New York

Welcome to New York - from the Staten Island ferry

I had a crazy few weeks at the end of August, in fact it's only just starting to calm down now, 2 trips to the US in a month, and out of London for 5 weekends in a row. That was a bit full on. I'm looking forward to just hanging out at home for the rest of the year.

The first trip to the US was completely unexpected, work suddenly needed to send me over there for a week and a bit. I say suddenly because the flights were booked on Tuesday and I flew out on Wednesday. That's pretty crazy for my work, I'm not really in the business of tight deadlines afterall.

But I'm not going to turn down a business class flight for anything. Thankfully work doesn't send me to enough places for me to get sick of some business class. Man is it nice! This whole post is probably going to be devoted to how nice business class is :). A flat bed, don't mind if I do. And actual cutlery to eat with, why thank you. And what do you mean there are 4 courses in this meal?

The business class lounge in Heathrow was pretty good, free food and drinks, comfy seats. Definitely a nice place to wait for your flight. The lounge in New York was actually really bad, and I was flying American Airlines, so I would have thought New York would be like their flagship airport. But it was terrible, you had to pay for everything! Screw that, has my work not already paid enough!?

Now that's a view - and for free too

There is a real deer inside this, it's surrounded by 

perspex bubbles - at the Met.

I found New York a bit of a weird city, in saying that I was there on my own, and for work. I think if I'd gone there with someone it would have been quite a different experience. I don't think I realised it was going to be so different from London. I think it's more similar to Sydney, which I really didn't expect. Everyone drives for one thing, what is up with that! How can you be in the middle of New York and there's 3-4 lanes of traffic zooming along beside you. It's insane.

And then there is hardly anyone on the subway. I'm used to the underground in London, where there are always people around, no matter how late it is, granted they don't run 24 hours, but you always feel pretty safe. Not so much on the New York subway. For a start it's really dingy, like scary video game dingy, there are dead rats floating in pools of water. And there is nobody around, you are walking down these long corridors and it's just your footsteps echoing. Then you come around a corner and suddenly there's a homeless guy begging for change. It's a bit confronting after the ease and wealth of London. Then on the platform there are no other people. The train pulls up and the carriage is completely empty. It kind of freaks you out, I like other people around, at least ones like me, safety in numbers after all.

How is that scene!

But walking around is quite different from London, on the streets there are always heaps of people around. And up on street level you always feel totally safe. So that's pretty cool, just make sure your hotel is within walking distance of everywhere you want to go and you never have to take the strange subway. Which is made completely of stainless steel and has a bed bug infestation, so there you go.

The Rockefeller Centre - and some massive topiary

The bars and restaurants are also really good, again I probably would have enjoyed them more if there was someone with me. I'm not one of those people who likes to drink alone. I was loving the burgers there, London really hasn't mastered the burger yet. And over there they are just so dirty and delicious!

The museums are amazing and the buildings are really spectacular. It was nice to be working there, my office was on the 20th floor in mid-town, just a couple of blocks south of Central Park. And from the meeting rooms you could see both the park and the Hudson River. And you are just surrounded by these amazing buildings. But then you go down to the street level and it's just covered in garbage and it stinks. It's a really weird city of juxtapositions. Though at least there were a lot less homeless people than in California. Perhaps it's because the weather is worse or perhaps there are better services, I don't know. I was expecting a lot more in New York.

The incredible interior of the Morgan museum

One of the other differences I noticed just walking around is that there seem to be a lot fewer parks around the place. There's central park, and then one by the library and one right down town at Battery Park, but apart from that the parks seem very sparse on the ground. But even though there are many fewer parks, they seem to have a lot more benches to sit, just around the city. It seems that businesses really fill the gap left by the government in providing this sort of social infrastructure (if you can call a bench social infrastructure). So all the big buildings would have this plaza out the front, and there were a lot of places to sit there. I think these plazas were still technically private property, so I'm not sure what would happen if you weren't the type of person they wanted sitting around.

Also the insides of some of these buildings were amazing, the Rockefeller Centre for one, you really got an idea of the robber baron kind of era that the US went through. You can really see that in these really ostentatious lobbies.

