Travel: New York

Published on Thursday 24 March 2011 11:05

My ultimate New York moment comes as I am preparing to leave. Having finished packing I lie on the bed in my room on the 25th floor of the Mondrian SoHo and take a last lingering look across the rooftops of lower Manhattan.

I flick on the television and there is Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man, leaping between skyscrapers, clambering over fire escapes and battling to persuade evil Dr Octopus to save the city by drowning himself in the Hudson River.

"Wow," I think as my eyes dart between the city on the screen and the view from the window. "I'm actually here."

There's no more cinematic city than New York. Everything is so familiar and yet slightly unreal - a cartoon landscape where beautiful buildings reach into the skies and the human imagination seems to flourish more than anywhere else on earth.

It is the city of Woody Allen, of Seinfeld, of hip hop, of Bob Dylan, of Arthur Miller, of Dorothy Parker, Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.

Every street corner vibrates with a thousand cultural references - and yet I've never visited previously. It is a weird feeling.

I've been invited for the opening of the new Mondrian Hotel - a modernist fantasy in SoHo inspired by the Jean Cocteau film La Belle et la Bete.

You enter from Crosby Street through an enchanted forest, with newly planted trees and a dark tunnel wreathed in ivy.

The centrepiece of the restaurant Imperial Number Nine, is a precarious glass sculpture by Beth Lipman - giant dishes representing the magical food and drink at the Castle of the Beast.

The opening night is a swanky affair. The Kills are playing in the pink and blue-lit hotel lobby, there is a tequila party and an art film premiere in the penthouse suite, waiters are sashaying about with trays of delicious cocktails, and lines of tall chiseled model types are leaning languidly against the walls.

The hotel manager is worried about the weather, which is wild and stormy, but designer Benjamin Noriega Ortiz is hoping for a thunderstorm. "It'll be perfect. The Empire State building always gets struck by lightning in a storm. It looks amazing."

He shows us the new nightclub in the basement. Mister H is half speakeasy, half opium den, in dramatic red and black with shining walls covered in curios. Hidden around the room are tiny stuffed birds, escaped from the forest.

Miraculously, the next day dawns bright and sunny and I decide to take a mammoth trek uptown.

With a hint of spring in the air, Manhattan is a great place for walking. There's a wonderful buzz of energy about the streets. Everyone looks like they have an interesting place to go, interesting things to do. All the street-side businesses have reviews in their windows, praising their coffee, noodles, cupcakes, sushi or whatever they have to offer. I buy a tiny souvenir map and head towards Grand Central Station where I sip a cappuccino at Cipriano's under the soaring blue and gold ceiling of the main concourse.

Walking up the Avenue of the Americas, everything starts to become dizzyingly huge and I decide to take a ride to the Top of the Rock.

A $10 ticket takes you past the guards in the huge marble lobby of the Rockefeller Center into a glass-ceilinged lift to the 70th floor. On the lookout deck you see the scale and size of the city.

There is the Empire State building, the Chrysler building, and far in the distance, the shining glass towers of the financial district. To the north is Central Park - a huge oblong of trees and lakes surrounded by shining skyscraper castles with roofs and turrets of gold and green.

To the east and west, Manhattan is squeezed by both the Hudson and the East River - the reason its irrepressible energy could not push outwards but could only go up and up.

Back on the street I've got my bearings - but I haven't got the hang of the grid system. People are amazingly patient but directions sound like a list of numbers.

"Turn first left on twenny-fifth onto third and you'll find yourself on forty-fifth."

I nip into Tiffany & Co in honour of Truman Capote and Audrey Hepburn, then miraculously find the Museum of Modern Art and head to the top floor where the Warhol screen tests are showing. There is Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed and Susan Sontag staring straight out of New York in the 1960s.

One floor down is the most dazzling collection of modern art in the world: Picasso, Miro, Rousseau, Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Matisse and one of Monet's biggest waterlily paintings. One world-famous masterpiece follows another until you are wandering around in a daze gasping for breath.

To recover I head to Central Park, where I find Strawberry Fields and watch a British group of folksters called The Riff Raff giving an impromptu concert.

You aren't supposed to play music here, but they're young with holes in their shoes and I imagine John Lennon smiling down.

As the sky starts to grow dark I catch a bus back to Chinatown, stopping off at Balthazar's for an Algonquin cocktail (Bourbon, vermouth and pineapple juice). The bar, which specialises in seafood and cocktails, is buzzing with lively conversation, with people sharing plates of oysters and sipping wine.

Next day, in honour of Dylan Thomas and Leonard Cohen, I decide to wander over to Chelsea to have a look at the Chelsea Hotel.

Nancy Spungen and Dylan Thomas checked out here, Edie Sedgwick set herself on fire and Arthur Miller wrote some of his finest plays. The crumbling red facade has an array of plaques while the lobby is dated, with big vinyl sofas, huge terrible oil paintings and guests with guitars checking in.

My final New York walk is over to the East River, busy with joggers, cyclists and toddlers. Then I head to Greenwich Village to enjoy the spring sunshine. It's a long time since Bob Dylan lived here, but there's still a counterculture vibe, with record shops which proclaim their refusal to sell CDs, second-hand book stores, neighbourhood delicatessens and cafs where fortune tellers beckon you inside.

Wandering back through the Village I find the soup shop which inspired the Soup Nazi in Seinfeld - sadly, closed for refurbishment - and Bleeker Street Pizza - a tiny place on a busy intersection which has pictures of its film star customers and a sign proclaiming it makes the best pizza in New York.

Sadly, it's time to leave and as the yellow taxi bundles through Queens towards JFK the driver tells us he plans to take the rest of the day off and enjoy the sunshine.

"Where will you go?" I ask him.

"I'll go uptown. Go to some restaurants and some bars," he says.

"Well, there is certainly a lot to enjoy," I say.

"You know," he says. "That's a good thing and a bad thing. Everyone enjoys - but everyone still wants more."

"It's true. I do. I want more."

THE FACTS

Flights from Edinburgh to New York start from 369 with Sky Scanner, www.skyscanner.net; The Mondrian SoHo is at 9 Crosby Street, SoHo, New York. Room rates start at $309 (189) per night, tel: [phone] or visit www.mondriansoho.com; Top of the Rock, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, www.topoftherocknyc.com; Bleeker Street Pizza, 69 7th Avenue South, West Village, www.bleekerstreetpizzeria.net

This article was first published in The Scotsman, 16 April, 2011