4: The Empire State

A fine morning and I decide to do the Empire State Building. I had seen queues winding round the outside of the building at weekends during the day, so I guessed an early weekday start might save me time. But what with breakfast and getting a bus (limited stop, of course) down 5th Avenue to 34th Street, I arrived at the (once again, sadly) tallest building in New York, grateful to see no people waiting outside. As I stepped inside I looked at my watch: 9.45 am. More or less straight up the elevator by a sign saying Tickets for Observatory, I emerged, frowning, into a big roomful of 150 people winding round the ubiquitous roped queue lines towards (I assumed) the ticket office(s). I had heard the lines move quickly.

10.0 am I reach an airline-type security gate and take everything out of my pockets and put my camera into the box, almost forgetting my keys. Beep, beep, beep. Oh! No, not my shoes? No, I had forgotten the notepad in my shirt pocket was metal ring-bound. Phew. Into another similar sized room with identical roped lines winding towards, yes, it looks like ticket offices. We pass notices indicating the offers: one adult $14, or a “new” item: “an upgrade for your Empire State Building experience”. When I see the word ‘experience’ I reach for – my notepad. When you get an upgrade in an airline you tend to get better seats and champagne at no extra cost. Here, the upgrade cost an extra $6. For $20 we could “actually see more by listening [sic] … to Tony’s Audioview.” Hmm. I wasn’t convinced, and I wanted my hands free to take photos. But Tony was an authentic retired New York cabbie. That settled it. I’d go for Observatory only.

But we were still in a line, with kids impatiently trying to slip past and being dragged back by their parents. Another sign offers us a further novelty, a New York Skyride, a high definition digital “motion” film as if we were flying over Manhattan. Not just after breakfast, thank you.

We come to another sign giving further ticket options. For $53, in addition to the ESB Observatory, I could get free entry to five other New York tourist hotspots: MOMA (I am a member already and get free entry, queue jumping and free films), the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier-museum (well, we might go, I suppose), the Natural History Museum (probably not), a 2-hour Circle Line boat trip (already done a three-hour one around Manhattan), and another attraction that was probably the Statue of Liberty (but the best view is from the free Staten Island ferry)? By 10.10 am I have my ticket.

Suddenly, to our left, a glimpse of a lift, but we are guided by more ropes a long way past them and as we advance the lifts get further away. We are moving very quickly now and trot past a sign saying 45 minutes to Observatory. What? Let’s hope it means if the queue is stationary. Having lost time at the security check I am now behind a British-Asian family of five presumably from Merseyside since the youngest child was wearing a Liverpool FC shirt and being teased by his teenage sister about wax in his ear (not that the latter is confined to the north west). I sympathise with the lad. The teenage girl turns to her mother and says: “We could have gone into five shops by now.” I sympathise – with the mother.

10.27 am A lift door closes five yards ahead of me, I am held at a turnstile – temporarily, it turns out and I am allowed to join my compatriots in one of lifts number 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 10 – by the look of them the original lifts. Up we go, my ears pop at the 60th floor, as I hang onto my trousers and my breakfast. The British-Asian lad grimaces. We get out at the 80th. I’d thought it was higher. Another line, but we glimpse a bit of skyline through a window. We all have to pass an individual or family group photo shoot and I almost end up in the Liverpudlians’ picture. “Smile please!” I make a note in my note book that it is 10.34 am and an Eastern European-sounding woman in uniform makes some sarcastic remarks about all the trivia I must be recording. Indeed, luv.

We turn a corner and … more roped lines to get to … the next bank of lifts. We pass some coloured photo menus advertising a cafeteria. 10.37 am. “Mum, I’m hungry.” – the teenage girl. This is getting like a Billy Graham revivalist meeting, building up tension and expectations by forever making us wait for the main event. We pass people coming down, looking rather shell-shocked, or goggle eyed, I thought. But one minute later we are out of the second lift and emerging into the Empire State Building Observatory souvenir shop, then out onto the viewing platform and the bright sunlight … and the heat – 53 minutes after setting foot inside the building.

Quite a few people already up there, but you can generally make your way round and get a good position to look or snap, despite the tough wire fence and steel bars making it very difficult to throw yourself, or anybody else, for that matter, off into the void. It is a bit misty despite promises of ten mile visibility. However, I take a lot of wide-angle photos – with my proper camera, rather than the digital. You see the bridges over the East River, the UN building looking quite small, the elegant Chrysler, the mid-town skyscrapers, Central Park in the distance, and as I walk round, the Hudson river and New Jersey, nearer the round shape of the new Madison Square Garden Center (round not square, that does puzzle me, and its not a garden centre either, by the way, in case you are not a boxing fan), and the Flatiron Building, quite close but a long way down. As I am scanning the downtown Manhattan skyline against the sun, someone points out the Statue of Liberty in the far distance through the mist (not Tony the ex-cabbie). The one thing missing from the view is the Empire State Building, the most beautiful profile of the lot. New York doesn’t seem complete without it. No doubt it would be on the Skyride. For some of the points of interest I fail to identify, there are helpful names on drawings of the skyline etched in metal. There are also coin-operated telescopes – I guess powered by quarters like everything else here, from parking meters to launderettes.

