New York City
Just 4 days until Christmas and we’d arrived in New
York. And at -5°C it was not warm. We were staying in the SoHo
area and once we had managed to leave JFK airport and had paid an absolute
fortune to get to SoHo, we went straight out to Chinatown to get some food. No such luck, as everything was closing up.
We had a pretty packed itinerary and had booked up
several trips for our 6 days in NYC. This was our schedule:
Day 1 – Arrive in
late afternoon, check out area round hotel (SoHo).
Day 2 – 9/11 memorial
and museum in the morning, Greenwich Village walking tour in the afternoon,
Times Square and Broadway show in the evening.
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| Fire truck in 9/11 museum |
We booked ahead for everything we could, including the National
September 11 Memorial & Museum and we went for the 9am slot because of
how busy it gets there. We were in there for a good 3 hours and by the time we
left it was packed. The museum tells the complete story of the events of that
horrible day, including individual stories, engineering reports, the heroic
efforts of the emergency services and the reactions of the world. The displays
included recordings of concerned family members calling loved ones that worked
in the World Trade Centres, and recordings of people on the fateful flights
trying to get hold of family and friends to say goodbye. It was an insightful
and emotional morning.
We headed over to Greenwich
Village for our walking tour, stopping
at a 99c pizza place for a cheap lunch.
Greenwich Village is a very affluent area of Lower
Manhattan although it wasn’t always so. It’s now the most expensive part of
NYC, and has a well-established reputation for being one of the most bohemian,
artistic areas, famed for its celebrity artists, writers and now its superstar
actors. It was also the birthplace for the LGBT movement.
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| Stonewall Inn |
There is a renowned gay bar in Greenwich which was mafia
owned called the Stonewall Inn.
The story goes that the mafia used to pickpocket patrons, stealing their ID and
finding their address, and then using this information to blackmail them. In 1969
despite local police taking bribes to leave the bar alone, it was raided by
undercover cops. Because of the blackmailing issues by the mafia, patrons had
taken to sharing ID because of being pickpocketed, and then there was a delay
in the police transportation, so there were lots of arrested patrons milling
around outside. When a female customer was dragged out by the police, the crowd
which had swelled considerably, went crazy and riots ensued, known as the ‘Gay Rebellion’.
This led to the first parade on the
anniversary the following year called the Christopher Street parade. After that
there have been annual marches for LGBT rights, and even today Gay Pride events
take place all over the world. In the UK the main group that lobbies for gay
rights is called Stonewall.
We learned that around 40% of Manhattan is built on
landfill, and in New York, avenues go from north to south, and streets from east
to west. Greenwich however, didn’t want the grid street system when it was
introduced over 200 years ago, and if you look at the streets and roads there,
you’ll notice they are more irregular than other parts of NYC.
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| Greenwich Village |
Greenwich was originally named Groenwijck by the Dutch who were America’s first settlers in 1624, then the name was anglicised to Greenwich in 1664.
The architectural style throughout Greenwich is primarily Georgian, but this
was renamed ‘Federal’ after the American Revolution when the US broke ties with
Britain, and didn’t want its architectural style names for the King of England.
In 1906 tall buildings were approved to be built in Manhattan. Greenwich however,
didn’t want them and so didn't get them.
Our guide’s recommendations for food in Little Italy -
Best pizza – Bleecker St Pizza.
Best pizza – Bleecker St Pizza.
Best cannoli – Rocco’s.
Best thin crust pizza - Joe's pizza.
Best cupcakes - Molly's Cupcakes.
Best ice-cream (gelato) - Grom Gelato.
Best thin crust pizza - Joe's pizza.
Best cupcakes - Molly's Cupcakes.
Best ice-cream (gelato) - Grom Gelato.
Famous ‘sons’ of Greenwich include Edgar Allen Poe and Robert De Niro who both
lived in Greenwich. ‘Minetta Tavern’ was where Hemingway used to drink, and
where the some of the movie ‘Sleepers’ was filmed. Bob Dylan wrote ‘Blowing in
the wind’ in ‘Panchitos’, Bruce Springsteen played in ‘Cafe Wha’ and Jimi
Hendrix was discovered there. Betty Davis’ debut was in Provincetown.
