There was a time when you would be caught dead walking through many parts of Manhattan. Things got pretty out of control in the '70s and '80s, and it's only recently that the city has cleaned up its act and been restored to the safe and accomodating city it had been for hundreds of years. I haven't felt at all threatened here at any time, and I've walked down just about every street in the past week.
Neighbourhoods that were previously plagued by urban decay have suddenly blossomed again. The gangsters and drug addicts have faded away and been replaced by trendy hipsters, Hispanic kids kicking a football down the street, and punchdrunk tourists pointing cameras at everything that moves.
"It's the gays", Shelly explains, rather cryptically at first. "The gays move into a neighbourhood, buy up the cheap property, do places up, make them habitable, then everyone else moves in. They did it in Williamsburg, East Village, West Village, Soho"...
Innovative homosexuals with an eye for fabulous interior design are America's 21st century urban pioneers, or so it seems. Davy Crockett must be spinning in his grave.
"And the city has never been safer", Shelly continues. "You wouldn't believe the number of undercover cops they have in this town. Thousands! Dressed like bums and low-lifes too, so you'd never suspect 'em. Of course, they can't stop everything from happening, but they're pretty close to it".
Shelly has been kind enough to lend us his vacant apartment on the Upper West Side for a few days and is now driving us to Battery Park, at the lower tip of Manhattan, where we are to board a ferry. Shelly was best friends with my father and Larry David at high school. After university however, he did not take my father's noble path of getting a doctor to write him a phoney medical report declaring him unfit for military service and subsequently joining the peace corps and being posted on a remote Fijian Island to avoid getting his ass shot off by Charlie. Shelly just stayed in New York instead. As it happened, he didn't have to go to Vietnam - much less get his ass shot off - and he's lived here ever since. "I can't imagine ever leaving this town", he says, and I don't blame him.
New York's harbour isn't as visually stunning as Sydney's, or even Dunedin's, but neither of the latter two can boast having the Statue of Liberty in their centre. Regardless of the vantage point - and at 305 feet it can be seen from pretty much anywhere - the statue casts a hugely imposing figure. From its creation in 1886 until the advent of commercial air travel, it was the first image that greeted newly-arriving immigrants to the country.
The second image, and the structure considerably less clogged by tourists on this sunny July day, would have been Ellis Island. Sitting adjacent to Liberty Island, Ellis housed the immigration station through which every man, woman and child enterting via the Atlantic was processed. Twelve million people passed through this island during its peak years between 1892 and 1924, hoping for a better life in the land of opporunity. These days, many of the people who come here are retracing the steps of their distant relatives.
100 millions Americans can trace their ancestry back to Ellis Island: that's almost a third of the population. Standing in the midst of a common starting point for new Americans from all over the world - Europe in particular - provides me with a peculiar and melancholy feeling. Most of the immigrants who arrived here owned nothing but the clothes on their backs. A century on, their identities have been completed absorbed throughout America but their contributions to their adopted homeland are evident throughout the staggeringly multicultural city of New York. Over 200 different languages are spoken in this city alone.
It's easily overlooked by mindless anti-American bigots across the world who view the country as one large redneck haven, but the U.S. is far and away the most multicultural nation on earth. Long dependent on new arrivals for its livelihood, it has welcomed waves of immigration that have taken in every region of the globe: British and Spanish in its early years, the African slaves, then the Irish, the Eastern Europeans, the Jews, The Chinese, and finally, the Latin Americans. The result is a patchwork of different races and peoples who came to American with a common goal in mind. This is superbly illustrated in the thousands of photographs and first person immigrant accounts now on display in the museum which stands on the Ellis Island site.
It must be said that immigrants from New Zealand have not played a significant part in shaping America's national identity. One of the first displays we encounter upon entering the museum is a massive world map displaying the flow and volume of settlers from different regions of the globe to America. While New Zealand can be made out on the map as two small bits of green next to Australia, there is a distinct lack of arrows pointing in the direction of the U.S. from our South Pacific haven. This could mean one of two things: either our migratory population is fairly insignificant in the greater scheme of things, or New Zealand just hasn't had its turn to shed a great wave of outbound migration to America yet. I'd be willing to bet on the latter.
After lunch, our sightseeing tour of the city doesn't get any less melancholy. We are at Ground Zero now, gazing down at the improbably large hole in the ground where the World Trade Center towers once stood. To say that the hole is immense doesn't begin to do it justice. It doesn't just take up one city block; it takes up about four. Reconstruction is already underway and one of the new buildings, WTC 7, is already complete. "Fuck you, Osama", it says as it towers 226 metres above the former rubble of Ground Zero, and the tallest building in the complex is due to top out in 2011 at a height of 541 metres.
