Em and Jon’s Wedding

We struck out at the crack of lunchtime, bodies still on California time, but having slept well and ready to take on New York. Although some of the city’s reputation seemed deserved - the traffic really was bad, and the drivers are just as fond of honking and shouting at each other as the countless TV shows and movies portray - but it’s not quite the den of iniquity that I was perhaps fearing. It’s no worse than London; that is, it’s a toilet, but it’s a toilet with lots of interesting things to see in it. Maybe I should just drop that particular form of words…

There are plenty of people trying to scam money from you, but they are, for the most part, easily ignored. The waiters and shop workers were actually more polite than I was expecting.

Anyway, the first call on our whistle-stop tour of NY was the southern tip of Central Park, and this was the first time of many today when I felt like I was on a movie set. Mind you, my reverie was punctured by a sight that gladdened my heart mightily: the sight of Americans playing proper football in their own Central Park! Now, admittedly they were kicking a ball about very clumsily, but nevertheless they weren’t playing American football, or baseball, or ice hockey or basketball, but proper footy, complete with jumpers (OK, sweaters) for goalposts. So, well done you. I knew you’d catch on eventually.

The Chrysler Building is so frequently photographed that it was exactly as I was expecting, but no less beautiful for that. It really is a jewel in the skyline, and still stands out among the rest. Close by, though, Grand Central Station was a surprise to me. It’s gorgeous. I believe it’s recently been restored, and to very great effect.

From there (via some more shops, naturally, including yet another Origins and Sephora, the former inside Grand Central and the latter in the former Charles Scribner building - a Beaux Arts delight) we started the agonising process of queueing to get to the observation deck on the 86th floor of the Empire State. Now, I don’t mind queueing: I’m British, so for me it’s practically a national sport. The problem was that at every turn (literally, the queue was one of those that snaked back and forth between the dreaded Tensabarriers) we were shouted at by earnest young men extolling the virtues of the audio guides which, it would appear, we must ask for once we reached the ticket booths if we were not the kind of people who drown kittens for fun, every second Wednesday.

It has to be said, though, that the queue to get through security, the one to buy tickets, the one to get 80 floors up in the express elevator and lastly for the second elevator to get up the final 6 floors to the observation deck were all worth it in the end. The view is just stupendous, and we were very lucky with the weather and haze: the visibility was very good indeed. Although full-sized tripods were banned, my mini-tripod was overlooked and I was very glad, since despite the fact that it’s not perfect, it allowed me to get some decent shots.

We spotted that you can skip some of the queues on the way down by walking down 6 floors to the express elevator, and that brought home just how hard it would be to go all the way down to street level on the stairs if you had to: by the time we’d descended just six floors, our knees were aching quite a bit. The brickwork and other structural elements were visible in this exit staircase and in the 80th floor area while they re-fit it, and it really doesn’t look like it was thrown together despite the fact that the whole thing was built in 13 months. All of the pointing and so on is really pretty good: seems they had some formidable craftsmen on that job, not just chancers with a head for heights.

Once we were back down at street level, we were absolutely starving, and the meal we had was so lovely that it gets a mention not only in the flog but in the main blog: Heartland brewery in the basement of the Empire State does great microbrewery beer, and stupendous steaks. Mmm..