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| Washington Square Gardens |
In the heart of Greenwich, between the Empire State Building and Tower 1 of the
World Trade Centre lies Washington Square Gardens, dedicated to George
Washington, whose renovation took 4 years and cost $30 million. The Gardens used
to be a swamp and were then used as mass grave for victims of cholera, yellow
fever and other nasties. In the 1820s there was a huge cholera outbreak
which moved from Lower Manhattan up to Greenwich Village. Later, it was paved
to be used as a military area which then sank into the marshy land. The gardens
went on to be excavated and between 10 and 20,000 bodies were found.
After the tour we took a subway up to Times Square to see about getting cheap
Broadway tickets. I think we would have been better off booking them online in
advance as a lot were sold out or ridiculously expensive, but it might have
been because of the time of year – Happy Holidays!
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| Times Square |
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| Miss Saigon on Broadway |
We ended up finding a cheap website called Todaytix
and then we found a discount code, so we bought tickets for ‘Miss Saigon’ that
evening. We stopped for some food at a Chinese restaurant called Real Kung
FU around the corner and grabbed a quick drink in a pub nearby and headed
over to the theatre for the show. We were to meet the agent to pick up the
tickets outside the theatre, along with about 100 others who had had the same
idea! The seats were high, one row off the back row but the view was okay and
the show was very good.
Day 3 – Sopranos
tour, Christmas market at Bryant Park, window displays on Fifth Avenue, St
Patrick’s Cathedral, Central Park, and evening cruise round the harbour.
As huge fans of the
Sopranos we were really excited to go on the tour, which was to take us on
a coach from near Times Square, right through New Jersey to the main sites
shown in the show. When we arrived in the freezing rain, we were sent over to
where a car was parked and someone was digging around in the boot. Turned out
to be the actor that played Vito in the show, which was cool. We got a couple
of photos and bought merchandise that he was selling from his car. It was hard
to say no to him, he was pretty pushy, so we bought the cheapest thing and got
on the bus.vkito
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| Vito from The Sopranos |
The guide was an actor who had had a few bit parts on the
show and he knew everything there is to know about the Sopranos. The bus took
us straight out to New Jersey and we passed some fairly well-known Sopranos
landmarks such as the NJ turnpike and Pizzaland from the opening credits, Carmela’s
church, Holsten’s which is the restaurant where the family met for dinner in
the final episode, and the outside of Satin Dolls, better known as Bada
Bing, the show’s infamous strip club.
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| Holsten's - final scene of The Sopranos |
Strangely enough, Satin Dolls had been in the news in the
weeks leading up to our trip, as it had been closed down. I emailed the tour
company beforehand to check it we would still be able to go inside on our trip
and was reassured that yes we would. After stopping at Holsten’s, to sit in the booth and get a pic (which they
had had to make bigger to accommodate the awesome James Gandolfini) we were
given a bag of complementary onion rings and got to order a sandwich to go
(which they got wrong), and then we were told that the tour of the Bada Bing
was off. We got to stop in the car park and look at it from outside though.
Can you tell I wasn’t too impressed with the tour? Many
of the landmarks were a bit vague unless you are a superfan, and the tour
really relies on Holsten’s which was great, don’t get me wrong, but it would
have been nice to have been able to eat there rather than having to grab a
takeaway sandwich and eat it on the coach. I don’t know why they didn’t charge
$5 or so extra to include a sandwich and get people to order what they want
when they book the tour, then the restaurant is guaranteed income, and they can
make the sandwiches well in advance of the tour group’s arrival. The other
place that everyone wanted to see was the Bada Bing (especially as Tony’s house
wasn’t on the list). So for it to be shut, even after being assured it wouldn’t
be, was pretty disappointing. I was surprised that there wasn’t a contract in
place between the tour company and the bar.