New Yorkers crowding into one of their parks

The Staten Island ferry is another complete juxtaposition from the rest of the city, in fact their whole public transportation system was not what I expected at all. The subway was only $2.50 per ride, and you could go as far as you wanted, they didn't have an idea of zones.  New York is the first place I think I've been to where it wasn't an insanely expensive ride to get to the airport. I could get from the centre of the city to JFK for $7.50 in about an hour. That's some good transportation. I even got a seat all the way.

The Staten Island ferry goes maybe 6 times an hour and is completely free! That was one of the weird things about New York. You go over there thinking how it's going to be this completely capitalist society and the market always wins. That there's no such thing as government provided services, and then you find the public transport is really cheap. It may look incredibly scary, but it's cheap and it seems to run really well. I just wish a few more people caught it.

The Staten Island ferry, at least on the weekend, is then this completely free service provided solely for the pleasure of tourists. I mean I'm sure that there are a few locals going back and forwards. But when you land at Staten Island, 95% of the boat gets off, and then walks straight back on. That's quite nice of the government, to provide a totally free tourist attraction. And you do really get a great view of both the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline. I didn't realise Manhattan was so low, you would think New Yorkers would be all over rising sea levels, since they really don't have much lee-way.

Weird smashed dinner set at MOMA. It was dropped on the
ground then pieced back together. Now that's some modern art!

I walked so much whilst I was there, I nearly wore my feet out. New York is definitely a city for walking. The subway is not quite dense enough, so even if you do use it to get around, you'll end up walking a fair way. Especially around the Central Park area.

I went to the New York Public Library, I've really been getting into the public libraries here in London. I was feeling hopeful that given the public transport situation, that actually the government does spend money on public services. And then you go into the library. Great building, but where are all the books?

Apparently the main branch is just a research library, so I guess you have to request any book you want to look at. It was just a really weird feeling, walking into such a great building, and it just being an empty shell of a library. Especially given the great libraries in London, granted they don't look like that building, but at least there are books in them. I haven't visited the British Library it's true, perhaps that suffers the same dearth of books (at least on the publicly accessible shelves). I mean I get why you need to have research libraries, where the books can't be messed up by just anyone. And perhaps the tourists would just steal all the books if it was a normal library, but I can't help feeling that it would have been a great place to take a book from a shelf and just read for an hour or so.

Even SimCity made it into MOMA. Check out those old school graphics.
Aaah it takes me back!

There is a park surrounding this building. And it was here that I really noticed the lack of green spaces for Manhattanites. The whole week I was there the weather was amazing, 28 degrees and not a cloud in the sky, perfect weather. So on the weekend everyone wants to be outside. Unless you want to lounge around on hard concrete you are really limited to where there are lawns. So this tiny park was jam-packed. I've never seen such a packed park, it was like Bondi beach, except in the middle of a city. I think what I realised the more I was in New York, is how much I like living in London. It's very similar to New York, I think anyway, it's just so much more livable, for me anyway. It really made me appreciate what I have in London.

Just a casual book from the 1200's sitting in the Morgan museum.

But back to New York, it definitely has grand buildings over London. The skyscrapers and lobbies of these buildings are unbelievable. I guess that's the bonus of not having any history to preserve. You can just bulldoze whole blocks and start again. Which does give New York a different energy to London, there's a lot more renewal going on. Though I do wonder now that they have these great skyscrapers, if the renewal is kind of stopping for them. I mean would you ever be allowed to redo the Empire State building, or the Rockefeller Centre?

That's the signature of Elizabeth I in the Morgan Museum.
And why not really

I tried to do a bit of shopping there, I mean everyone says New York is the place to go. I tried Macy's first, I mean that did get a Christmas movie made about it, so it can't be all bad. For all those who have ever lived in Canberra, it had the same feel as the Target in the city. Just clothes lying around in big piles, everything on the ground. It was late at night, so maybe the tourists during the day had completely trashed the place. So that was a little disappointing.

