New Yorker #2
Manhattan by the calorie count...
Previously… New Yorker #1
In New York with colleagues from the Maltese press, I was lucky to have had Bertrand Borg from The Times tag along. A well-seasoned traveller with a solid sense of adventure, Bert took time to map out the few spots just off the touristic trek for that hard-to-find pizza slice and hotdog.
Just to put his hardcore wanderlust into perspective, while I went – touristically speaking – AWOL in Prague and Rome for a few weeks after spending the weekend in Glastonbury when I was 22, Bert was treading the streets of Bogotá, Colombia, where he had decided this would be the country to learn Spanish and work. Not the European charm of Madrid or Barcelona (which incidentally, he did roam for a few months if I remember correctly, and then again setting up base in the notorious El Raval quarter), but Colombia. And he traipsed into Nicaragua and Honduras before circling a good part of the globe eastwards, which really underlines Bert’s steely-balled passion for adventure.
(I am prone to linger here about that part in The Last Waltz where The Band drummer Levon Helm talks about the young band’s first trips into New York: “New York, it was an adult portion. It was an adult dose. So it took a couple of trips to get into it. You just go in the first time and you get your ass kicked and you take off. As soon as it heals up, you come back and you try it again. Eventually, you fall right in love with it.”)
So as I tried to get my bearings around what tends to be billed as a chaotic island of 1.7 million (that’s Manhattan), Bert would tell me stories of getting stitched up by taxi drivers and the corrupt cops in Bogotá, planting sachets of illicit substances in the car during a surprise search mid-journey, bundling him and his friend up in a cop van before they could pay their way out of this detour, to be dumped on a highway. (Kind of puts everything into perspective, really, as I stared down a 12cm rat below the platform opposite me on Bryant’s Park.)
With Bert uninterested in clocking the sights (same as I on such a short trip), we got into a gruelling circumambulation around a couple of quarters in Manhattan, always marked by some food shrine. Pizza at Scarr’s near the Lower East Side took us to a deserted couple of streets into a dark joint where thin-crust, large-slice, oily pizza is served to customers squeezed into the doorway that opens into the tiny kitchen area. We roamed Chinatown, Little Italy and SoHo (skipped the financial district), then refuelled with Japanese and dim sum in Koreantown, beneath the Empire State Building, with the rest of the press gang. Again thanks to Bert, we got a table at the Comedy Cellar where the highlights of the night were Brian Scolaro, Godfrey, and Keith Robinson. Here’s a clip from the night itself...
Even on the day of our departure, Bert crafted a decent meander – walked the Brooklyn Bridge, brunch in Dumbo to catch the iconic shot of the Manhattan Bridge in Once Upon A Time In America, then ferried back to Midtown East by the United Nations building where we were staying...
… before walking yet again up to the Lower East Side (a 40-minute trek in 0-degree weather!) interrupted by The Strand mega-bookstore (packed to the rafters with browsers) and a hot dog on Saint Mark’s Place where the fabled Physical Graffitti album cover was shot. And now my back is out.