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| Saks Christmas display |
After the tour, we were dropped off opposite Bryant
Park which was handy as we’d planned to visit the Christmas market there.
There were plenty of stalls to buy unusual and unique Christmas gifts, and
there was a huge Christmas tree and an ice-skating rink. From there we strolled
up Fifth Avenue to check out the window displays – especially the renowned Saks
display, which this year was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. We popped into St
Patrick’s Cathedral briefly which was packed, and we carried on walking.
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| St Patrick's Cathedral |
When we reached the gorgeous Central
Park we strolled inside from Fifth Avenue side, towards the Columbus
Circle Christmas market, located at 59th street and Central Park West
which had many of the same stalls as the Bryant Park market.
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| Central Park |
After a 99c pizza
for dinner and a freezing cold walk to the river we were on our 90-minute Harbour
Lights boat trip around the NY harbour. If the walk to the boat was cold,
the actual trip was bleeding Baltic, but nevertheless I was out on deck taking
pictures.
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| New York harbour |
We had a fantastic guide that pointed out major landmarks along the
way, including the Brooklyn
Bridge, the Statue
of Liberty and Ellis
Island, which was the first stop for immigrants arriving in the 1900s.
Day 4 – SoHo,
Chinatown, Little Italy free tour, Top of the Rock at Rockefeller.
SoHo
In the morning we were on another free walking tour,
this time covering SoHo,
Chinatown
and Little
Italy. The tour started within a few minutes’ walk of our hotel in SoHo
outside what was the Michael Kors charity for Aids sufferers. It’s now a
general charity, which delivered 4 million dinners last year to those in
need. We found the Dominique
Ansel bakery, which is famed for inventing the cronut. There was
already a queue outside at 10am; they usually sell out by midday. SoHo is a
lovely area, again popular with the rich and famous. Its name derives from
South of Houston – SoHo, Houston being a main street in the city.
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In the 1930s, the Mayor, La Guardia, who was of Italian
descent outlawed organ-grinding because he wanted to kill the negative perception
of Italians as organ grinders and he was apparently bullied as a child and called
an organ grinder.
Nowadays there aren’t many Italians in Little Italy, as
the immigrant families from those days would be third and fourth generation and
are assimilated into the community. Over the years, 47% went back to Italy but 85%
of New Yorkers claim Italian ancestry.
Lombardi’s
in Little Italy was the first pizzeria in the USA and serves the traditional thin
crust even though most pizza these days is Americanised and has a thicker base.
Spaghetti and meatballs is also Italian-American. Meat in Italy was hard to come
by, so was rarely eaten there but in the USA there was plenty of it, so the
immigrants started adding it to pasta, adapting it to local tastes and making
the most of the abundance of meat.
Chinatown
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| Chinatown |
There are actually 10 Chinatowns across NYC, as a result
of high immigration from all over China. At one stage there were 10,000 Chinese
immigrants per year, who spoke many different dialects, but in the late 1800s,
the Chinese Exclusion Act was introduced and immigration from China fell to about
10 per year.
In the 1830s people didn’t tend to travel so no one had seen Asian people and one particular Chinese woman made a lot of money by playing on this and decorating her house in the traditional Chinese style and cooking typical Chinese food, so she was a novelty at the time. By the mid-1800s, selling Chinese cigars and candies was a common way to make a buck.
In the 1830s people didn’t tend to travel so no one had seen Asian people and one particular Chinese woman made a lot of money by playing on this and decorating her house in the traditional Chinese style and cooking typical Chinese food, so she was a novelty at the time. By the mid-1800s, selling Chinese cigars and candies was a common way to make a buck.
In 1849 the gold rush arrived in California. (Interesting fact, this is how the
football team, the 49ers got its name). Lots of immigrants were needed to work
for ‘new’ rich. This resulted in a lot of discrimination of the Chinese who
were accused of stealing the jobs of Americans.
