An Englishwoman in New York
The first time I laid eyes on New York was in 1997, when I was twenty-three years old. All I knew of the Big Apple was the movies and viewing the sidewalks through those lens made every single part of that first trip cinematic. Ain’t that so, for all of us?
I arrived by coach from New Hampshire, where I had spent a summer semester at Dartmouth College, a classic Ivy League university with vast green lawns, white pillars on every doorway, frat boys in khaki shorts and Birkenstocks, sorority girls in flippy tea-dresses. After two months there, I was feeling part-American: I’d downed shots in the fraternity that inspired the movie ‘Animal House,’ had snogged a frat boy, made friends with the campus ‘outcasts’ (the gays and lesbians) and spent long nights lip-syncing to pop songs with them. I’d bought myself ‘phat’ jeans, knew my favourite order at Taco Bell, spent a weekend in a log cabin by a lake.
But New York, I quickly realised on arrival, was not America. New York is New York, New York, an entity all to itself. It owns its capital, its state, it does not belong to the rest. It took me both utterly by surprise and was also totally familiar. I knew the skyline and the yellow cabs as well as I knew the street I’d grown up in.
I was staying with a Brit, a friend who had upped sticks, married a musician from Alabama and bought an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She was (is) very cool, and way ahead of her time. Williamsburg in 1997 was not yet a place where the hipsters were to be found, with their kale chips and wide array of pronouns. Below my friend’s apartment lived a mafia grandmother, and I was under strict instructions not to annoy her by stomping on the stairs. I’d arrived in the early morning, dumped my bags and we hopped on the train to Fire Island, a friend or two and a cousin along for the ride. We had our own boombox and we sunburned ourselves dancing on the beach. Back in the city, we partied with Mick Jagger’s future son-in-law, then went back to the apartment. My friend was tired, needed to sleep. But I was 23 years old, it was my first night in the best city in the world. I did not want kip.
Miraculously, her friend – the hot one – called the apartment landline (no mobiles yet). ‘Come and meet me,’ he said, and gave me an address. I hung up, then realised I didn’t know how to get a cab. There was no way of calling him back because he’d rung from a call box. My friend was fast asleep. I found a phone directory, found a cab company, prayed they would not ring the wrong doorbell and spur the mafia grandmother up the stairs with a gun in her gnarly hands.
Got the cab, found the club. A dingy basement, pool tables, floor sticky with beer, a tiny dancefloor, bodies heaving under blue lights. The hot guy and I made out, we drank more, went to another club, got told about a party. Found the party, but on the way up to the fourth floor, there was a girl crying, sitting on the floor, waiting for the cops, her boyfriend had beaten her up. I think we waited for the cops with her, but did we? I’d like to believe we did but it had to be three or four o’clock in the morning, we were young, drunk and selfish. I mostly recall thinking it was like a scene out of Hill Street Blues. I do remember that Hot Guy and I went to the party and made out some more, stoners all around us, before he put me into a limo – A LIMO! – and sent me home. Driving through the city over Brooklyn Bridge as the sun rose, tipsy, in the back of a limo. What could be more New York than that?
Cut to this week, 2025, nearly thirty years later. I’ve returned to Manhattan many times since, have come to know it better but still can’t remember whether Park comes before Madison. There’s something of the chaos of that city that refuses to organise itself in my brain, and I like it all the more for that. My experiences may no longer be quite as they were that first time, but there’s still something of the cinematic, invigorating atmosphere. The city this week felt hot, shabby, chaotic, exciting. Whether you’re walking down Fifth Avenue, or around Tribeca, or midtown where the big banks reside, there’s a constant stream of honking traffic, filthy exhaust fumes spewing over the hot dog stands kerbside, puffs of steam from the subway. And people, people, people – streaming down the sidewalks as fast as water, every single kind of person. The punk with the mohawk, the Upper East Side divorcée, the exhausted service worker, the smooth-talking banker jabbering into his cellphone, the families hauling prams and bags, the Midwest American tourist ambling along, backpacks causing bumps in the flow like rocks in a stream.
Everything is so big. Like an earworm, for some reason I kept thinking this time of the old 1980s jokes about Texans visiting London (‘Big Ben? That’s the size of my wristwatch’). On this trip, I was with my husband, the two of us doing business stuff together, and we took a lot of elevators to the 45th floor, the 31st floor, the swanky third floor, to be greeted by huge works of modern art and windows as large as cinema screens offering up the city’s sprawl, Central Park far below, like a tennis court for Barbie dolls.
We ate excellent Indian food in Greenwich Village – at Semma, it’s good, book two weeks’ in advance, amazingly reasonable prices – and a revolting take out from the ‘hot bar’ at Whole Foods, which is even less enticing than it sounds. We had margaritas at the Algonquin Hotel, where Dorothy Parker sat at the Round Table (it’s still there) with other writers and wits. They met for lunch every day from 1919 until 1929 and called themselves The Vicious Circle. Of martinis – my drink – Parker said: ‘I like to have a martini, two at the very most. After three I’m under the table, after four I’m under my host.’ I limited the vodka but drank maybe a little too much rosé in a Tribeca apartment with concrete on the floor and wooden boards on the ceiling. We walked through the park, and then caught the bus back downtown. Driving past our window we saw a man on a moped, with a cat wearing bespoke sunglasses, sitting in a basket on the handlebars.
