Ralph Waldo Emerson called it a sucked orange. Henry James compared it to Paris, Thomas Jefferson to a toilet of human depravity, and Le Corbusier called it a catastrophe – albeit a beautiful one. Most compare it to a big apple. Not just any apple – but The Big Apple. This is New York City (Not Your City for the ‘bridge-and-tunnel’ commuters living outside of the only true NYC: Manhattan) where I was to spend two months working at an art auction house in the Rockefeller Centre. That is, whilst not spending the other half of the work-play dichotomy giddying my senses with all this marvellous city has to offer.
Intrigued as to where the fruity nickname came from, I found this a question surprisingly hard to answer. Why had the name stuck so well? It seemed to be a mystery to most – reflective of the city’s character as a whole. Despite a brash air of seemingly self-explanatory ‘of-course’-ness, it certainly hides a remarkably dense multitude of stories within its relatively short history. Fact and fiction meld into one as the fibres of the city’s past cross over each other, and they can prove somewhat hard to unravel. Going back to the nickname, some explanations are almost definitely false. This includes my favourite: that a French Mademoiselle named Eve owned a famous Manhattan brothel whose workers were referred to as ‘Eve’s apples.’ It turns out that the most firmly established story behind La Grande Pomme is that of a media catchphrase snatched out of 1920s horse racing commentary (John J. Fitzgerald being the first to make public use of the phrase, having overheard it thrown about during New Orleans stable banter) and hurled with force into the 70s tourism drive of the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau. This tourism drive was a textbook success of urban development – helping transform the city from the mess it was in earlier times to what many now see as the most exciting city in the world.
Public transport, if one has the time to notice, always proves to be a microcosm of human variety and intrigue. Despite various ‘difficulties’ concerning actually flying here (never have I seen so many red “heavy” labels attached to one suitcase, nor raced through quite so many red lights in an effort not to be late), I later found public transport to be – dare I say it – an almost enjoyable experience. This could be because you generally have more ‘limbo’ time to spend gazing at your fellow humans when on public transport. Alternatively, it was perhaps just due to the potent concentration of individuals on offer from all walks of life and corners of the globe, thrown together to re-enact the theatre of everyday existence. Manhattan itself is like an extreme form of this, at least for the traveller – making you feel that you’ve stumbled upon a film set at every turn. If that sounds too clichéd, well, that’s because it is. When on occasion the life and people here are not painfully close to being a stereotype, they seem to make up the embroidery of eccentricity lining the underbelly of the city. This being a genuine – not cultivated – eccentricity.
Quite why I ended up spending so much time on the Subway system when the New York streets are so neatly gridded up just waiting to be strutted along I do not know. Yet again it demonstrated the wealth of ‘behind the scenes’ encounters to be had in this marvellously all-encompassing metropolis. Oh and just a note – don’t say tube, it causes confusion, and you end up getting directed to art installations and the like (the syncretism of ‘American’ and ‘British’ language often seemed to be a somewhat one-way system). As a general rule in fact I found the overwhelming confidence of New Yorkers something of a misnomer when asking for directions. This only becomes truly apparent through a lack of sobriety on the part of the direction-giver, whereby the confident guess turns into a circulating arm, wildly gesticulating a multitude of directions under the umbrella term “it’s definitely that way.”
One of the great joys of the Subway is the fact that it runs 24 hours (theoretically, at least). A true insomniac’s dream: why toss and turn in your micro-scale apartment, when you can hop on a $2 ride to just about anywhere in the world’s most macro-scale city? The aforementioned leaps and bounds with which New York has come on since the 70s and 80s are nowhere more apparent than on the New York Metro. Before travelling here a family friend recounted a Subway journey in New York as being one of the most terrifying experiences of her life. Not so anymore. Perhaps one of the more amusing instances, yes. For example, more than once I was confronted with what appeared to be a sort of ‘reverse psychology busking.’ A scruffy old man would hobble onto the train, wait for the Subway doors to close, and unexpectedly break out into the most shockingly appalling din. Closer to screeching than singing, this most bizarre parody of busking would only stop when paid enough to do so. I was treated to many other auditory delights, including Chopin à la chainsaw, various forms of rapping, an abundance of Bongo drum playing, a dreadlocked lady in a purple jumpsuit making her way from train to train with a large boom box and an amazing pair of dancing feet (despite the lack of a constant downwards force of gravity as the train moved), and a whole host of displays on the more visual end of the spectrum – some more overt than others. There are of course the less pleasant aspects of underground public transport – mainly hygiene related. A rat made the cardinal error of being spotted crawling onto my foot – my gaze followed that of a Chinese lady staring at said foot in horror – preceding a screaming kick and leap into said lady’s arms (I’m not usually that embarrassing on public transport). For once the spectacle was now firmly on me.
When Anaïs Nin referred to New York as “a city of rhythm” – she was certainly referring to a different form of the ‘underground’ to be found in Manhattan – that of the abundance of dance floors, bars and general Houses of Fun within which to quench your taste buds to within an inch of their life. Ms Nin’s allegory felt so true – the city is a very easy place to feel out of beat, but also incredibly tempting to dance along to. Arriving at my apartment I passed a sign kindly informing me that “reality is an illusion created through a lack of wine.” Two of my favourite such haunts in which to escape this illusion were both somewhat characterised by an overabundance of red lights and taxidermy (please don’t let this be Freudian). In both these places you felt firmly ‘underground.’ Don’t get me wrong though, nothing beats a rooftop bar in Manhattan. One very much ‘underground’ venue in which we were decidedly above ground (three storeys to be precise, although that varied throughout the evening) was a party, or more an ‘event’, at the Surreal Estate. This was to be found in what is now the pinnacle of skinny-legged hipsterdom, otherwise known as Bushwick, which is The New Williamsburg, which is The New Brooklyn, which is sort of The New Manhattan, depending on how seriously you take the hipster prophecy. The event was called 13D, due to its taking place on Friday the 13th with a theme of being in 3 dimensions, or 13, or whatever. Very cool it was, easy to find it was not. Stumbling out of the train onto an eerily silent street relative to the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, all we could hear was some very distant music. An old boy of the summer of love immediately realised what we were looking for (evidently we were dressed more appropriately than we’d thought): “Surreal Estate?” (cue long pause and exchange of cautiously optimistic glances)… “Err, yes?”
