Manhattan Transfer
New York up close

There is probably not another city in the world that lives up to the preconceived expectations of the traveller with as much as ease as does New York. Even as the airport bus from JFK gives you your first glimpse of Manhattan you get a strange feeling of déjà vu. Something clicks and you think: “I’ve seen this movie before!”
            Even deprived of its two greatest features the Manhattan skyline is instantly recognisable and even as a newcomer you find yourself searching for landmarks you feel you already know. You scan your eyes offshore from the last soaring chrome-and-glass skyscrapers, looking for the pale-blue needle of the Statue of Liberty and – though you haven’t yet consulted a guidebook or a map – you’re pleased to see that it lay exactly where you had expected to find it.
Manhattan Island is 15km long by 3km wide and if you’re only in town for a few days then there is more than enough diversity and sheer breath-taking vitality here to keep you busy. The neighbouring boroughs all have their own attraction and unique characters but there is little reason for a first-time visitor to roam further north than Central Park or to stray much beyond the far end of Brooklyn Bridge. The Bridge (to New Yorkers there is only one that matters) is probably the best free tourist activity in the city and provides the classic views of that iconographic skyline. 
While Manhattan undoubtedly has more than its share of museums and galleries, you’ll quickly come to realise that the island is itself a living museum and that your time could best be spent simply wandering those quarters whose names already seem so tantalisingly familiar: Greenwich Village, Soho, Little Italy, Bowery…
Leaving Chinatown’s gaudy shop-fronts and evocative eastern scents behind for a while, you head southwards past City Hall to the money-spinner’s Mecca of Wall Street and the Financial District. The vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank – lying just a mile away from the spot where the Manhatto Indians sold their tribal territory for $24 in 1626 - now store a quarter of all the world’s gold bullion.
            The soaring skyline of Manhattan has been described as a economic bar-graph and, quite apart from the inestimable cost in human life and suffering that resulted from the attacks of ‘9/11,’ there are also the psychological and financial traumas that must follow when the major features of that bar-graph are wiped away with such brutal efficiency. A year later New York is struggling to come to terms with those losses and signs are everywhere of its attempts to boost its own shattered confidence: star-spangled banners flutter from the façade of virtually every building and T-shirts bear the slogan: ‘I ♥ NY More than Ever.’ Unfortunately, there is also occasional evidence of a more negative reaction to the disaster; in a gift-shop at Newark Airport T-shirts were emblazoned with an offensive redneck mantra, ‘One world, one belief…It’s time to kick some asses!’
 ‘Ground Zero’ has become New York’s most visited sight and, though there are those who point at the ghoulishness of this, the atmosphere there seems to be one of respectful and heart-felt homage. The railings of nearby Saint Paul’s Chapel (once itself the highest building in the world) are still being swathed in flags, baseball caps and those personal messages to loved ones that force you anew to try to grasp the inconceivable horror of what happened here.
It seems that most New Yorkers have never themselves visited the Statue of Liberty yet in an average year it attracts a number of visitors equal to the population of Norway. A drop-off in visitor numbers in the last year has meant that there is, for perhaps the first time ever, elbowroom at the railings of the Ellis Island ferries as passengers rubber-neck for yet another view of that fantastic skyline that you just can’t seem to tear your eyes away from.
Up close ‘Lady Liberty’ doesn’t look quite as impressive as she always appears to be on the big screen and since the observation deck is now closed for security reasons – despite exhaustive searches that make JFK look like a kissing-gate – Liberty Island itself is something of a disappointment.
Not so The Empire State Building. It was completed a mere 410 days after the foundations were laid and at $9 million dollars less than the estimated budget. The year was 1931, and the feat was made possible by the depression that provided an inexhaustible labour pool…even at the time King Kong was terrorising Manhattan from this elegant perch critics were still calling this icon of western capitalism ‘The Empty State Building.’ 
From the viewing platform on the 86th floor you can finally fit the missing pieces into your interior map and, on a clear day, even orientate yourself with Connecticut and Massachusetts. You can stare down, nearly a vertical quarter-mile, to stumpy little office blocks that would be considered major edifices in many of the world’s capitals.
With a sense of pride you realise that you recognise certain streets and buildings that you have seen from ground level. There’s Madison Square Gardens, you point out, and beyond it the tenements of Hell’s Kitchen. And that flash of neon is Times Square. Follow Broadway southwards with your eyes, past the unmistakeable wedge of the Flatiron Building and you can pick out Little Italy and Tribeca (which you have learned means ‘Triangle Below Canal St’ and where, according to local gossip, Robert de Nero is rapidly building a restaurant empire).
Even as you gaze down and think about the unnaturalness of living in such a bustling, bursting ‘anthill’ you feel drawn to the challenge of actually getting to know this city. This visit might be no more than a fleeting ‘Manhattan transfer’ but you already feel the urge to return - to live the movie for yourself.

The End