Before going back into the souvenir shop, I notice a bronze plaque on the inside wall, typical of all sorts of buildings and events, drawing attention to the American flag on the flagpole way above us: “Old Glory atop the Empire State Building dedicated to the Defenders of Freedom … around the world, the ARMED FORCES OF THE USA” [in capitals], inaugurated May 13, 1968 by some rear-admiral or other. That must have been the Vietnam era, and now it’s Iraq. The US’s own white man’s burden (but with a lot of black squaddies), to spread its own view of freedom to the rest of the world, was not born with Dubbya, nor did it die with Johnson or Nixon.

As I move into a corner of the souvenir shop, a woman is leaning with her back to the glass window avoiding looking out, she looks a bit pale – heat exhaustion or a problem with heights? I walk round the whole of the inner glass-enclosed area and find that you are above the height of the people on the viewing platform, you look through antiglare glass – and it’s all air-conditioned! This is the best tip I can offer when visiting here: look out for the two side corridors of the souvenir shop – north and south - for the best views. As I turn my back to the views in these corridors, I see behind me a mirrored wall – I CAN EVEN TAKE A PHOTO OF MYSELF TAKING A PHOTO OF MYSELF THROUGH THE MIRRORS WITH THE NEW YORK SKYLINE IN THE BACKGROUND (a mirror-image of course). When I come round again the lady has changed colour – it looks like verdigris – or do I mean vertigo- no, verdigris is a better description. I mention to her there are toilets around the corner should she need them, then correct myself to ‘rest rooms’.

Resisting the temptation to buy a little, glass Big Apple snow globe with a miniature ESB inside, I venture outside for one last look and realise that I had blotted out until now the noise of the city. The rumble (in the urban jungle) of the traffic and the air-conditioning units – the white noise of New York, interrupted by the horns and sirens of Tony’s fellow professional drivers, since the taxis and emergency vehicles seem to make most of the noise at street level.

I head for the lifts and find the guards are holding a queue of would-be visitors until more people have decided to leave. AND there is queue for the down lift - I say ‘lift’ in the singular since one of the down lifts has stopped working. One of the employees suggests those who choose to could follow him down the stairs. A few of us decide to – remembering it is only five or six floors to the other lifts, but before we are halfway down one flight he comes back up and says we can’t go down that way now. “Why not?” “We can’t get down.” “Why not? “’Cos we can’t.” Ah! He heads for another stairway and a senior uniformed guard says: “You can’t go down there.” The non-uniformed man asks: “Why not?” “’Cos you can’t.” Nobody bothers to ask why.

We wait in the original queue, having lost a few places. But within a couple of minutes we emerge onto the 80th floor and walk past the photo sales site. I see a reasonably good ¾ portrait of myself posing beside a photographic reproduction of the ESM. I look at the price - $15 – and remember I already have a self-portrait in my Olympus OM-1- in principle. There is no photo of the Merseyside family there. At $3 each a family group must have seemed good value.

A short walk further to the six high-speed lifts, no real queue and down we go. I wonder if I would have seen more by listening to Tony’s commentary. Maybe next time. Doors open at the first floor, which I remember is the ground. We exit pasta pizzeria [I have left this typo in], Uncle Louie G’s ice-cream parlour, a Walgren’s supermarket and through the smart lobby to see directly across the street (that is, across Fifth Avenue, for goodness sake) a McDonald’s – great location, pity about the food.

1. First Impressions

Arrived in Manhattan (Midtown East) in a yellow cab driven by a Russian and the buildings just hit you in the face. You know there are going to be skyscrapers (the Woolworth Building, the Empire State, the Chrysler Building, and so on) but every single building is taller than anything in Newcastle, and in Paris come to that (if we discount the Maine Montparnasse). They are in your face the whole time, and you walk round with your head in the air and mouth open. The older brown-stone ones, the art deco ones, the new one-way-mirror glass ones that reflect the one next door, the pointy-top ones, the triangular ones, the ones built like Lego blocks that get thinner the higher they go.

It means there is no view from our flat of course – except of the top of the CitiCorp building and a lot of brown brick walls with the back ends of air-conditioning units mooning out of the windows. We are near a number of hotels – the Waldorf Astoria for one, but closer to the Marriott, pronounced like the Marie in Marie-Celeste and the -ott as in blot. The Marie – ott has a super-strong air-conditioning system whose fans produce a constant background noise. We have learned to sleep with it – but not yet with our own air-conditioning on.

