NOTE: I visited NYC from October 15 to November 12 of 2021, before the Omnicron surge.
If you haven’t seen Pretend it’s a City featuring Fran Leibowitz and Martin Scorsese then I encourage you to stop reading this and tune in. The Netflix show is really a love song and a bit of a lament to my hometown New York City. It was filmed pre-Covid when NYC was overflowing with tourists.
Fran Leibowitz, as it happens, has some firm opinions about that. The title of the series comes from her remark to visitors who irk her for doing stupid things as we tourists do. “Pretend it’s a city (— and stop acting like a country bumpkin)” Fran advises tourists who stop in the middle of the street to take a selfie.
While Fran never seems to leave Manhattan I visited all five boroughs during my visit. Although I lived 30 years in New York I am sure that I never visited all five boroughs in a single year yet alone in just over a week’s time. It was not just my range that was different this trip. It was how I saw New York. Yes, it is a city, no pretending necessary. Contrary to Fran, my advice is to visit New York but do not not pretend it’s a city. Pretend it’s a country.
Gotham is a jumble of neighborhoods and precincts but they make for me a tapestry of memories. Every major cultural institution, a score of restaurants and dozens of shops, parks, and more are souvenirs from my emotional life. New York is a mind map for me. Although always new and changing, New York remains a constant as well. Too big, too kinetic, too unwieldy to be understood comprehensively, it can still be experienced and known deeply.
So this posting does not — cannot — pretend that it is a guide to New York. It is offered as an appreciation, a reflection, and a celebration of my favorite city in the world.
I arrived in New York on a one-way ticket from Bozeman, MT. I had no departure date in mind but I did have plans aplenty — more than I normally do when I travel. My usual planning was prompted by my purpose. I came to New York in the Fall of 2021 to give my hometown some love. This meant going to Broadway (Moulin Rouge, American Utopia, To Kill a Mockingbird) and to the Metropolitan Opera (Boris Gunodov, Turnadot, Le Boheme, Porgy & Bess). I purchased full price tickets in advance. I would not be a bargain hunter for once. I’d be a liberal tipper. I was determined to support New York and those cultural institutions that shaped me (like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History). I was determined to be unhurried and unafraid during my first post-Covid (maybe?) trip.
The Practical.
Tips for a brilliant trip
I rely on the app Tripit to both organize my travel plans pre-departure and to record my daily itinerary while on the move. Click here for my recent itinerary.
My total on-location spending from 10/15/2021 to November 12, 2021 was $4,317 or $148 per day. You can see all of my daily spending here.
$1,654 or 38%of that went to my accommodations (hotels and an AirBnb). I spent $1,488 on food and beverage for 34% of my total costs Entertainment was my third-highest category at $773 or 18%. Local transport totaled $220 (5%). (Note, I don’t include airfares since they can vary so much. These costs were all made in New York.).
I use the app TravelSpend to record all of my expenses. Tracking expenses is necessary if you want to control your expenses.
QUESTIONS?
The Theoretical.
New York & the imagination
I’ve been waiting to return to New York since 2018. I am sure that NYC suffered as much if not more than any other US city from Covid. I made my plans to go in July 2021 — a time of coronavirus hope. Of course, it was also the beginning of Delta. By the time I made my reservation at The Leo House (at an incredible price of less than $100/night), it had begun to surge and we were back in facemasks. Still, I was confident that I could go to NYC and avoid a lockdown (something which I had been fortunate enough to avoid while visiting four continents since the outbreak of Covid.) I was now vaccinated so I felt my luck would continue and I committed to traveling with an overabundance of understanding, understanding that things would be different and that I would be OK with that. (See my post, “The Five Senses of Brilliant Travel” for more on how I aim to travel.)
Were things different? Well, yes and no.
New York was certainly a tamer, quieter, and home-bound around the edges. The Upper West Side was quiet by 10 pm. Nonetheless, I found the City to be both the New York I know and love and a New York emerging as something different in what we all can only still hope is a post-Covid world.
I was pained to see a few of my favorite restaurants closed (most regretfully, Rocking Horse) or with reduced service hours (Grey’s Papaya). But I was delighted to see NYC once again vital and dazzling, determined and proud. I attended my first NY Marathon choosing the Queensboro Bridge stretch for viewing. I admired the runners — but I marveled at the crowd of boosters. There were knots of friends waiting for one of their own to make it to the Bridge, consulting with their associates at other points on the course. There were the three young gay men waving a flag non-stop. There was the handsome young dad calling out runners by number, or costume, or need with words of encouragement. He lead cheer after cheer for one stranger after another, fellow New Yorkers who would be out of sight in seconds but who were the most important New Yorkers in the world for those minutes.
New York City is always new, always changing yet always New York. It is all at once novel and historic, familiar and foreign, conspicuous and covert. (Go to the High Line for proof.) It is not hard to pretend New York is a city. But I want you to pretend it is something bigger than a city.
I visited Japan while in New York where I had great ramen in Manhattan. and saw Kayoi Kasuma in the Bronx. There was a trip to France as well New York available on Broadway and at The Met. My journey to Irish New York was more limited but deep in memory. All the people on bicycles made me think of the Netherlands and Astoria proved that it is still the capital of Greek New York.
The Metropolitan Opera was a mile marker not only of expressions of rich national culture brought by immigrants — I visited Beijing, Moscow, and Charleston as well — but of universal New York, the New York that creates and houses some of the finest artifacts of human creativity. MOMA, the Whitney, the American Museum of Natural History, along with the Met are the heart of this New York. This is the universal New York, the one centered on art, design, music; a land of human creativity
New Yorkers often speak of themselves as a special breed. But I wonder if what makes New York unique is not that everyone in the City shares some common identity like its a genetic code. Maybe it is this idea of New York as a country, New York as the homeland to magnificent jewels of human expression. Maybe it is this that allows its denizens to claim whatever identity they wish, to be citizens of a series of countries, any of them that they chose.
Visit New York soon. While you are there, make sure that you pretend it’s a country.
See more here soon!
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