New York.
I’m up at 5 AM because of jet lag, and I’m walking.
Down Broadway from the hotel, steam is coming out of the grates, giving the streets an eerie feel.
A very tall guy in a black hoodie stumbles towards me in the dark.
I told my wife Morena back at the hotel room that I wouldn’t get stabbed – she mumbled it in her sleep, as I was leaving. So I dodge around black hoodie.
He doesn’t even want anything, he’s just stumbling.
But the darkness and the steam give me horror movie vibes, and I’m being extra careful.
This whole city smells like farts and weed.
Further down, I guess this is Times Square. Hours before dawn, it doesn’t look like much. Everything’s closed. On the first corner, there’s a shop called The Fantastic World of the Portuguese Sardine.
Two garbage collectors are out on the sidewalk, pitching big black bags into the truck, making a sport of it. One misses, smiles at me, and says, “I’m just tired, is all.”
I decide to turn around and walk up towards Central Park. This is better. A surprising number of people are out running, even though it’s only six, by now. I ask a guy who’s reading a book in the light of a streetlamp what time the sun comes up.
“I don’t know, man, I’m always at work by then.”
I get some coffee in the first Starbucks I see open. Then I walk off to the edge of Manhattan to see the view. There’s New Jersey off in the distance, the sun glinting off the buildings as it rises.
Well, here we are, back in the US. This sure doesn’t happen much.
New York: not my kind of town
I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I have serious objections to New York, as a concept.
In fact, one of the most common conversations I have as an American abroad is the following: someone asks where I’m from, and I tell them I’m from the US. Their eyes light up. “Oh my god, I LOVE NEW YORK!” they say.
But I never considered New York to be representative of the US as a whole.
The similarities between New York and Phoenix, Arizona, where I grew up, are minimal. And while it is, technically, the same country, I’ve always thought of New York as more like a far-off setting for unrealistic sitcoms, and a place where narcissists with big dreams could go to become famous.
When my wife Morena had a conference to go to in Las Vegas, and planned to spend several days in New York as well, I told her to count me out. Nothing could be less compelling to me than a trip to New York and Las Vegas.
I maintained this position for several months – finally breaking down and buying a ticket ten days before her scheduled departure. “Fine. I’ll go to New York, but I’m skipping Vegas.”
That’s how I ended up in Portland and back in the Arizona desert. I figured I’d use the trip across the Atlantic to see my parents. And begrudgingly agreed to visit this place for a few days as well.
A bit of background on New York
Morena has never been to the US before.
I’ve told her everything I know about New York – a city populated by slender, sickly beings who cling to their NPR tote bags with thin, claw-like hands.
The “locals” spend their days in 44th floor offices, nursing a sense of unearned superiority while answering emails and completing crossword puzzles, before scurrying home, pursued by giant rats and accosted by the homeless, to $10,000-a-month studio apartments.
Brains swimming in a cocktail of carbon monoxide mixed with a feeling of self-satisfaction derived from not living in “one of those flyover states”, they go through their lives thinking of themselves as uglier versions of their favorite characters from Friends, and waiting for their “big break” in acting, finance, or media.
Or something along those lines.
Like I said, I don’t care about New York at all, so I can’t be asked to do any research.
Our first morning, several hours after my 5AM stroll, Morena is up and we go to get breakfast. She wants to go to some famous bagel place, where we pay $48 for a bagel, some latkes (AKA potato pancakes) and two coffees.
Less than thrilled by the prices, so far, we decide to head off to the Met.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of art is on the edge of Central Park, half an hour or so up from our hotel.
On the way up we stop at a diner on the corner of Madison Avenue for another coffee. I try to explain to Morena that “Madison Avenue” is synonymous with the advertising industry. So when Mona Simpson (mother to Homer) says “but Abe was stuck in his button down plastic fantastic Madison Avenue scene” it’s a statement on consumerism and the sort of life expectations Americans get from TV commercials.
I could, in fact, say quite a bit about the sort of life expectations that result from spending decades in a country where the media is largely concentrated in one or two wealthy coastal cities. Especially if you happen to live far from those cities, growing up in the desert, and being told (implicitly and explicitly) that your life is unimportant.
Better to save that for another article, though.
Land of the Ketchup Moguls
The Met, when we arrive, is huge, and the building itself is worth the entry price.
We see some famous paintings: Van Gogh’s self portrait with the straw hat is there. They’ve got some El Grecos, and some Monets. Really the list of famous paintings at the Met is so long it’d be a bit exhausting for me to read it. We’re there for hours. I get quite emotional, for some reason, in front of Washington Crossing the Delaware.
