New York and all that jazz?
Nan Flory spent a few weeks of the Easter break taking a bite out of the world’s biggest apple. New York is not only America’s cultural capital, but also arguably the cultural capital of the world. Can any similarities be found between the US city and its very English namesake?
Despite the similarity in names, old York has no special place in either the historical or present day heart of the New version: New York has two international airports, York has one train station; New York has five boroughs, York has South and North Bank. I suppose, if the rumours are true, York is home to 365 pubs – an impressive number – but somehow it’s not hard to believe that New York City, with its eight million residents, could have enough bars to beat us there too.
Any connection is even more tenuous when you find out that the ‘York’ part of America’s most iconic East Coast city’s name has little to do with the English city. New York was apparently christened in honour of King James II when he was Duke of York. But James was born in London, not York, and spent a good deal of his life in France, Spain and Belgium escaping religious persecution. It’s pretty certain he didn’t spend a lot of time hanging out within the city walls. The fact that New York’s sister city in the UK is not its eponymous predecessor, but London instead, says it all. Even if New York had earned its name from remarkable parallels between itself and York back in 1664 when it first adopted the moniker, the city that we know today was entirely different. It started out as a modest farming settlement on the tip of Manhattan Island, populated by farmers and milkmaids rather than haute couture-wearing business people and avant-garde artists.
So how does it change your tourist experience when you go to a place with such an international presence? Arriving in New York, you don’t just recognise it from your guidebook, you see a lifetime of movies and TV shows. The city is home to much of the world’s greatest art, it’s where hip hop -arguably the most widespread youth culture in the world today - dropped its first beats. You’ve seen it in fashion magazines, read about it in novels and followed its stock exchange. It’s where the ‘War on Terror’ began, with the tragic events of 11th September 2001 now themselves entering the international public sphere with the release of Oliver Stone’s forthcoming docu-drama, The World Trade Centre. When you go to New York, you go to the origin of modern pop culture, the headquarters of the cultural hegemony. Everyday life for New Yorkers is the stuff of legends for plain old York residents.
When I went to the city during the Easter holiday, I found that the expectations I carried with me made all my experiences much more striking. Usually, when travelling, you just immerse yourself in the place and enjoy the novelties, be they sunshine, historical artefacts, nightlife, or food; in New York, everything is either a confirmation or subversion of pre-conceived ideas, so you’re super-conscious the whole time. The disappointments of New York arise when the outside world’s myth-making gets ahead of itself and idealises the city’s actual reality. It’s easy to forget that New York is a living, breathing place. It still has the quotidian, unlike, for instance, Venice, another renowned city, which nobody really lives in anymore. New York is what Venice might have been in the days of the silk route, when it was a centre of commerce and culture.
Culture is something New York is in no way short of. Novelist Tom Wolfe once said, in a rare, enlightened moment, ‘culture just seems to be in the air, like part of the weather’. Some of Kandinsky’s most stunning work was commissioned to hang in the lobby of an exclusive apartment building. Anywhere else, you’d have Ikea prints, but in the Big Apple, you have genuine art in the true sense of the word. Chagalls hang in the Metropolitan Opera House and one of the most impressive galleries, the Frick, was originally a private home. Its owner, an über successful businessman, spent his money on collecting one of the most extensive private collections of old masters in the world. And somehow it doesn’t seem too strange, the prospect of all those wonderful paintings decorating the walls of his family home. New York is the real thing, not only in a coca cola sense; it’s where every other major city takes its cue.
In the same vein, while I was there, a rainy evening trip to the cinema led to an encounter with none other than Steve Buscemi. The actor/director made an appearance at a screening of Lonesome Jim, a film he directed, which premiered at the Sundance film festival but has only just landed a distribution deal. In true New York style, no one but my companion and I were awed by the fact that a man who appeared in The Big Lebowski and Reservoir Dogs was standing in front of us. They just got on with it, asked him a few questions, didn’t take any photographs with stupidly bright flash guns; they were nothing short of cool. I can’t really see Buscemi casually appearing at the Odeon, or a York audience displaying similar restraint if ever he did.