Given Americans' penchant for tackiness and overblown patriotic zeal, I am pleased to report that the Ground Zero viewing platform, and indeed all the WTC memorials scattered across the city, have been designed with a tactful restraint and respect for the dead. The viewing platform I'm on is free of anti-terrorist rhetoric and commercial notices. It simply features a long stone wall, upon which the names of each victim of 9/11 is engraved. Likewise, many of the fire stations and police departments in Manhattan feature understated but touching tributes to their men who were killed that day. Even for someone who had no connection to anyone killed or involved in the events that day, the emotion of these memorials is overwhelming.
In the evening we take a stroll across another of New York's iconic landmarks, the Brooklyn Bridge. In a city that boasts remarkable feats of architecture at almost every turn, this bridge is one of the finest of them all. When it was opened for use 125 years ago, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world and its towers were the highest structures in the Western Hemisphere. What is more remarkable is that its designers could never have foreseen that the bridge would one day carry six lanes of heavy traffic (145,000 vehicles a day in fact), yet it has stood largely unmodified to this day. The walk across it is long but spectacular, offering views both ways down the harbour and a jaw-dropping panorama of Manhattan's soaring skyscrapers every time I turn around. And there's lots of pubs on the opposite shore.
Tired and sweaty, we stop in for a beer at an inviting old school pub in the Dumbo (Down Under Manhattan Bridge - don't ask me what the "o" stands for) district. In one small back room of the pub I find a tribute, replte with names and pictures, to the 30 or so workers who lost their life during construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Some were crushed when stone blocks fell, others died of the bends while diving to secure the towers' foundations. One poor bastard even had an epileptic fit and fell from the top of the tower. It occurs to me that epileptics are probably best served not working on herculean construction projects. Thankfully his misfortune has been memorialised in this small, humble room, providing thousands of historically-conscious alcoholics the opportunity to silently toast him and his ill-timed bout of uncontrollable dizziness.
Back at the table, ESPN has switched from showing the World's Strongest Man competition to footage of the baseball All Star Game Parade through the city streets. Governor Richard Paterson and Mayor Mike Bloomberg are wandering about looking pleased with themselves.
"Did you see what these guys did at the Pakistani Day Parade a few months ago?", asks Tony, who has joined us for the walk across the bridge and the beers. No, we did not.
"They were leading the parade, so when they got the call to start, off they went, marching down the street. Trouble was, they were marching by themselves. The two separate factions of the Pakistani marchers were brawling at the start line so they were just walking ahead by themselves, waving to the crowd and all that. But of course, they didn't think to look behind them, and no one bothered to tell them what had happened".
The mental image of a Jew and a Christian walking together side by side through through the New York streets and saluting their adoring citizens, while a large throng of Muslims beat the shit out of each other some distance behind, nicely encapsulates the multicultural spirit that pervades this fine city.
After dinner, we head out onto the street and back towards the bridge when I notice a man walking two peculiar-looking dogs on the street ahead of me. They are very short and squat, and I've never seen a dog's tail wag like that before. Perhaps the beers have gone to my head already. I get a bit closer and - to my immense surprise and pleasure - that the man isn't walking his pet dogs, he's walking his pet pigs . They're on leashes just like dogs, they're frantically sniffing about the place just like dogs, but they're fat little pigs.
"They're really affectionate", says the owner, pausing while people gather round to take photos. "I'll get these guys home, and in five minutes they'll be lying on my lap on the couch watching TV". Why you would want two pigs lying on your lap while watching TV is still unclear.
"They don't smell, they don't shed, they're extremely smart. They make better pets than dogs, really". By now, a crowd of about 50 people has formed at various points on the street corner, some taking photos, others approaching the owner thinking of a suitable question to ask him but having the words fail them, others still just standing a respectable distance away and squinting hard at the pigs, as if wondering whether it's time for a new pair of spectacles. Cars are backed up in every direction, the drivers craning their necks to see what has caused the commotion. It must take this guy forever to walk the pigs anywhere, given that a similar ruckus must surely form on every corner.
Eventually it all dies down as the Brooklyn locals go back to their own pig-free existences. Nothing surprises me about New York anymore, I realise, still vaguely aware of grunting and foraging noises wafting through the night air from across the street. This town is so diverse, every neighbourhood and locale so unique, that you could get away with pretty much anything and no one would bat an eyelid. We walk back across the bridge, the skyline now lit up from the Statue of Liberty on our left to the Empire State Building far away to our right. We walk through bustling, living streets feeling as safe as always, and jump on the Subway which is quick, cheap, efficient and well lit. It's been an emotional but instructive day, and I've seen a few things I definitely would not see anywhere but here.
I still can't shake the feeling that if I owned a pig, I'd come home drunk and hungry one night and... well, you know. Come on, I'm only human.
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