But just as much as the art, what strikes me are the donors who the wings are named after. Here’s Michael C Rockefeller (son of Nelson) who may or may not have been eaten by cannibals in New Guinea in 1961. And here’s Henry J Heinz II, grandson of the ketchup mogul.
At least a significant part of American greatness is attributable to the fact that we don’t have royalty, but that if you (for example) solve the ketchup problem for several generations of people, your family can be “sponsoring a wing at the Met” rich. I’m not aware of any other country which treats its condiment manufacturers so well.
Being American, in other words, is a really good deal, and I’m grateful for it.
Immigration in New York
Exhausted from the overstimulation of gallery after gallery, we head off to find some lunch.
Immigration is alive and well in New York.
If you believe what you hear from ultraliberal white suburbanites, of course, ICE is terrorizing any “person of color” they see on the streets, and it’s basically Nazi Germany.
However, Morena is a person of color, and manages to walk around for several days unharassed by law enforcement. (Roving bands of MAGA vigilantes are also conspicuous in their absence.)
On the ground here in New York, actually, it seems like two thirds of the people doing any real work are immigrants of one kind or another.
At Dave’s Hot Chicken, there’s a long line of delivery riders standing around – apparently recent immigrants from Africa. They’re bundled up in cheap puffy jackets despite the fact that there’s only the faintest chill in the air. The (Mexican) girl behind the counter calls out order numbers for the non-English-speaking, first as a full number, then one digit at a time. “Order twenty-seven. TWO SEVEN!”
If the iron first of a gestapo-like law-enforcement agency were really cracking down on immigrants, most of the street-level New Yorkers would have to go into hiding.
Anyway, with somewhere north of 50 million immigrants in the US, and around 11 million of those “illegal” it seems like most people are feeling relaxed because of strength in numbers.
(Or maybe – just maybe! – the media pundits are overselling the “gestapo” narrative to a gullible public.)
American Abundance
The next day we walk all the way down to the southern tip of Manhattan Island.
Google Maps says this will take less than two hours, but in reality it taxes us six, with all the stops we make.
There’s a place selling South Indian dosa for breakfast.
Then the New York Public Library near Grand Central, which has an exhibit of treasured documents: a Gutenberg Bible, a draft of Washington’s Farewell Address, and one of the original hand-written copies of the Bill of Rights. Morena is oddly moved by the whole thing.
On the way out of the library, Morena asks, “Do Americans understand that they live surrounded by massive wealth?”
Good question.
“Some of them do. But a lot of them choose spend their time being angry about politics.”
After that, there’s Union Square Greenmarket, where they sell ostrich femurs for dogs, then the REI, where they sell socks for dogs, and – swinging towards the left – Chinatown, where…
Oh, I don’t know, I can’t think of any stereotypes involving Asian people and dogs.
Chinatown, in any case, is pretty intense – it feels just like being in Asia, in some parts. We wander through a supermarket that’s selling snails the size of my fist, and that smells like day-old squid. It’s full of elderly Asian people. So is the park, which has a statue of Sun Yat-Sen (1866 – 1925), physician and founder of the Republic of China – and still revered in both China and Taiwan.
Morena buys rambutan (a spiny Asian fruit) from a street vendor, and eats it was we walk. She almost drops $25 on a bag of mangosteen (another exotic fruit) but thinks better of it in the end.
And we walk on, towards the south.
Diddy and The Donald
Completely by accident we come across the courthouse where Diddy (you know, the rapper) is – at that very moment – inside, being sentenced to four years in prison.
That’s why the street outside the door is swarming with reporters. Allegedly, Diddy’s now on laundry duty in the big house, making 40 cents an hour, or maybe less.
At his sentencing he said:
“I’m not this larger-than-life person. I’m just a human being. … I got lost in the excess. I got lost in my ego, I lost my career. I totally destroyed my reputation. But most of all, I lost my self-respect. … I hate myself right now. I been stripped down to nothing. I really am truly sorry for it all, no matter what they say.”
How the mighty have fallen. It really makes you think.
A bit further along, there’s One Police Plaza, which is constantly referenced in the show Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but which I had (for some reason) just assumed was a fictional place.
Finally, we’re down in the financial district, looking for Wall St.
These dark tunnels between skyscrapers are depressing. There’s the Trump Building (not to be confused with Trump Tower, or Trump World Tower) and… well, there’s not really much to see on Wall St. It’s narrow, and just a few blocks long, ending at Trinity Church, where we throw pennies on the grave of Alexander Hamilton.