It was fun.
New York Tips
If you’re thinking about going to this fabulous city, here are some things I thought about that might enhance your stay a little.
Flying in: JFK is in the process of upgrading and in the meantime it is CHAOS. Passport control queues are averaging two hours, and security lines on the way back out are not much less. If you’re the kind of person who gets edgy about missing flights (I am), give yourself a lot of time to spare. Also, there isn’t really a decent train service into the city, it’s pretty much taxis. These are regulated but expect to pay around $100 each way, and be mindful of traffic – an hour and a half each way. This adds up to a good chunk of your time if you’re only there for a few days, so be mindful of it. (I mean, you are in a yellow cab and there’s lots to look at outside the window – this can also be part of it.)
PS Newark not really much better. They are just getting back to normal after mending a runway. Heathrow is very much more glamorous and smooth in terms of shops and systems – don’t expect to do any fun shopping in duty free.
Getting Around: You walk a lot. Why not? But you can also take the subway. It’s easy - tap on the way in (no tap on the way out, it’s a flat fee for every trip). My favourite line is the 6 (green on the map) because it takes me to pretty much all the places I like, from Bleecker St, Canal St, Spring St, 23rd to 51st on the east side. Plus the subway stations on this line are the prettier ones. I love watching the New Yorkers. Check out this guy: with his paint spattered boots, bandanas and sunglasses, is he an artist on the way back from the studio or a construction worker heading home? You can’t tell, can you? Because New Yorkers are cooler than the rest of us, they just are.
Shopping/Eating Out: Honestly, there’s not a lot to buy in NY that you can’t get here, and it’s not any cheaper. Gone are the $2 = £1 days. Generally speaking, it’s expensive. I’d plan one or two fancy things, get stuck into the pizza slices for the rest. Even a crappy hot dog is $8. I went to Sephora for the hell of it, but it was massively overrun with teenagers and their moms and it all felt quite shabby. I asked a sales girl what the average spend was and she said $150. The (barefaced teen) before me in the queue spent $323 and everything fitted into a miniature paper bag. I got out of there for $33, phew. I prefer CVS Pharmacy, late at night, gawking over the locked up cabinets of teeth whiteners (the Crest strips ARE good and you can’t get them in the UK). They also sell giant bags of Twizzlers, and giant jars of ibuprofen, enough tablets to kill an army – I don’t see how it’s legal? But there ya go.
Also, on eating, really you have to find a proper diner – so uncool it’s cool. I stumbled across this, on Upper West Side, 2532 Broadway, the Manhattan Diner. They advertise healthy cuisine. Nope. But it’s good stuff – vanilla milkshake, English muffins and jelly, the whole pancake caboodle. A fridge of desserts. Formica tables and yellow mustard.
For a more swizzy version of this, totally delicious (need to book) and the best American breakfast I’ve ever had, go to The Odeon. It’s in a cool part of town, too, and you can go to the very moving tribute to the Twin Towers and 9/11 not far from there.
Where to stay: OK, so we go cheap. I’m not someone who spends money on hotels. I’d rather spend it on food and shizzle. We usually go to Broadway Plaza, where you can get a room that has the Empire State Building in its view. It’s fine – not schmancy, but it’s right where I want to be (near Madison Park, a few blocks from Flat Iron Building and the no.6 line). Nice staff, too. This time it was booked, so we went to the Royalton, which is more midtown but still pretty handy - a couple of blocks from Times Square, which is always worth a gawk. It’s also not far from Bryant Park, where I was distraught to discover I had just missed the Musical Chairs World Championships. The Royalton was apparently the hip place in the 1980s when Philippe Starck designed the rooms (they look like ship cabins, with portholes for bedside lamps). It’s not hip now. But it’s clean, comfortable, has daily housekeeping, and crucially was only 600 smackers for three nights.
I like Madison Park, by the way, because it has the best free entertainment: two dog parks, one for large hounds, one for small mutts. These are fenced off areas, where you can observe them romping with each other, sniffing butts and barking excitedly. And that’s just the owners. (Boom boom.)
Also, by Flat Iron Building (which used to house my wonderful publishers, St Martin’s Press, but is currently being turned into an apartment and hotel block) is a small, rusted iron coffee shack – the Flat Iron Plate – that serves the very best coffee I’ve ever had.
There’s so mucb more but I think that’s probably enough for now. What are your New York recs?
If you liked this, please nudge the heart for me.
Have a gorgeous weekend.
Jess x
lovely description.... just fyi, you can actually get a train from JFK to Grand Central Stn in Manhattan for around $11. You have to change trains once (at Jamaica stn) but it was very easy and journey took around 45 mins I think. We used to always take a cab but now it's so much more $$ and might in fact take longer than the train...
The train from JFK to Penn is so fast and cheap, I’ll never cab it again!