New York’s universities are similarly incredible to the outside viewer, but calmly accepted by native students. I stayed at Columbia with two friends from York University who are completing an exchange year there. The Columbia library is pretty much solid marble and definitely contains over a zillion books. They are kept in ‘the stacks’, a series of low-ceilinged rooms ‘stacked’ on top of one another, filled with books. The stacks are like huge bookshelves, except instead of individual volumes, they hold whole bookcases. My host explained that one of the must-dos for Columbia students before they graduate is have steamy sex in the stacks. Can you imagine a corner of the J.B.Morrell being remote enough for carnal exploration? I think not. At Columbia, however, there are rooms no one has ever been into; it’s actively conducive to the more racy kind of study break.
Then there’s the local park. New York’s version, Central Park, is actually bigger than Monaco. (Yes, than a country.) I spent several days exploring, visiting the turtle pond, the Jackie Onasiss reservoir, the Swedish puppet theatre and the zoo. Central Park is an oasis of calm in such a frenetic city and is made all the more striking by the fact that, deep in greenery, you’ll suddenly spot the spire of the Empire State building poking up between trees.
As New York is so densely packed with skyscrapers, its parks are the only places where the sun shines comprehensively. Elsewhere, there is always shade on one side of the street and then there are those slightly unsettling times when light, out of nowhere, streams up the avenues and avoids the cross-town streets almost entirely.
Another of the city’s odd features is the incredibly sharp borders between different parts of town. One block makes all the difference between areas. The city is divided by cultures – there’s Chinatown, Little Italy, Spanish Harlem or El Barrio, and Jewish areas. There are also divides between hip and arty places, old money quarters like the Westside 70s or the financial district. New York’s artistic part of town - and by that I mean the ultra hip, leotard wearing quarter that used to be lower East side - has moved. I made the trip, to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. On Manhattan itself there’s broadly downtown and uptown, east and west, all surrounding Central Park. Downtown and east are cooler than uptown and west, although the latter two do have their charms. Then, at the top of the island, there’s Harlem, which is a whole other story.
Spending a day in Harlem is what seriously alerts you to the fact that New York is a real place, not a theme park. Harlem’s main landmark is Strivers Row, a strip of wonderfully preserved brown stones, encompassing the best of New York architecture. The row has its origins in the days of the Harlem renaissance when African Americans established a rich, artistic community in the area. The beautiful houses were reserved (somewhat obviously) for the real strivers, who worked to extreme lengths to achieve successes, usually barred from their community by the institutional racism of the time. Harlem today, despite being only a few streets up from Columbia (one of the most prestigious, and expensive, tertiary institutions in the world) is run down and poor, populated almost exclusively by disadvantaged African and Hispanic communities. It doesn’t give the impression that New York’s ‘melting pot’ (that term was coined about the city) is actually blending particularly well. Although there aren’t exclusively white neighbourhoods so much, it’s obvious that poor New Yorkers are still black New Yorkers.
Tourists are encouraged to take bus tours through Harlem rather than walk the streets. The area is probably a lot more typical of America than the bright lights of Manhattan and it seems wrong that most visitors will avoid it, keeping to the usual landmarks. While places like Times Square and St Mark’s Place work to maintain mythical New York, Harlem can’t afford such a luxury. Despite a brand new shopping complex, featuring H&M rather than New York’s more exclusive labels, and new efforts to pump some money into the neighbourhood, the difference in the standard of living between 116th and 125th streets, (separated by just one subway stop) is clear.
The standard line is that New York presents ‘an embarrassment of riches’. The sheer variety available in the city is ridiculous: every time I ordered food I had a little crisis of confidence and ended up just choosing the first thing on the menu; I went to supermarkets bigger than my hometown. However, the phrase can be read in another way: the ‘embarrassment’ is the uneven distribution of New York’s riches. It is a city of extremes where people sleep on the streets outside apartment buildings decorated with Kandinskys; where the sun shines fiercely on one side of street, leaving the other in darkness. If New York has any similarities with Disney Land, I certainly didn’t see them. There is no techni-colour simplicity to the Big Apple, as much as the rest of the world would love it to be so.
The Five Boroughs of New York City
The Bronx
Hip hop began in this area, which is characterised by poverty and crime.
Brooklyn
Recently it has become a haven for artists.
Manhattan
Famed for its impressive skyline, this island contains the most tourist
attractions.
Queens
Birthplace of director Martin Scorsese and site of the Shea Stadium - home of baseball’s New York Mets.
Staten Island
The forgotten borough’s ferry is popular for its view of the Statue of Liberty.
