Whistle stop New York tour

12 Octber 2015

In all honesty, New York has never really been on my top ten list of places to visit. Big cities full of hustle and bustle are not exactly my thing, although CJ says it’s his favourite place on earth. If he could have stowed away in my suitcase he would have. Two full days is just not enough time to see everything in Manhattan but I had a plan to make the most of the time we had. This involved a swift Starbucks breakfast and  a great deal of walking, the best way to explore. When this was in the planning stage I’d been expecting cold weather, maybe even some rain, what we found when we set out just after nine, was blue sky, sunshine and the makings of another beautiful day.

Once again we started off in Central Park, entering from West 77th Street but this time we were just passing through. My plan was to cross the park diagonally towards the south east corner but, when we reached West Drive, there was a slight disagreement about which way to go. Commando  wanted to turn off along the drive while I said we should stay on the path we were on.
“We need to be heading south east,” I said, “but that way is north.”
“I’m sure it’s south,” Commando said, “trust me, you know you have no sense of direction.”
Even though I was sure he was wrong I followed for a while but as we walked we continue to argue.
“The buildings over there,” I pointed to our left, “are on the west side of the park so we must be heading north not south.”
In the end I found the compass on my phone and, sure enough, we were heading north. Of course Commando then pretended he was the one who said we should be heading the other way and I was wrong, but he did it with a grin. This just goes to show how easy it is to get lost in Central Park and that sometimes I actually do have a good sense of direction, not that Commando would ever admit it.

By this time we’d walked quite a long way in the wrong direction so I was a feeling little cross and stampy but when we passed the Delacort Theatre with its statues of Romeo and Juliette and The Tempest I cheered up a bit. When we caught sight of Belvedere Castle across Turtle Pond I cheered up a bit more. Built by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux on Vista Rock as a Victorian folly in 1869, the castle stands on the park’s second highest elevation and is surrounded by the woodland of The Ramble where I’d been lost the day before. With its towers and pavilions of quarried Manhattan schist dressed with gray granite it’s a romantic, almost fairytale, building. Sadly, there was no time to explore it.

When we came upon The Obelisk, nicknamed Cleopatra’s Needle, I completely forgave Commando for leading us astray.
“I knew where we were going all the time,” he lied, “I wanted to show you this. Did you know it’s the oldest man made thing in the park? In fact it’s probably the oldest thing in New York.”
This was something I already knew from my research but I didn’t tell him that. In fact it’s one of a pair of obelisks built for Heliopolis on the banks of the Nile in 1450 BC. One of the obelisks was moved to London in 1878 and this, it’s twin, was given to America by the Egyptian Khedive in exchange for financial assistance to modernise Egypt two years later.
“Do you remember when we went to the quarry in Egypt, near the Valley of the Kings, and saw how obelisks were cut out of the granite?” I asked Commando. “This probably came from there and was cut in the same way.”

Before long we passed under East Drive through the beautiful saracenic Greywacke Arch built by Vaux and Mould in the early 1860’s. The sandstone from the Hudson River seemed to have taken on a green, almost verdigris, colour with age, although this could have been a trick of the light. Commando marched on ahead while I stopped to look at the trefoil designs on the face of the arch and the cross shaped patterns in the bricks underneath. Of course I then had to run to catch him up.

It would have been easy to stay all day, just wandering around finding all the things I’d read about but there was a lot to see outside Central Park. When we came to the entrance to Central Park Zoo, I knew our park ramble was almost over. In fact we heard the zoo before we came to the entrance, the Delacorte clock, unveiled in 1965, was playing twinkle twinkle little star and the sound drifted towards us. It was ten o’clock, we’d been wandering for half an hour. There was a lot on the itinerary if we wanted to see everything and I began to worry about the time.

Leaving the the park we went from one clock to another when we came upon Alicja Kwade’s  confusing art installation on Doris C. Freedman Plaza as we looked for somewhere to cross the road. At first it seemed as if the clock was upside down but Commando noticed that the face was rotating while the hands appeared to stay in the same place. In actual fact he wasn’t exactly correct but close enough. The face of the sixteen foot tall clock, part of Public Art Fund’s Lightness of Being exhibition, does rotate counter clockwise but the second hand actually rotates in the opposite direction at exactly the same rate, making it look as if it’s not moving. Confused, you bet we were, but that is the object of the piece. If you know how to do it, you can actually tell the time by this bizarre clock but, being jet lagged, I just couldn’t work it out.