Around the corner is the famous Charging Bull sculpture – currently swarmed by Asian tourists taking pictures. One teenager is sitting between the bull’s hind legs, cupping its balls as his girlfriend snaps a photo.
Staten Island Ferry
Our real goal today is the Staten Island Ferry, where we plan to go and see the Statue of Liberty.
And finally, we’re almost there. A huge crush of people crowd behind the big gates at the terminal. The ferry is free, every 15 to 30 minutes, all day and night.
Coming from a place in the US with almost no public transport, I’m a bit shocked that there are cities willing to pay for this sort of thing. On the ferry, half of the people are speaking Spanish, and a lot of the advertising is for fentanyl rehab clinics.
A Mexican guy gets on and sits next to me on the plastic bench. He turns to me and says, apropos of nothing, “¡Aleluya, gracias a Dios!” Then he gets out his phone and starts listening to a Gospel music playlist on Spotify.
Off to the right you can see the Statue of Liberty through the slight haze. It looks exactly like the Statue of Liberty. You’ve surely seen it in photos before. So imagine that, but smaller, because of the distance.
We get out at Staten Island and find that there’s a Starbucks and an outlet mall. Not one to pass up an exchange rate bargain, I buy a couple of pairs of Levi’s. The guy who attends me is wearing face glitter and has angel wings on the back of his sleeveless t-shirt.
As he rings me up, he’s venting to a co-worker about someone who came in earlier and who was, (in his words) “really ghetto”. I’m surprised people are still using the word “ghetto” in that way, what with all that’s happened to the culture since I moved away.
Morena takes a moment to look at Staten Island real estate on her phone. It’s expensive, but nothing like Manhattan. She’s a bit overwhelmed by the abundance, here at the outlet mall.
After a coffee, we get back on the ferry and head towards town. It must have been quite a thing to see, in the old Ellis Island days – after a few weeks at sea, you suddenly have the Statue of Liberty, which I believe is supposed to symbolise something related to freedom, and the New York skyline behind it.
“Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breather free”, or something to that effect.
Immigrant life realities
If I don’t seem to share the opinions of your average American liberal where it comes to immigration, it’s because I’ve been an illegal immigrant myself, and I understand the tradeoffs.
I overstayed my original tourist visa in Spain by 7 years, and figured I’d eventually work something out. It was a pain in the ass, but I was hardly alone in doing so – Spain’s levels of immigration over the past couple of decades are making it a melting pot just like the US.
And one thing I decided in all of that is that the type of people who are willing to move to a new country and “work something out later” are not helpless victims.
They are, in fact, quite resilient, and will most likely be fine, no matter what.
The possibility of being deported is just part of the game you’re playing if you stay in someone else’s country. That’s how I always saw it. Things were pretty touch-and-go for me at multiple points during my immigrant journey.
And that’s fine. Because it’s supposed to be hard.
If it were easy, we’d call it “sitting at home complaining about how the government hurt your feelings”.
Streets paved with Tesla stock
So when comfortable upper-middle-class Americans claim that Elon Musk has too much money, and therefore the American Dream is dead, they may be ignorant of the fact that for about two thirds of the world, this place is beyond their wildest dreams as far as “lands of opportunity” go.
(Seriously, go spend 10 minutes in India and get back to me.)
That’s why there are long lines at US embassies around the world, for people to apply for visas. Morena stood in that line, just a few months ago, back in Madrid. And now, here we are… in the Big Apple.
Back in Manhattan, the pizza-by-the-slice place is 5 Mexican guys in a hot little space. The bodega where I get 6AM coffee the next morning is staffed with Spanish speakers… probably Mexican.
Katz’s Deli, where we go for breakfast, serves an amazing pastrami sandwich, made by – guess what! – various Latin and Dominican guys.
(Morena orders matzo ball soup at Katz’s, because she’s a foodie and has to try random things, even if I tell her they’re not good. She eats two bites and then gives up.)
Speaking Spanish in New York
Morena says “everyone was really really friendly” about Americans. She also says she spoke more Spanish than English in the US – “all the customer service people spoke Spanish”, and were delighted when she reciprocated.
So while La Vanguardia here in Spain reports “daily kidnappings of immigrants and citizens” by masked ICE agents, for no other reason than the color of their skin or their Spanish language, Morena and I can happily report that we saw nothing even suggesting that people in New York were living in a fascist police state.
Indeed, it seems like Spanish is spoken fearlessly in public, almost everywhere – which, of course, nobody would do if they were being persecuted or “kidnapped” for it.
