Howdy!
Hello! I’m finally leaving New York. I’ve had a great time here, even though I have to be honest and say that I’m starting to really miss Europe. Americans are so…American. Bless them.
Anyway! I couldn’t quite do a full guide to New York in the way I did with Venice because 1) New York is so much bigger 2) I was working for most of my time here so couldn’t quite go for the same amount of whimsy, but some people did ask so I’ve collated a bunch of thoughts and recommendations.
Hope they’re useful!
Some stray recs
# if you’re loitering in Manhattan and find yourself in need of an affordable drink - not the easiest thing to find - then I would kindly point you towards Veloce, which is a little chain of bars; they do maybe the best happy hour on the island, aka a glass of wine for $7 and a bottle for $28, and several of the locations have either a little garden or a little terrace
# everyone and their dog will have their favourite dive bar but reckon mine has to be Do Or Dive in Bed Stuy - affordable drinks, nice garden at the back, good atmosphere, and next door is the fancier Dynaco if you want to move on to a more respectable place afterwards
# similarly, everyone will have their favourite cheap dim sum joint in Chinatown but mine is Super Taste, which will give you ten fat dumplings for six dollars, and their homemade vinegar dipping sauce is real good
# if you want to experience a real New York institution, Montero’s in downtown Brooklyn is a solid bet - it’s a pool and karaoke bar that opened like 80 years ago and is home to basically one of each type of New Yorker, gets quite rowdy quite quickly on weekends and the woman who runs the karaoke is terrifying, big fan
# if you’re getting a bit overwhelmed by the city and need a walk somewhere quiet and charming, I’d rec going down to Red Hook, which is a bit of a faff as it’s not on the subway but you can either take a bus (boo) or a ferry (eyy) down and spend a lovely afternoon just pleasantly idling around there, it’s a delight
# if you REALLY want to escape from it all then absolutely take the free ferry down to Staten Island - love a good ferry, and love a free thing - then go have lunch at Enoteca Maria, which is this amazing place where they rope in “nonnas” from different countries to serve up whatever they grew up making, v v charming, although Staten Island in itself is maybe not very charming
# will say that another weirdly underrated neighbourhood is Coney Island - feel like people expect it to be insanely tacky and touristy and I mean sure it is both of those things but also the actual beach is really nice, and if you walk down towards Brighton Beach you can eat at one of their many Slavic/central European restaurants and just have a really good time wolfing down dumplings and drinking kvass
# hipsters/lovers of free bevs assemble! an absolute godsend on this trip was the Thirsty Gallerina account, which puts out a list of every private view happening in the city every evening, and even tells you if you should expect drinks or not - allowed me to see some good art and drink some fizz, truly ideal
# for a similar crowd - if you’d like to do some cheap thrifting then I’d recommend L Train Vintage, which I believe has a number of locations; I went to a number of different charity shops in my time here, as it is an illness that I have, and would say that was the only one where the prices didn’t make me want to faint
The “in retrospect, too expensive for what it is” corner
(obviously it should be said that these things are maybe not too expensive for what they are if you’re operating on a New York salary, but regrettably I was not, so my bar for “actually that was worth it” was pretty low)
# spent an altogether pleasant hour in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens but did I also spend a lot of that time thinking “hmmm but is this $24 pleasant?”? yes, yes I did - ultimately it’s just a big nice garden, that should cost a tenner, maybe twelve quid at most
# I’m so sorry but I think Katz’s deli is just a tourist trap now! spent like thirty dollars on what was essentially just some meat with bread and mustard, and a couple of gherkins! like obviously it is An Important Landmark but truly, unless you’re a When Harry Met Sally diehard, then simply go to any other Jewish deli and spend less money on your pastrami
Some things which are actually worth the money
