. One of the few memories I have from my first, short, visit in 1990 is the size of certain New Yorkers I saw both in town and on my way there and back. This time around though, I barely saw any overweight people in my whole 8 days there, which I found a little strange. Side effect of gentrification?

New York was definitely a fitting ending to the trip, another life long dream I’d managed to turn into reality. It’s a city that has incredible appeal, and I can definitely see why people would want to live there and nowhere else. At the same time, having now lived in two of the world’s most famous capitals and visited a few others (and while NYC isn’t a capital it counts as a cultural one of sorts, especially for the sake of this argument) I can’t say I particularly would want to live in New York even if the apparent gentrification of the city has turned it into a seemingly pleasant and ‘easy’ place to live in, on the surface anyways. NYC holds so much significance for most people, visiting it for the first time is just an incredible feeling as your ideas of it and your prefabricated knowledge is faced with the reality and remolded into a real experience. For me one of the really amusing things was to realise just how much of New York’s image and my knowledge of it was based on having grown up listening to hip hop. I remember the first time I looked at a subway map and saw place names like Queensbridge, Brooklyn or East Flatbush and how these names just invoked images and sounds in my head from growing up listening to hip hop. I wish I’d had more time to explore the rest of the city and actually visit more of the spots that I ‘know’ from hip hop and other media. But even the small amount of what I saw, and it was still a lot, was enough to make me realise just how powerful a city New York is in many ways, and how we all somehow know it even before we get there. I would definitely go back, and while NYC bares resemblances to other cities like London or Tokyo, it’s definitely one of a kind, a city that lives up to the expectations and preconceptions you have and which also throws up plenty of surprises. It’s also a vibrant cultural melting pot in different ways to London’s cultural diversity, and that only makes it all the more attractive and hypnotic.

Big big thanks and shouts go to Lewis and Ben for the shits and giggles as well as Michelle and the family in Brooklyn for the hospitality and tings. Also out to all the random New Yorkers I met and drunk with.