New Yorker #1
Manhattan lightning trip to report Malta at the United Nations and its two-month presidency of the Security Council - part 1
Next New Yorker #2 Manhattan by the calorie…
I am in New York. Before me, a monstrous conglomeration of towers shrouded in blackness stares at me with a million eyes, the Queens Expressway now engulfing the press juncket I’m travelling with in a taxi. We switch over from five-lane motorways to flyovers and underpasses, crossing from the patchwork of ticky-tacky Queens houses to the monolithic towers of concrete, brickwork and metal of Manhattan, now looming over us as the taxi negotiates the night traffic. Delis, liquor stores and weed shops powered by neon share the kerbsides with high street stores, and two-storey redbricks at the corner stand comfortably next to a 100-storey skyscraper. Room for all.
I think I ‘know’ this place. New York has lived with me ever since I was a kid. Hollywood and Italian syndicated replays brought it to me – the Park Avenue luxury apartments in Diff’rent Strokes or the Brooklyn Heights redstones in the Cosby Show, played out in Italian dubbing on Berlusconi’s channels all throughout my childhood in the 1980s. Later, it was Travis Bickle’s city of animals, “whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies... sick, venal”. Before turning off 2nd Avenue, I can see the endless blur of dotted car lights a lifetime away at the mouth of Harlem.
But I’m reporting at the United Nations in Midtown, where Malta holds the presidency of the Security Council during two months of its two-year membership as a non-executive member. And this New York looks like it has long had its scum washed off.
By day I see tourists carousing the halls of the UN, well-dressed New Yorkers outside walking their dogs in -1-degree weather, the smells of smoking burger kiosks and the unmistakable stench of weed everywhere I walk, meshed into the freezing air. There is a normality in daily life here: part TV and film tropes it may be (“I know this place, I’ve seen it, heard it speak”), but blue-collar life is everywhere you go, with screaming New Yorkers and Hispanic voices bubbling above the city din, around the shops, stores, garages and warehouses. You pick strands of conversation as you walk in and out of stores or in the side-streets that could be dipped in a GTA game: “This book says squid can be sautéed in chili sauce”; “I would never have dated him”... and so much vocal fry and mumbled drawls.
I see the steam from the 100 miles of below-ground service pipes smoking out of the manholes. I see the Madison Avenue office buildings that house some Don Drapers and maybe a few Patrick Batemans. Times Square is so much smaller than I imagined, with its revellers merrily locked inside the hyper-capitalist tesseract of screaming high-resolution advertising. I don’t see much basketball courts – the kids are playing football... “soccer” – ahead of the second World Cup to be hosted in the States.
I eat a pastrami ‘sandwich’ at Katz’s Deli in the East Village – at $26 this is the cost of a main dish back home. It comes with whole pickled cucumbers, served by a factory-line of men and women working the non-stop orders locked in a dispassionate rhythm. The doormen bellow at the wide-eyed tourists – Take a ticket! Go to the proper serving station! Pay after you eat! Take your ticket stub at the exit! Everyone is entertained by this cantankerous, inattentive gang that keeps the food machine working.
15% tips in restaurants, free coffee and soda refills, bagels for breakfast, over-sized burgers, real fries.
A 20-minute block-by-block walk to Hell’s Kitchen for cocktails by night, and then 30 minutes back to our Midtown East hotel at 1am. The streets are dark, and the dim street-lighting are just glow-sticks for the way back home. Even with the stars banished from the hellish, orange-grey night-sky of Manhattan and its all-seeing lights, or the neon garishness that announces every single shop and dive, the darkness on the streets is invasive, keeping corner hustlers only visible to those who need to know.
Pizza at Scarr’s in the Lower East Side: a dusky joint where three guys are kneading dough and serving pizzas in an impossibly tiny space.
Then walk straight through Chinatown and immediately into Little Italy, and then a couple of dives in SoHo, and more food at Koreantown further down in Midtown. Then back to SoHo to catch a comedy show. Walk the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn, where the food is not as pricey as Manhattan’s.
It is hard to ignore the constant threat of menace lurking around the next corner. The drunkards corner the bar stools. Hobos fulminate passers-by and harangue them, their stench marking out that liminal space, the calling-card of disease and damnation. Even on the subways, teeming with rats staring back at the commuters on the platform, the blunts get smoked by men hanging on in the interconnecting gap of the train vehicles. But it feels good to be here, even for just four days.