# I love the Whitney museum so much! that’s all there is to say on that to be honest - it’s a really great space, they always have really great art on, the Biennial slaps, it’s not cheap but it deserves it
# same for the MoMA actually, long live the MoMA, simply bananas permanent collection
# the Met Cloisters are also just fundamentally very weird - basically a whole lot of v random European medieval art shoved inside some sort of monastery up a big hill near the northern tip of Manhattan - but I aggressively loved my afternoon there; the art is good, the view of the river is good, and getting to then do a big walk down through Washington Heights was also a delight, really felt like a Proper Day Out
# so this one is a bit time sensitive as the exhibition ends in late July but if you’re going to New York before that then I cannot recommend the Noguchi museum enough - the space itself is really great, even if you don’t necessarily vibe with the permanent sculptures (I personally didn’t vibe with the permanent sculptures), and most importantly their Toshiko Takaezu show is soooooooooooo good, a real highlight for me (also if you’re doing this then I’d rec having some delicious Greek food in Astoria before/after, it’s only a fifteen minute walk up the road)
Some vague remarks
# Americans simply do not say “sorry” in the way that we - Brits and their fellow travellers - do, and it’s just quite jarring to say sorry as you brush past someone and for them to either ignore you entirely or go “oh no you’re alright don’t worry!!!!”, both those options are bad, please also just say sorry then move on with your life
# a message of hope: it may seem like a pipe dream at first but it is true that anyone can, with enough time and practice, no longer get unbelievably lost, angry and frustrated on the subway, my first couple of weeks were a navigational nightmare but it can happen! you too can defeat the MTA if you really set your mind to it!
# motherfucker there is just so much sugar in everything in America, food is full of sugar, drinks are full of sugar, even nominally savoury things like sausages are full of sugar, I don’t have a lot to add on this but I couldn’t not mention it, be ready for absolutely everything to taste ever so slightly sweet
# something I’d not really seen coming is that New Yorkers just…don’t really dress up? by Londoner standards at least? I’d brought a couple of fun little going out outfits with me and in the end I absolutely never wore them, because I would have looked completely out of sync with everyone else if I had, essentially every bar I went to even on weekends was just full of people dressed…..normally, please bring me my English hussies back, I miss them so much
# New Yorkers work very hard! I hate it! it may be that I’ve really found my specific people in London but my god did I struggle to find fellow layabouts here to go have drinks at 5.30pm on the dot, when I can usually find people happy to skive off work early back home - they all stay in the office until late! a lot of them don’t really go out during the week! a very odd people, basically ended up getting socially bullied into doing more work, which I naturally hated and resented
The free stuff corner
Made myself a list of all the free museums/museums with specific free time slots before I arrived and managed to get through a fair few of them - here they are, with commentary if I actually did go:
# Queens County Farm Museum
# American Folk Art Museum (quite small but solid exhibition on Art Brut)
# Bronx Museum
# Hispanic Society Museum (v charming! enjoyed it a lot!)
# The Museum At FIT (really fun exhibition on sleeves at the moment, love a good sleeve)
# Jewish Museum (Saturdays)
# Morgan Library & Museum (Friday 5-7pm)
# International Center of Photography (every third Thursday - 6-9pm)
# Smithsonian Design Museum (5-6pm)
# Rubin Museum of Art (Friday 6-10pm) (Tibetan art! not something you see a lot of! found it v soothing, as a place)
# National Museum of the American Indian
# Brooklyn Museum (first Saturday) (insanely good but good luck getting one of those free tickets, be prepared to set an alarm or something)
# Museum of the Moving Image (Thursday 2-6pm)
# NYC Library (just unbelievably good “treasures” collection, don’t understand why they don’t charge for it, some awe-inspiring stuff in there)
# Museum at Queens College
# Print Center
# Waterfront Museum
# Yeshiva University Museum
# Grey Art Museum (really enjoyed the exhibition they had on, actually, and quite rare for a free NYC museum to also not be the size of a shoebox)
# Neue Galerie (first Friday 5-8pm) (would say that if you’re European then the NG is only truly worth it when it’s free, as Americans may be ready to pay through the nose to see some German and Austrian paintings but ultimately we have a lot of them at home, don’t we, we know what they’re like)
And I think that’s it? But I may add some stuff over the next few weeks, who knows.
Bye!