The one thing I do warn Morena about is jaywalking. This isn’t considered to be a crime in Spain, but the last time I tried it in the US, walking across a red light in front of a cop car, it turned out to be illegal.
Anyway, if the US really is just like Nazi Germany, I guess the immigrants would be relieved to be deported to somewhere else. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, it seems like most people here are doing just fine.
Random New York Observations
If I try to describe every walk we took, this is going to get even longer. So here are (in no particular order) several observations from various parts of the city:
- There are some really crazy people out here. Like, “screaming at the pigeons” crazy. Also, a certain number of people are walking around so high that they’re bent over at a 90-degree angle. Apparently, this is called the Fentanyl Fold. And as I mention elsewhere, ads for rehab clinics are everywhere.
- At a crosswalk, we see three Amish guys, standing there, looking totally out of place – dressed for the wrong century. At another, I spot a girl who’s got the words INCOMPREHENSIBLE DEMORALIZATION tattooed in all caps across her lower back, just above her butt. Deep!
- In Greenwich Village, the Stonewall National Monument is about 200 square feet of park, and it’s got a sign on the gate saying it’s closed for the government shutdown. Which is hilarious, because it’s basically a few benches behind a wrought-iron fence. (In case you’re not keeping track, Stonewall is where the LGBTQIA2S+ movement started, back in 1969.)
- The subway is ugly, but fast, and full of ads for an injury lawyer called Michael “The Bull” Lamonsoff. They keep announcing that “backpacks and other large objects are subject to random search from the police. Thank you for riding with us!”
- I find the main streets quite dehumanizing, walking down through a sea of people, between massive grey buildings. For a moment, everyone just seems replaceable. This is not uplifting, human-scale architecture like you find in European cities. It’s a forest soul-crushing granite monoliths that remind you of your insignificance.
Also, surprisingly, I’m disappointed by the food. It’s mostly not worth the price – in fact, it would be not worth it at half the price.
The only memorable meal we had was the pastrami at Katz’s Deli. Looking for some extra protein one day, I found that Target has 10 feet of shelf space for macaroni and cheese, but their canned fish section is about five things. I get some tuna, and it’s literally the worst thing I’ve ever eaten.
Morena, who usually has no objection to shopping, is stunned into silence by the number of choices we find everywhere, as well as the lack of “small” sizes on things like corn chips, or ibuprofen.
The New York Media Stranglehold
One of my main objections to the whole “New York” thing is their stranglehold on most of US media.
Those of us from “the flyover states” are used to having a New-York-centric worldview shoved down our throats – but “used to” doesn’t mean we like it.
And as someone who’s not super impressed by celebrity, I find the idea of moving to New York to become a famous (whatever) to be a rather stupid life plan.
But the bastions of old media are everywhere in New York.
Our hotel is on Broadway, half a block from Ed Sullivan theatre, where the marquee is dedicated to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. There’s the name COLBERT in bright lights, crawling up the edge of the building. Not bad for a guy who hasn’t been funny in over a decade.
Also nearby is Radio City Music Hall, and, well, Broadway.
Morena briefly looks at tickets to see Hamilton, apparently unaware that “I’m going to see Hamilton on Broadway” is just a form of status signalling for rich douchebags.
“Thirteen hundred dollars!” she exclaims, dropping her phone in her lap like it’s burning her hand. “I could take a trip to London, and see it for 60 pounds…”
Personally, I’ve been waiting for old media to die for quite a while now. And it looks like it might happen, eventually. Colbert has been canceled (effective May 2026) because late night isn’t profitable anymore, and movie stars, if they have something to promote, can just hop on Instagram and record a video.
On the other hand, the New York Times seems stronger than ever.
Some of the old media will probably be around for a long time to come.
Brooklyn and DUMBO
One day we head out to Brooklyn.
Most of what I know about New York comes from music. And that’s not much. But I know that Jay Z used to hang out at 560 State Street, and that Biggie grew up, basically, in Bed Stuy (formally known as Bedford-Stuyvesant). Both places are here in Brooklyn.
Other street names around town bring song lyrics to my head: “A come-on from the whores on 7th Avenue” from Paul Simon’s “The Boxer”, or “Sunken-eyed girl on Delancey Street” from Mike Doughty.
Brooklyn is, at least, more relaxing than Manhattan.
DUMBO is what they call the Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass area – the Manhattan Bridge is, of course, the less-known cousin of the Brooklyn Bridge.
In DUMBO there’s a street where people take selfies in front of the bridge – as usual, there are influencers out making quite a production of this. Morena and I snap a photo at the nearby “beach”, which is a few square feet of gravel on the edge of the river.
