New York: beautiful, diverse … and crowded!

New York.

  Just saying the words evokes iconic images:  skyscrapers, the Statue of Liberty, Broadway plays  … It’s our biggest city, one of the most diverse and beautiful and one of the top U.S. tourist destinations:  number four, according to AAA, after Orlando, Anaheim and Las Vegas.

  My wife and I have been to most of Western Europe, a couple of countries in Eastern Europe, Mexico, Canada and most of the U.S., but we’d never been to New York.

  Actually, that’s not quite accurate. I’d been there a total of one day, while in the Navy. It was winter, bitterly cold, windy. My only memories of it are of going to the top of the Empire State Building, searching in vain for a deli that served great New York pastrami sandwiches, and being painfully cold.

  Last month, we saw New York in a different light. Our oldest daughter had planned to visit her best friend, who lives in Connecticut now, and casually asked if we’d like to go along. Not having been on a trip in ages, we said yes in a heartbeat.

 Her friend Stephanie and her husband, Jason, live an hour’s train ride from the city. We stayed with them all but one of the the six nights of our visit and spent three days and one night in New York.

  The temperature was roughly 60 degrees warmer than my previous visit so it was possible to see and enjoy the sights without worrying about hypothermia or frostbite. To a significant extent, the sights consisted of buildings. Scores of them, skyscrapers everywhere, some so tall their upper stories were lost in the clouds.

  The tallest building at the time of my Navy visit was the Empire State Building. Now it’s not even close; it’s the seventh tallest. The tallest, One World Trade Center, is some 500 feet taller. We had to be careful not to bump into people on the sidewalks while gawking up at the skyscrapers.

  Impressive as the tall buildings are, the one that impressed us most was St. Patrick’s Cathedral. We spent most of one of our three days in New York on a city tour. Our guide said that in its early days, the the Irish were at the absolute bottom of the city’s social structure. They responded by building the cathedral, and what a job they did!

  The largest Gothic cathedral in the U.S., St. Patrick’s covers an entire city block and is absolutely stunning, inside and out. The only thing in my experience that compares is Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which it resembles.

  The cathedral is a bit over a mile from the Dakota, where John Lennon lived and was infamously murdered. (Other celebrities who lived there through the years included Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland and Leonard Bernstein.)

   A one-mile walk from the Dakota takes you to Central Park, the most visited city park in the U.S., one of the most beautiful, and home to Strawberry Fields, the John Lennon memorial. Visiting that is a meaningful experience for any Beatles fan, this one included.

  Jason and Stephanie, our exemplary hosts, took us to a concert at a club called The Village Vanguard, the oldest continuously operated jazz club in the world. The featured act that evening was a guitarist named Kurt Rosenwinkel.

  Jason is a jazz musician and graduate of one of the best music conservatories in the country. He’s primarily a saxophonist, but also plays guitar; he owns some 30 of them. I’ve been playing guitar most of my life. And neither of us recognized a single one of the many chords Rosenwinkel played that night. My guess is that he invented a lot of them. After the show, I looked him up. He’s considered one of the greatest guitarists ever to have played the instrument.

  We emerged from the club to an entirely different kind of sound. Honking your horn is illegal in New York City, but you’d never know it. New Yorkers honk constantly. It’s annoying at first, but you get so used to it that eventually you don’t even notice. It’s just background noise. 

  New York, according to Google, is “one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, with dozens of enclaves and neighborhoods, and hundreds of different cultures, cuisines and languages.”

  Which would explain why almost everyone we spoke with there had an accent. Not a New York accent, but accents from all those languages. Our daughter asked a man for directions, listening intently  while he spoke and gestured for several minutes.

  “What did he say?” I asked her.

  “I have no idea.”

  So many accents, so many people.

  “You will never be alone here,” our tour guide said. “There will always be somebody around you.”

  True. And it can be a bit overwhelming.The sidewalks are human rivers, hundreds upon hundreds of people – people moving in front of you, behind you, beside you. People If you lived there, you’d get used to it. I didn’t, and in time it started to bother me. I vowed that upon returning home I’d drive to the desert east of town with a book and a lawn chair, take a dirt road to nowhere and enjoy a quiet read without another soul within miles.

  Our daughter was crazy about New York.

  “Wasn’t it great, Dad?” she said. “Didn’t you love it?”

  “It was great. I liked it. But can’t honestly say I loved it.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “So many people. You can hardly take a step without walking into someone. That got to me after a while.”

  I told her about my desert-drive idea.

  She mulled that over for a bit before responding.

  “I guess you’re just a true Idahoan, Dad.”

  No argument.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.