We were promptly taken into the deepest darkest realms of no Manhattan land. At last we approached what appeared to be a very large garage-cum-3 storey building, drawn to the thumping bass like moths to an iridescent street light.
As we entered through the splattering of red paint, chicken wire and other varieties of artfully arranged material, we were handed a pair of 3D glasses (after initial puzzlement we discovered there was a special “3D” dance floor: thus this wasn’t some playful jibe at the metaphysics of 3 dimensional reality) and proceeded to drink suspect sangria, converse with potheads over shisha pipes, boogie on the 3D dance floor to a psychedelic transformation of famous artist’s faces on the wall, and various other projections to tingle the eyeballs and entrance the visual senses. This was certainly a long shot from previous evenings drinking Moet et Chandon with Wall Street puppies. Dancing to a Latino jazz band on the rooftop a rather more sober friend noted the makeshift dance floor was taking on almost elastic qualities and bouncing us up and down as we danced. An individual of indeterminate sex wearing a large orange afro and more flowers than clothes wandered up and down the stairs. A fortune teller gazed through you as you walked through the second floor, whilst a groover in Ray Bans and a multicoloured, psychedelic bodysuit made of lycra popped up several times during the night seeking assurance that he was “cool as a kettle.” The joy of frolicking amongst such an absurd conglomeration of people and things was snuffed out upon the arrival of the ‘cops’ – at which point we were ordered to flee unless we wanted to join the ranks of the 30 activists (cum-artists) living there.
During daylight hours, The Big Apple lives up to its name in a more literal sense. The city feels fresher. Perhaps this has something to do with the architecture – as Sartre noted, the sky feels pushed up higher than normal due to the abundant skyscrapers piled upon the island of Manhattan. “Was there ever such a sunny street as this Broadway?” said Charles Dickens. The streets are however constantly being transformed, neatly symbolised by the construction work going on outside of my window which also served as a useful alarm clock. Again, plenty of literal and metaphorical fruits abound – on my walk to work for example, having had a mandatory glass of papaya juice with my breakfast at Gray’s Papaya, I would see a group practicing t’ai chi in Madison Square Park. The homeless lined one side of the park and lusty couples the other – the change in scene punctuated by a Hungarian Vizsla puppy trotting past in a pair of red shoes, whilst a perfectly polished pair of black lace-ups lie neatly beside the trash can, and a small man perched on the street corner sprays two cans of orange aerosol onto the ground, with hopeful eyes looking up past his tweed flat cap at the sky, as if he might take off with the overarching bizarreness of the situation.
Another occasional daytime pursuit, aside from the endless hours spent in cafes (Starbucks is so much more prevalent here than you could ever imagine; its popularity is not to be underestimated) and shops (I blame many financially ill-advised purchases on the fabulous fact that I was suddenly down to a “size 6”) were life painting classes at the Art Students League of New York – an institution run “by artists for artists.” I’m not exactly sure what is so unique about that, except that it made the classes very good value. My teacher there had a very laissez-faire approach, and rarely came around to give advice unless it was asked for – although once asked for was not shortcoming. A lesson in how to sharpen my pencil took a good 20 minutes via the imaginative metaphor of a French guillotine. Predictably, this was quite a hub for some very amusing characters. One lady kept bringing ‘picnics’ consisting of rosé wine and pretzels, and would always insist I used ‘her’ soap to wash my brushes in (carefully preserved amidst ridiculous layers of towels), a very tall Chinese man who would waft around the classroom – one hand behind his back – gesturing wildly with the other with a minimal expenditure of actual vocabulary, before moving back to his easel. A very small Frenchman in an oversized suit and square glasses was always present, painting incredibly and furiously. The place also gave refuge to various bored housewives and pouting teenage girls with dark pouffled hair and red lipstick. Afterwards I might totter along to visit a landmark (the definition of which certainly in my case extended to cover the apartments of Holly Golightly and Carrie Bradshaw), and often would eat out with some of the other interns sharing my lack of talent in financial matters – it seemed impossible to stay here and not explore the profusion of eateries clustered around the city. Compared to England (and probably the rest of America) the waitresses can be somewhat more overbearing. Never before have I had unfinished dishes literally swept away from me (fortune cookie included) by an angry lady barking Cantonese in China town, been chased out of a sushi restaurant by a waitress demanding a larger tip, or been winked at throughout a meal (in little Italy at a grotty bistro diner) by a terrifying he-she called ‘Juliette’ across the other end of the room. It still must of course be said that many of the venues were absolutely charming, and like most places you can’t go wrong with a good Italian!
True of a city ‘too crowded for anyone to pay too much attention,’ a captivating experience lay around every corner. Near the end of my stay, after discovering the source of some startling prodding by a stick I guided a blind man across the road, consequently stumbling upon a jewellery market. This led into the most marvellous hat shop, owned by two elderly and very camp gentlemen with a supersized white cowboy boot suspended from the ceiling on which was dotted a profusion of glittering brooches. I walked around a corner towards a waft of fresh coffee, to be greeted by the bold lettering of “no, you’re weird” across a shop window. Oh New York, I’ll miss you! I certainly agree with Neil Simon that “there are two million interesting people in New York and only 78 in Los Angeles.”