Timeout Market is something Morena wants to see. Everything, there, is (allegedly) famous. The famous chicken and biscuit place. The famous Jamaican barbecue. Morena spends $22 on a smoothie at a place called “Drugstore” that she knows from Instagram – it’s artfully presented with several colors of syrup swirling up the inside of the plastic cup, and contains lion’s mane mushroom. Famous!
Later, we walk between brownstones, and have coffee at a Yemeni coffeeshop that’s packed with loud hipsters. Then we sit outside a Protestant church, which has a mostly empty food pantry on its front porch. A few people come out, eventually, for a break in whatever event they’re attending.
They look like members of the NPR-totebag crowd I’ve heard about. They’re all wearing nametags which prominently display their pronouns.
The sound of the trains rattling across the bridge is deafening. But other than that, Brooklyn seems more liveable than what we’ve seen of Manhattan.
The Rockefeller Clan
The Rockefeller name is everywhere in New York.
According to family lore, my mom is descended from one of the less-important branches of the Rockefeller clan.
I haven’t seriously investigated whether this is true or not, but it’s at least plausible, and lines up with the facts that I have available.
For that reason I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Ron Chernow’s Titan, a biography of my ancestor John D Rockefeller. (If you’re not signed up for Audible, I highly recommend it.)
What I’ve gotten from the book is that old John D was a genius for creating organizations. Standard Oil became so successful at bringing kerosene lamps to poor homes around the world, that they were broadly hated. In a way, it’s a story quite similar to that of our current generation of tech bros – complete with slow-moving attempts at government regulation after the industry they created gets “too big”.
I suppose the story of “hating the guy who makes it to the top” is a basic part of human psychology, and it predates Rockefeller (and, for example, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg) by a million years.
John D retired from Standard Oil as kerosene lighting was on its way out. Lucky for him, the automobile was just becoming practical at the time, and he got a lot richer in retirement than he did while he was working. The second half of his life he dedicated to philanthropy – founding, among many other things, America’s first biomedical institute for medical research. (It’s now Rockefeller University, on York Avenue.)
Museum of Modern Art
Our last day, we head for the MoMA.
There we see The Starry Night by Van Gogh, which is actually better in person than in a reproduction. It’s a bit strange, though, that we’ve all seen everything from posters to pillowcases printed with Starry Night, and still, we’re willing to go and pay to see the original.
Monet’s Water Lilies fill a whole room, and I sit on a bench and take them in for a few minutes.
Dalís “The Persistence of Memory” – more commonly known as the “melting clocks” painting – is there, too, and much smaller than I had imagined.
They’ve got a huge Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol’s soup cans, and even Marcel Duchamp’s famous Bicycle Wheel, which, I guess, had to be somewhere.
If we had more time, we could see more museums, but in the few days we had I just wanted to see these two – the Met, and the MoMa – and they were incredible.
Living in Spain, I’ve spent plenty of time at the Prado Museum. These two were just as good as the Prado, and if you had any one of the major pieces you could build a whole museum around it in a smaller city.
Closing thoughts on New York
I thought I would hate New York, but I don’t.
It’s a city of immigrants, and I can’t really object to that.
(I also can’t really object to countries enforcing their immigration laws. It’s controversial, I know, to be both pro-immigration and pro-law-enforcement, but here we are.)
One of our last days in the city, Morena wants to go to the Anthropologie store next to Rockefeller Center.
It turns out it’s right across from where NBC studios are. A gaggle of weirdos is standing around outside the studio door, clutching DVDs, apparently waiting for autographs from whatever celebrity might be coming out.
A line of black Escalades hugs the curb.
Around the corner is the Rockefeller Center ice rink – John D loved ice skating himself, so I guess it’s a century-old tradition. There’s row of flags, and an impressive relief of Wisdom (personified as a Greek-style god) over the door of number 30. “Wisdom and knowledge,” it says, “shall be the stability of thy times.”
Several generations after John D Rockefeller, son of a snake-oil salesman, became the world’s richest entrepreneur, then, his distant grand-nephew visited his skyscraper. Having inherited nothing of that great man’s genius, or his wealth, the distant grand-nephew looked up, briefly, and said, “Wow”.
And shortly after that, the distant grand-nephew was told off by a security guard – an immigrant from India – for sitting on the edge of the skating rink.
Thanks for reading.
Yours,
Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.
P.S. If you enjoy what I’m doing here, please donate. There’s literally no reason for me to be writing long essays about my travels and my life in Spain, but people seem to like them and I’m going to keep doing it. So if you’re a fan, please show your support here. Thanks!
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