Fairytale of New York: what’s new in the Big Apple?

After a two-year travel ban, Londoners are finally allowed to visit the Big Apple again. Nick Curtis took the first flight out and soaked up the architecture, food and culture - and finds it’s still a hell of a town
Evening Standard
Nick Curtis @nickcurtis12 November 2021

As you read this I’ll be back in the UK after a manic four-day trip to New York that took in major art exhibitions, Broadway and off-Broadway shows, explorations of Central Park and the High Line, more restaurants and bars than I care to name, and a view through a glass floor panel 1,131ft over the new district of Manhattan West. Well, if you’re offered a chance to take the first flight to London’s sister city after the lifting of a 19-month US travel ban, you go large, don’t you? The morality of taking a transatlantic jet trip in the middle of COP26 bothered me for about a nanosecond before I agreed to it. And I can report that Manhattan remains worth every footsore, red-eyed, hotdog-gorging moment you can spend in her hectic, uncompromising bounds.

It was a surprisingly emotional flight. Our Virgin Airbus 350 staged a historic joint take-off with rival British Airways on Monday, bound for a city I first visited in 1982 as part of an exchange programme my south London comp had with a Long Island High School.Since then I’ve seen New York boisterous and vulgar in the Nineties, subdued after 9/11, and battered by the 2012 Frankenstorm that punctuated the Obama/Romney election (where New Yorkers “voted” by sticking chewing gum wads to a picture of their preferred candidate).I last visited in 2018, exploring lesser known neighbourhoods Inwood and the Heights, watching basketball at Madison Square Garden and 93-year-old drummer Roy Haynes at the Blue Note jazz club.

Emerging from a pandemic that cost more than 56,000 New Yorkers their lives and saw emergency morgues and mass graves, would the place retain its brash, flash swagger?

The answer is, yes and no. The first sign that New York is quieter is that both immigration control and the ride into the city were the fastest I have known. There are fewer tourists around, fewer people on the streets and cars on the road.

Nick Curtis took the first flight from London to New York since the travel ban was lifted

Each time I arrive here, I ground myself by walking to familiar landmarks: Grand Central Station, the Chrysler Building, the Public Library. This week I went up the Empire State for the first time since I brought my wife here for her first visit in 1997: no queues for those wonderful views.Signs that New York is, conversely, just as excessive as ever can be found a few blocks along 33rd Street from the historic skyscraper, where Manhattan West has been magicked into being on top of the railway lines of Hudson Yards. This $25 billion cluster of architectural totems overlooking the river will be home to Peloton’s corporate HQ and a new venture from master restaurateur Danny Meyer (chair of Shake Shack), among much else.

The Edge sky deck at Hudson Yards
Getty Images

Here already is The Edge, a pointy skyscraper with a high-end shopping centre on its lower floors and the aforementioned triangular viewing platform near the top, from which you can see the whole of Manhattan.

Pendry Manhattan West Hotel

Truly brave souls can do City Climb, scaling the very tip of the building and leaning out attached to a safety line. I thought about them as I sipped cold champagne in the unseasonably warm November sun on the viewing platform. My hotel, the Pendry Manhattan West, opened just eight weeks ago but already felt like a fixture, its rippled glass façade by SOM architects modest and pleasing compared to its bombastic neighbours. It has two terraces, a spanking new gym, a beautiful tucked away bar and a fourth-floor restaurant with a punchier, ground-floor dining room, Zou Zou’s from serial dining entrepreneur Michael Stillman, opening soon.

Nick Curtis seeks out the city’s hottest new openings

Nearer the Hudson is the first hotel from gym chain Equinox, an elegant pencil of a building opened in 2019. Here I was given a tour of its 24th floor restaurant and outdoor pool, a complementary facial and a cryotherapy treatment (three minutes in my pants in a tank chilled way below freezing) which would have set me back more than 300 bucks.

Nearby is the Vessel, Thomas Heatherwick’s heart-shaped structure of interlocking staircases. It was closed after a person committed suicide there, the fourth to have done so — a reminder that New York can be brutal as well as brilliant.

The New York High Line
Getty Images

A sun-dappled walk along the High Line linear park took me to Little Island, a happier Heatherwick vision. This lushly planted open space for performance or reflection replaced a derelict pier: it’s supported by concrete “tulips” that recall Heatherwick’s Olympic cauldron design, and was paid for by $260 million of mogul Barry Diller’s money. As with Manhattan West, I marvel at the ability of this island of 22.82 square miles to find and develop new territory and infrastructure. The grim and crowded Penn Station is being expanded beneath the beautiful post office building of Moynihan Hall, necessitating much pedestrian displacement above. “These f****n’ people won’t let me get where I’m going,” shouted a well-dressed man fighting through the pedestrian throng.

Strolling through Greenwich and Soho, or up Broadway and Fifth Avenue, you pass empty shops and many restaurants closed by Covid. Others alternately survive or thrive with covered outdoor seating, and rooftops which are at a premium. Among the places I paused at were Gallow Green, the restaurant in the “faux” hotel where immersive theatre company Punchdrunk usually perform; the glass-fronted balconied top floor of Hotel Hugo; and Soho’s highly agreeable Broome Street bar. The chess players were out in force in Washington Square but someone had designated a “Screaming Spot” in chalk on a pathway at Union Square Park.

There are Covid testing and booster stations in gazebos on street corners everywhere: and also, to my eyes, even more homeless people than usual.Theatre is back with a vengeance, in all its stratified variety. Over two days I saw the experimental Wooster Group give a typically bracing reading of Brecht’s The Mother in the downtown garage they’ve occupied since 1975; Edie Falco and Blair Brown in British writer Simon Stephens’s new play Morning Sun at Manhattan Theatre Club; and a preview of the exuberant musical adaptation of Mrs Doubtfire, eventually destined for London.

Everyone wears masks inside, and you are asked for your vaccine passport everywhere.In the last hours before filing this and boarding my overnight return flight, I worked my way down Central Park via the Kandinsky exhibition at the Guggenheim, Surrealism at the Met, and the Automania show dedicated to the car as artwork at the Museum of Modern Art. All sparsely attended, with opening hours limited, and entry pre-booked, but all in their own way wonderful. Like London, New York is nowhere near back to normal, but it’s open and ready for rediscovery. What are you waiting for?

Five reasons to visit NYC now

1. The Broadway shows

Old favourites like Phantom, Chicago and Company are back or about to be, with Hugh Jackman in The Music Man opposite Sutton Foster, fresh from her London triumph in Anything Goes.

2. The great outdoors

This built-up metropolis discovered the joys of the outdoors in the pandemic: not just Central Park and Riverside but boat tours to Governors Island and the Circle Line boat tour that takes you around Manhattan.

3. The food scene

New Yorkers are raving about south Indian restaurant Semma in the West Village, which is also where you’ll find highly rated wine bar Temperance.

4. Elton John

Yes, he’s playing London, but how amazing would it be to see Elt at Madison Square Garden early next year?

5. A white Christmas

Flights may be pricey but there will be deals on accommodation. After nearly two years away, live out those fantasies of a snowy Fifth Avenue and ice skating at Rockefeller Center. The decorations are already out …

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