The other irksome noise is that of the yellow cabs. Every other vehicle seems to be a cab and they seem to have squeaky brakes, the noise of which, at night from the flat, we first thought was the sound of squealing tyres going too fast round corners (Osborne Road conditioning), and it does go on all night.

Can there really be enough people around to fill up these office blocks and residential blocks? As in the UK, you see people gathered outside office blocks or by the rear service entrance of Marie-otts all smoking since the mayor has recently banned all smoking on work premises, including restaurants and bars, but there are really only three or four at the bottom of each 40 storey building. Perhaps it takes too long to get down to the bottom, so they give it up as a bad job or cheat somehow. To be investigated.

It really does seem as though we are two nations separated by a common language. The Russian cabbie told us he could understand us better than he could the locals. I too have problems especially on the phone –it seems partly the speed, although I know that’s just a common false impression for language learners and le nooyoikais is a foreign language to me. I took a bus all the way down to City Hall yesterday and in response to my question about where the bus stop was for the return journey, I understood the driver to say, with a flick of his head, by Jenners. I saw roughly where he meant and when I crossed the road I saw it was a shop called J&R. I need to adjust my listening.

Buses are great of course, if you get the right stop. I found the right line on Lexington Avenue and saw, not a yellow line on the pavement as the guide book said, but a red, white and blue sign that indicated M101 and M103 – M being for Manhattan. I wondered why buses were driving past me – I stretched out a tentative hand and the next bus swerved out of the bus lane to give me an even wider berth. I walked up the street to the next stop and found some locals waiting –exclusively older female and Afro-Americans – no change there then – and found it said that this was a limited-stop stop, which means even the limited-stop buses stop there. And, sure enough, one did.

A lady who winters in Florida and spring-and-summers in Noo Yoik, sat down beside me with a pile of polythene-covered library books – one week’s reading - she loves Ed McBain. She gave me a running commentary on the Stuyvesant Town and the Peter Cooper village, which seem like US gated communities and where there was no point in going to look since there were no shops or anything, but said I should go to the South Street Seaport, where I guess there are shops.

Shopping is not an unpleasant experience- the assistants and cashiers do all say “Have a nice day” – but they sound as though they mean it and that raises the spirits. My Nat West debit card causes as few raised eyebrows but it does work, and I am asked if I want any cashback – there’s globalisation for you. I can’t get over the amount of recognisable European food – don’t the Americans make any cheese of their own apart from something that resembles Kraft Cheese slices? And where can I find some ordinary semi-skimmed cow’s milk? The fat-free organic is a bit thin, but it does all come from a cow; the Fat Free ultra-pasteurized Half & Half’s second ingredient is corn syrup and claims to be free of most other things such as cholesterol, vitamin C, most calories and even fat - except for a “trivial amount of fat” from the added cream – it sure tastes of cream but drowns out the coffee taste in the morning.

And where can I get a decent cup of coffee? I made the mistake of going into a Starbucks to regroup in a doubtful area I had wandered into when searching out the Bodum shop. The only thing I recognised on the big sign above the counter was “mocha”. I indicated by sign language that I wanted a small (should I have said regular?) cup. The assistant picked up the smallest paper cup and I nodded – he shouted: “one tall mocha”. Don’t ask. I declined the squirty cream on top, but the second assistant remembered too late and had to ladle it out, but then added further half&half. I didn’t pick up the straw and, by the time I had finished it, found the chocolate had gravitated to the bottom. Jennifer tells me I should go for a flat white.

I say ‘doubtful area’ because I went into a discount store and found a pack of six clothes hangers for $1.99, but in order to get out of the shop I had to have the receipt that had been pinned to the plastic bag signed by a black guy the size of “the Refrigerator” on the door.

Bodum by the way because, despite the flat being well equipped with an all stainless steel set of ice-cream scoop, pizza cutter, beer-can opener, corkscrew, potato peeler, tablespoon measures and an over-complicated coffee percolator, it has no simple cafetiere. Indeed, the word ‘cafetiere’ or even ‘caffatier’ (with an increasingly desolate rising intonation) evokes no response. I did find a kitchenware store that had everything including very helpful staff who recognised the name Bodum and my description of a glass container and plunger and told me I needed a “French press”. Le Monde, by the way, is even harder to find than a coffee maker.

To get to Bodum’s I take my first ride on the subway and on my way back I confidently assured a German tourist that, yes, the incoming train was going ‘uptown’. There seems a lack of subway maps both on the platforms and in the carriages. It appears a bit dirty, but only in contrast to the streets that are completely free of litter and dog mess. Just as well since I shall again today be walking around with my head in the air.