I do like the late night shopping though. In London it's as if opening on Sunday is this great taboo. Let alone late night shopping. New York really is open all the time. My final shopping adventure was Bloomingdales's I mean that's another famous mall. And it was definitely better than Macy's, it felt a bit like Selfridge's though, so not really that much different from what I can get in London. I mean I'm not a big shopper at the best of times, but I think you would appreciate it more if you were coming from Sydney perhaps.

Warhol at MOMA

Enough about the downsides of New York, on to the good! The museums have to be up there, they are amazing, worth a trip just for them. And there are still so many that I haven't visited. Maybe the next time I go, I'll manage to convince Dave to come with me. But the ones I did manage to see were all really good.

First up was the Museum of Modern Art, which was two blocks away from my office. How good is that! So I popped along the first evening I was there. And it was good. Massive too, I did not expect it to be so large. There really are some good modern American artists, or at least famous ones; Liechtenstein, Warhol, Pollock. As well as the really well known artists, there was a section on Architecture and Design which was surprisingly good. Somehow Sim City and MineCraft got exhibits. I guess games really are art. It was real old school Sim City too, the one I played when it first came out. It was just a really nice building too, they do buildings well in New York. It had this courtyard where they seemed to put on little music performances, so you could sit out there amongst their sculptures, drinking some wine and listening to a band. A pretty nice way to spend a Thursday evening.

A garden on top of the Met - with a view of the city. What a place!

One of my favourite pieces at the Met. This sculpture is
actually bolted to the wall. 

One of the surprising museums of the trip was the Native American museum. I guess technically it is the Museum of the American Indian, since it covered South America as well. My only real interaction with native American culture is old western movies, and maybe Twilight. Not good examples I imagine. So it was great to be able to visit this museum and get a feel for just how many tribes there were. It didn't go too much into the more recent history, which was a shame. I really want to find a good book on that era. It was just full of objects, and really interesting stuff, the outfits mainly. There was a little description on each tribe, and some objects from each one, so you could also see how they were quite different.

J. Pierpont's study. You can't see the massive vault in
this shot. This guy had some serious wealth.

The second surprising museum of the trip was the Morgan Museum, which started as the library of J. Pierpont Morgan, of JP Morgan bank fame. The wealth this guy must of had was incredible. The things he had in his collection were astounding. He even had a vault in his study, to keep his more valuable possessions. And not just a little wall safe, this was like a walk-in wardrobe, probably as big as our whole study in our last place. He had books from 1204, he had a letter signed by Elizabeth I, as well as an original score of Mozart's. Forget the Bodleian Library, this place is in another league. Definitely worth a visit, and again just a really great building. Even without the incredible treasures.

But my museum visiting was far from over. There was still the big one to go, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This place is like the Louvre, it's enormous. I really didn't expect the scale of the place. You could easily spend 2 whole days there. I spent nearly one, and still felt like there were things I had missed out on. It's like the British Gallery, Tate Modern, British Museum, Natural History Museum and the V&A museum all rolled into one, to give you some idea of the scale we are talking here. Really incredible.

There were so many good pieces at this place, I had originally planned on only spending the morning here and then moving on. I ended up leaving at 4pm. It was just amazing. It did mean I ended up getting to my last museum of the trip rather late.

The Guggenheim museum

Last up was the Guggenheim, I think perhaps the best part about this museum is the building. Sorry Guggenheim, but I'm not really interested in 8 floors of Italian futurism. Even with the whole museum devoted to this subject, I'm still no clearer as to what the main objectives, themes, background to it all was. And I even had an audio guide. So good work there whoever curated that one.

How it seems to work here is that the majority of the museum is given over to changing exhibitions, so I got Italian futurism, lucky me. Then there are a couple of rooms with the permanent collection. The permanent was so much better than the changing exhibit. I'm so glad I didn't rush out of the Met to see this.

A Turner at the Met - why is this not in the Tate Britain? I thought the British
were the ones who do the pillaging around here!

And that was my trip to New York, man I'm exhausted just thinking about it. It was so good to go, and I'm so lucky to have a job that gives me (admittedly very rare) trips around the world. I think I would definitely visit again, it's just not on the top of my list. And next time will have to be with someone too, I'm not a great solo travel, it's the restaurants that intimidate me.