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| Statue near Five Points |
Following this racial tension, a number of Chinese benevolent societies to help
Chinese immigrants were formed but factions soon broke off and formed ‘tongs’
which were organised brotherhoods or violent gangs, as a result of the high
number of immigrants from different parts of China, or because of disputes
between families. Doyers Street, right in the heard of Chinatown was a hotbed
for organised fights with knives, chains and hatchets. Known as the bloody
angle, it runs at almost 90 degrees so noise didn't travel. Perfect for
avoiding the cops.
Chinatown wasn’t always a Chinese area, it was actually
the first settlement for Irish immigrants dating back to the 1600s.
Five points was an infamous part of this area, where 5 streets which bordered different gang patches met. Although the 5 streets aren’t all there anymore, the spot is situated in Columbus Park and was synonymous with gang warfare in the 1800s, particularly between the Irish and African gangs. The area was a crime and disease-ridden neighbourhood, averaging allegedly a murder a night for 15 years.
After the tour we headed up towards Times
Square to go to Top
of the Rock, the viewing platform at the top of the Rockefeller
Centre. Carnage. We had booked tickets but it was a bit of a free for all.
And this is why Brits are famous for queuing people! Because we are not stupid!
Anyway, we made it up after some pushing and shoving, not helped by the fact
that it was Christmas Eve and the whole of NYC was rammed. Born in the late
1800s, John D Rockefeller was a vanguard of philanthropy in an era of economic
depression.
Although he was teetotal he helped repeal prohibition, commissioned
modern art even though he wasn’t a fan of art, and saved the Northern
Californian redwoods. The Rockefeller
Centre covers an area of 9 hectares or 22 acres and was known as the
‘Metropolis of Good Manners’ with valets sliding down firefighter-style poles
to retrieve guests’ cars, and staff whose sole job was to clean up chewing gum
and cigarette butts.
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| View from Top of the Rock |
We stopped off to see Rockefeller’s awesome Christmas
tree and then we attempted to head back down Fifth Avenue to see the light show
at Saks. No one had a clue what time it was supposed to start, so we waited
around for half an hour before making our way through the crowds to Grand
Central Station. It took us 45 minutes just to cross the street; it was crazy
busy!
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| Rockefeller Christmas tree |
There was another Christmas fair at Grand
Central, and we had agreed that we would spend a small amount on each other
so that we would have some presents to open on Christmas day, so we needed to
get shopping if we didn’t want to disappoint each other. Grand Central’s market
had some lovely gift ideas but they were even dearer than the other markets
we’d been to, so once we’d had a mooch around the station, we headed back to
the market near Central Park to buy presents for each other and some wine for
Christmas day to drink in the hotel. Turns out that it was only 6% because we
got it from a 7/11 and they don’t sell proper wine! We went to a lovely Italian
in Little Italy called Il
piccolo bufalo for a sharing platter and great pizza and walked home in the
snow. It was magical.
Day 5 – Christmas
day!
After spending hours researching where to find a turkey
dinner in NYC on Christmas day, we ended up booking lunch at a German pub for
the closest thing we could get – goose. New Yorkers (and maybe Americans in
general) don’t tend to eat turkey on Christmas day because they have a huge
turkey feast for Thanksgiving, the month before. Apparently New Yorkers tuck
into Chinese food instead. No turkey for us but the goose was pretty good and
the wine and cocktails made up for it.
On the way back after trying and failing to find a
bottleshop to get some real wine, we stumbled across a little traditional
looking pub and dived in for a quick drink. We sat at the bar with an eclectic
mix of New York folk and several drinks later, decided to hit up another pub in
the area with our new friends. Cue me teaching our pals how to drink a pint of
Guinness in 3 gulps. Meanwhile, one of our friends pointed out to me that Baby
D was getting chatted up by two girls who would eat him alive, and didn’t I
mind? Baby D is a Brit and a Londoner.
He is also a very nice guy. Brits might apologise when you stand on their foot,
but there is only so much rudeness they’ll take, and Mr Baby Nice Guy can soon
turn nasty if he wants to. So when the girls realised he had no money, wasn’t
going to buy them a drink and started getting rude, he told them to ‘piss off,
no one in London would look twice at their rough boat races’ and speechless and
slightly shocked, they disappeared.
