May 2008
/ 1 of 1
There's more to the Big Apple than shopping, but even honeymooners might be tempted to indulge in a little retail therapy, says Sam Baker
Think of New York and you probably think of shopping. From legendary bargains at discount department store Century 21 to cut-price iPhones and pound-for-dollar bargains in Gap. You might think of bars and clubs like Balthazar and tables-for-friends-only Waverly Inn. But despite having attended the ready-to-wear shows twice yearly since the 1990s, the New York I love is not the one of fashion shows, car-to-bar heels and clothes suitable only for an air-conditioned lifestyle.
It’s a city of weather and walkers.
New York is one of the few US cities where you don’t feel like an idiot for setting foot on the sidewalk, despite its climate of extremes. (Half a metre of snow one visit, 90 per cent humidity the next.)
My New York is a reflection of the grand American families who built it – families like the Vanderbilts and Astors, whose feuds resulted in some of the city’s most opulent buildings as they competed to build ever more elaborate houses.
The first time I visited New York was to get married. Looking back, it seems madness. Neither my partner nor I had American connections. He’d visited the city only once and I hadn’t been at all. But in our flight from family conflicts, we decided to keep the numbers down, the ceremony simple and set our own location.
For $75 dollars (£40) and a minimum 72-hour stay, we could marry there. ‘Why not?’ we asked ourselves. A wedding and honeymoon rolled into one, with my partner’s nine-year-old son as best boy and official photographer.
The Dorset Hotel on West 54th Street, once the place for media meetings and power breakfasts, was quietly decaying by the time we stayed there; and we chose it for no other reason than we could afford to. We trekked down Sixth Avenue and Broadway in search of our marriage licence, through the garment district, past Canal Street and Chinatown, to City Hall at the tip of Manhattan, so close to the icy Atlantic we could almost taste its spray.
In City Hall, we queued in an office adorned with bullet-proof plastic to protect the staff. Next morning we took a yellow cab to City Hall and waited with 30 other couples in a lobby filled with orange plastic chairs until our names were called. Five minutes, two ‘I dos’ and a computer printout later we were married. Our knee-high wedding photographer, who could barely see under his NYC baseball cap, took his first official photos on the windswept steps of City Hall. (We even have heads in some of them!)
From here, our tiny wedding party walked to the Empire State Building. More photos were taken on the 86th floor: dazed, jet-lagged grins against a crisp April sky, with the world stretched out behind us past the two towers that dominated Manhattan’s skyline; and whose absence is just as omnipresent now.
Back at the Dorset, we drank champagne, then changed out of our fancy clothes and went for a walk. Uptown this time, along Fifth, past St Patrick’s Cathedral and on to the retail temples of Saks and Bergdorf, and my new stepson’s own private heaven: the world-famous toy store, FAO Schwarz. The city morphed as we skirted Central Park, approaching the gothic grandeur of the Metropolitan Museum, and beyond to the Guggenheim, standing stark and white among the buildings that surround it.
A New York wedding is the ultimate excuse to keep going back. Whether or not our work demands it, we return each year and watch the city change. The Dorset Hotel is gone, subsumed by The Museum of Modern Art next door. Now, if a fit of nostalgia takes us, we have to visit MoMA and stand in the garden.
Several of the grand midtown hotels do remain: the Art Deco Waldorf-Astoria, which moved from its original 34th Street location in the 1920s to make way for the Empire State Building, The Carlyle, now scrubbed up, and The Plaza, recently renovated. My personal favourite is The Algonquin – not cool and long-since fashionable, but steeped in history and with a personality all its own. I would rather stay there than all the chic hotels in Manhattan. (People still visit the lobby just to sit at the round table, hoping to imbue themselves with some of Dorothy Parker’s rapier wit.)
Next time you’re in New York, take time between shopping and the shows to treat yourself to a Sunday afternoon in The Algonquin’s lobby. Relax in its plush armchairs with the papers and drink your way through the cocktail menu, as you suffer inspection by the latest incarnation of the hotel’s famous cat, Matilda.
Sam Baker’s new novel This Year’s Model (£12.99, Orion) is out now.
