NYC

Lower Manhattan
Originally uploaded by j_pyo.

James' New York pics
Sen's New York pics

This was my second time in New York City, but really the first time I got a chance to explore it. To get a feel of the city, we spent a lot of time walking around, strolling through the Financial District, Chinatown, Little Italy, East Village, Soho, Union Square, Midtown, Times Square, Central Park, and the Upper East Side. James has already summarized what we did in his post below. Here are some of my thoughts.

- Going up to the observatory deck of the Empire State Building gave us a sense of how small, area-wise, Manhattan really is. Width-wise the entire island of Manhattan would span from Victoria Park Ave. to McCowan Rd., and length-wise from Eglinton to Steeles – it’s that small!

- Manhattan is yuppie-central. Strolling the streets, you’re rarely see a face below 20 and above 35. And most of Manhattan is actually fairly white with a smattering of Asians. You’ll see other groups on the subways headed towards Brooklyn and Queens.

- People here are definitely more fashionable and trendy. And there is definitely a large gay contingent.

- Tourists, tourists, tourists! They’re everywhere! Especially around Times Square at night. Faisal, who we crashed with and who showed us around, commented that he was sick of them, and even tourists James and I were getting tired of their camera-flashing/pedestrian traffic-stalling presence!

- Everything is ridiculously expensive, and that goes all the more for housing. Faisal’s place in Midtown (bedroom + kitchen + bath) - a place the size of two bedrooms in MKV, and wedged between two porn shops – is $1500/mth.

- Be it kebabs, pamphlets, giant pretzels, the street vendors on every corner, or the African guys peddling fake Oakleys and Rolexes near Ground Zero, people are always hustling you all kinds of stuff on the street.

- Architecturally the skyscrapers are stunning. The level of detail in the older buildings is astonishing – they don’t make’em like that anymore. There’s not a city in the world that could contest New York here.

- The subway cars are more narrow than the TTC, giving it a more cramped feel, and there are more cars per train. They’re also remarkably all graffiti-free. The system is older and grittier than Toronto’s, but certainly a lot better in terms of breadth. Also, the turnstiles are all automated and designed with vertical barriers in between, such that one can’t hop over them.

- For a city of this size, there are scarcely any homeless people. No one was sleeping on the streets and not once were we accosted by panhandlers. You couldn’t walk three blocks in Toronto without encountering one.

New York is a great place. A part of me wishes I was around during the seedy, sketchy, bankrupt Taxi Driver New York circa 1976 to contrast it with the post-Guiliani gentrified New York of today.

But to live in New York, you have to be of a certain mindset. And I don’t think it’s for me – too many people, too hectic, too anonymous, and I like to see trees and the sky once in a while. IMO Toronto has the optimal balance – it’s a big city, but there’s still a bit of that civic small-town “we’re in it together” parochial quality to it. I actually find it charming that we’re still shocked when there’s a murder, or when a girl goes missing. New York is just a little too... much.