We ended up back at our friend’s gorgeous apartment for a
drink and rolled back to our hotel at around 5.30am.
Day 6 – Statue of
Liberty and Ellis Island
I’ve got to be honest, we nearly gave this a miss. We
stayed in bed until the last possible moment before heading down to Battery
Park to go on our tour. We had booked our tickets, but the whole area was
absolutely rammed and mayhem ensued. Most people didn’t have booked tickets, so
the queues were massive, but even the queue we were in took almost 2 hours to
go down. We finally made it on to the boat to the Statue
of Liberty and we spent around an hour and a half walking around, taking
pictures, wandering through the museum inside the statue and climbing up her
for some fabulous views over New York’s harbour. The statue is made of copper
(125 tons including the skin which weighs over 28 tons itself) and steel (225
tons), and is 46.5m tall from base to torch. It was weird looking at Manhattan
from the statue and I’m sure many people have done the same as us, and thought
about what it must have been like to be somewhere like the statue on 911,
especially bearing in mind what she represents.
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| Statue of Liberty |
We jumped on the next boat to Ellis
Island to go to the national museum of immigration. Ellis Island was an
inspection station for immigrants arriving between the late 1800s and the
mid-1900s but the museum covered all parts of the USA’s immigrant history from
the 1500s onwards. It was a really interesting insight into how immigrants were
treated once they had arrived into the States as well as finding out what they
had left behind. There were signs up about boycotting Asian shops, and warning
‘colored’ people to beware of kidnappers and slave catchers, and many cartoons
depicting immigrants as ‘riff raff’ and criminals.
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| Ellis Island |
It was a lovely day out but it was definitely cut short
because we needed to get the last boat back to the city. We were booked on the
1pm trip but didn’t get to the statue until around 3pm so we had very little
time to see everything in depth. I would recommend booking onto the earliest
tour of the day, but if we had done that, we wouldn’t have gone as we were so
hungover!
We found a burger bar close to our hotel for dinner –
sometimes it’s exactly what is needed after a night on the booze.
Day 7 – Empire
State Building
We were leaving New York today, heading up to Boston for
a few days. But first, we had to climb the Empire State Building. We headed out
quite early to try and beat the crowds, and it was a lot smoother than the
Statue of Liberty, plus it was inside. Plus we had shaken off our hangovers.
The famous art deco Empire
State Building was opened on 1 May 1931 and stretches up to 102 floors. Its
height, including the antenna is 443.2m. Originally built to provide office
space, its opening coincided with the Wall Street Crash and it sat vacant for a
long time, earning the moniker the Empty State Building. Tourism really kicked
off its success and has maintained it over the years.
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| View from Empire State Building |
We had booked a Greyhound bus up to Boston
for that evening so we had a few hours to kill, so headed over to Wall
Street. On our Greenwich Village tour, we were told that Wall Street was
so-called because when the Dutch settlers arrived and claimed the land from the
native Americans, they built a wall to keep them out, and part of the wall is
still there, so we went to find it. We couldn’t find it, so we asked a guy
directing traffic, who looked at us like we had 3 heads and tried to direct us
to something else. Now bearing in mind we are English, so speak English, and we
were on Wall Street, you’d think this muppet might understand the word WALL.
But no, not even when I spelt it out to him. Instead he told me to learn to
speak English properly, and shouted across to some other hilarious yanks who
laughed at the tourists looking for the Wolf of Wall Street. They obviously had
no clue about their own history, and decided to deflect their ignorance onto
us. Once we’d told them all how stupid and rude they were, we gave up and left
for the bus station, where we sat in the freezing cold for 3 hours because
there were traffic jams all over the city. Bit of a crappy ending to an awesome
week in NYC!
#NYC #newyork #rockefeller #topoftherock #empirestatebuilding #statueofliberty #ellisisland #centralpark #christmasinnyc #911memorialmuseum #sopranos #timessquare #littleitaly #sohonyc #chinatownnyc
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