Still scratching my head I followed Commado across the road onto 5th Avenue. Pretty soon we were opposite the Apple Store and I stopped to take a few shots of the iconic glass cube entrance with its white Apple logo. CJ had told us we should go inside but we didn’t have the time, besides, I think we already have enough Apple products to be going on with. The street was more crowded than I’d expected for a Monday morning. Naively, I’d thought everyone would be at work and we’d have the place to ourselves. As it happened there was a parade about to start. There were police everywhere, their scary guns easily visible. Later we found out this was the Hispanic Day parade. Maybe we should have stayed to watch.

Much as I love the woods and the parks a tiny part of me is a city girl and dwarfed beneath buildings taller than any tree I couldn’t help admiring the way one building was refelected in another like strange, distorted pieces of art. The chaotic mish mash of different styles, the glass, granite and stone shouldn’t have worked together but somehow they did. The glazed frontage of Trump Tower, a symbol of consumerism and excess, reflected the towers and copper topped spires of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, which took New York City to court and won the right to shelter the homeless on its front steps. Polar opposites standing side by side.

A few minutes later we passed the Microsoft store, not yet open and looking secretive and mysterious behind a boxy looking plain blue and white facade with just the coloured Microsoft squares as contrast. Close by was St Patrick’s Cathedral. In any other setting this new gothic building might have been an imposing landmark. In the late 1800’s, when it was built, it probably was but since then the buildings around it have grown taller and now it seems small in comparison. Even so, the brick, clad in Massachusetts marble, tall spires, ornate decorations, beautiful stained glass windows and massive carved wooden doors make it a beautiful building and it takes up a whole block of prime New York real estate.

Directly opposite is the Rockerfeller Centre, a temple of excess like a small city filled with shops, offices and even an ice rink covering over eight million square feet. Commissioned by the Rockerfeller family, some of the richest people in the world, it was built in the 1930’s and was the largest private building project undertaken in modern times, although much has been added since then. Purportedly some of the best views of Manhattan can be had from the Top of the Rock observation deck on the seventieth floor. We thought it might be worth a look so went inside. In hindsight, given our tight schedule, this was a mistake. Almost immediately we were lost and overwhelmed and, when we did find the lifts that would take us to the top there was a massive queue and a hefty price tag.

Time was our biggest problem and I couldn’t help thinking that the queues would equate to a crowded observation deck and not much of a view for our money so we left, once we’d found our way back out. Ten minutes and sixteen blocks later, peering along 42nd Street, we got our first view of another iconic landmark, the Chrysler Building. This beautiful Art Deco tower, brainchild of Walter P. Chrysler, was the tallest building in the world in 1930 when it was constructed. In less then a year it had been topped by the Empire State Building.

The Empire State Building needs no introduction, although we’d been stopped several times on our approach by people trying to sell us tickets to the observation deck as if we had no idea it was there. We didn’t buy any because we knew we didn’t have the time to queue although we did hesitate in front of the doors and wonder if we should have. Unfortunately, as with so much in New York, it was impossible to take photos of this ridiculously tall building close up because it was just too high. CJ would, of course, have been laying on the pavement to get a shot but I was not about to do that.

Soon we were passing Madison Square Park and the shimmering heat made us think of coffee. We’d been walking for close to two hours, even if we didn’t seem to have got as far as I’d have liked and breakfast seemed a long way behind us. The heat added a strange haze to everything and, much to Commando’s dismay, I stopped to capture the Metropolitan Life Tower, peeking through the trees  of the park because the sun seemed to  give it a halo. The Empire State Building behind us seemed hazy too and, for a moment I wondered if it was my eyes. Perhaps I needed coffee more than I thought.

On the other side of the park we left 5th Avenue behind and turned onto Broadway searching for coffee. A man walking behind us must have heard us talking because for the first time in New York we were offered assistance.
“There’s a Starbucks just around the corner,” he said, “don’t worry about the police tape, there was a shooting there last night.”
“A shooting?” I said, suddenly feeling very nervous.
“This is New York,” he shrugged, as if a shooting was a normal occurrence.
We thanked him but decided to give Starbucks a miss. Much as I like coffee it didn’t seem worth walking through a crime scene for. Luckily, a few minutes later we found a cafe, another Pain Quotidien. It was time to stop for another latte in a soup bowl and a few moments of rest.