July 2015

Just reading that name twice probably made you hum a certain tune. Writing it made me realise how difficult it will be to do a travel piece about the most famous city on earth. How do you avoid cliches when you’re dealing with a place everyone has seen a million times, in movies, television, a place literally famous from songs and sagas?

Maybe by going the road less travelled?

If you decide against one of the horribly boxy hotels around Times’ Square and opt for a rent-controlled apartment in an art deco-building on Westside Avenue?

If instead of the glitz and glitter of Broadway you have a picnic at an impromptu outdoor concert in Riverside Park in the evening, where belly dancers and fireflies provide more restrained but no less attractive variations on that theme as the sun sets the water on fire?

When other tourists stampede into Harlem to have a “genuine gospel experience” (as genuine as a Disneyfication of black culture can be), why not trek still further north on Manhattan, and seek out the thoroughly fake and marvellous Cloisters, a faux monastery built by Rockefeller to house his collection of medieval art and architecture, stunningly situated on an outcrop above the Hudson River?

Shun the shopping in TriBeCa and the bars in SoHo, and take the High Line* through the meat packing district instead, before developers have turned that area, too, into a chic yuppie-version of its former self. In fact, don’t do Chinatown and Little Italy and Wall Street and the rest of those places at all – even if you haven’t been (and chances are that you have), you’ve seen them anyway. You know them intimately. Go rather to the Upper West with its Woody Allen-characters and Ivy League campus (replete with ivy-covered professors), or to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, whose local tribe people sport massive beards and numerous tattoos (regardless of gender). Go to the Metropolitan, not to look at the art but to have cocktails on the rooftop; don’t eat burgers, have Ethiopian or Tibetan cuisine (because when else can you?); head to New Jersey (yes, there, I said it!) and watch as the moon rises over that most familiar of cityscapes (that you never actually see if you stay in Manhattan).** Then you will have bitten to the core of the Big Apple, and not just admired its shiny surface.
*The High Line is a disused elevated railway that has been turned into a park – it’s gimmicky but enjoyable.

**And if you must – although I advise against it – get a severe cold and pop into a pharmacy for remedies, only to realise that you’ve strayed into yet another ethnic enclave, this one Polish, and that all the products on sale are Russian, of all things. I couldn’t understand a word on any of them, but they were clearly industrial strength, and I’m grateful, even though I haven’t slept for three days now…