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I decided to have a little walk around Central Park, unfortunately cut rather short by a deluge of rain, but it’s the rapidly (well, relatively) changing views of the skyscrapers around the edges of the park that I found the most captivating. If I’ve got my skyscrapers correct, of the tallest two, that’s Steinway Tower to the left and Central Park Tower on the right.

I think that Steinway Tower, or 111 West 57th Street as it’s officially called, looked very odd in the skyline because of just slender and thin it is. The development has 60 luxury apartments, of which only 46 are located within the main part of the tower. How much space do people really need in a city of such homelessness? The apartments cost from between $7.5 million to over $60 million, although the views are really something impressive judging by the photos at the official web-site at https://111w57.com/.

As an aside, look at the rainy skies….

Given that, I went to hide in a covered area and got there just in time.

Along with two police horses and their riders who also wanted to avoid the rain. New York has one of the largest number of mounted police in the United States, there are over fifty.

And a post-rain view of the skyscrapers.

Riverside Park is a four mile long park which is located by the Hudson River and I don’t have much to note about my meanderings around some of it. It was odd being able to hear an underground railway line underneath the park, which is the Freedom Tunnel in which 100 homeless people used to live before it was thought a good idea to remove them. One of the entry points is visible in the above photo and there’s more information about this rather fascinating tunnel at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Tunnel.

The biggest disappointment was to discover the below.

There were raccoons in the park and I didn’t see any ?

The first brewery of the evening was Grimm Artisanal Ales, although I had to faff about in a local park for fifteen minutes as I turned up at 16:45 and hadn’t realised that the taproom element didn’t open until 17:00. The brewery was founded by Joe and Lauren Grimm and this is their main taproom, located in Brooklyn. They were founded in 2013, but it took them five years to get a brewery set-up of their own, relying on using other breweries for the first few years.

It’s another organised and even quite alluring brewery set-up, with the brewing equipment off to the left. There’s plenty of seating as well, including an outside area for those who like to sit by traffic fumes and insects. Sitting at the bar was popular during my visit, but there were some lower chairs available as well. The staff members were friendly and pro-active in explaining the options, it felt a welcoming venue to visit. I visited on an early evening on Thursday and it was getting relatively busy, but I can imagine that it must soon hit its capacity on a Friday and Saturday evening.

The menu is on Untappd, but there’s a printed version as well which is always handy. It’s a well balanced menu in terms of the different beer styles and there are also plenty of ciders on there as well.

I tried five different beers, this is the most colourful, the Lilt fruited sour. My favourite was the bottle pour Memory Palace, a 12% imperial stout. That beer had some coconut and chocolate flavours and was very smooth for its ABV, a rather lovely way to end the visit. A very passable bar and one that I’d visit again.

I really appreciate the complete lack of subtlety with some of the overground sections of the New York Subway. This particular clump of metal leading to West Farms Square in the Bronx dates to the first few years of the twentieth century. There’s more information about the elevated rails of the New York Subway at https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Chapter_13._Design_of_Steel_Elevated_Railways which shows their scale and complexity.

I mention all this as the track was a little bit broken when I came back to the station after visiting Bronx Zoo, hoping to get back to Manhattan. The only solution was to go one stop in the wrong direction and then change tracks back again whilst the engineers resolved the problem. There was no subtle way that they were fixing the track, the engineers were high in the air either whacking the rails with huge mallets or watching the others whacking the rails with huge mallets. This is what I consider true civil engineering to be and I think that’s what my friend Liam does all day (other than drinking tea). I thought that it was most impressive.

They didn’t shut the line down either, the repair crew just moved out of the way if there was a train going past on the neighbouring track. There was something rather industrial and exciting about listening them hitting steel (or whatever it’s made out of) about the place.

Located opposite Evil Twin Brewery, this is the former Tobacco Warehouse which is now used by the St. Ann’s Warehouse theatre group. To me, it’s one of those fake buildings where there’s now just the frontage and nothing else, although that’s not a recent design decision that’s the fault of the theatre, the interior went long ago. At least the building is in usage again today, it was constructed before the Civil War and was used as a tobacco inspection centre.

Next to it is Manhattan Bridge which crosses the East River (which isn’t technically a river, it’s a tidal estuary, and it’s also known as the Sound River) into Manhattan. Work on the bridge started in 1901 and it was completed in 1909, which seems fairly reasonable going for a structure of this complexity. I’m sure my friend Liam would have struggled to get this constructed any quicker today. There was though a structural mistake made with later additions to the bridge which meant that there was a dip in the road and rail lines, which wasn’t entirely ideal. They fixed this in 1980, although only at great cost. The bridge was going to known as Bridge Number 3, which is entirely practical, but the New York Times hated that, and newspapers are powerful so it was renamed.

The Manhattan Bridge is here on the right, with the Brooklyn Bridge, the first bridge to cross the river (or tidal estuary), on the left hand side of the photo, built between 1870 and 1883. It was a difficult sell for the developers and they had to bribe city officials to get the required permissions to construct it. It was once known as the ‘Great East River Bridge’ which I think has quite a ring to it, but it took its current name in 1915.

A nice little beach area, there’s a pleasant riverside park here.

The Freedom Tower and much else in downtown Manhattan is visible in the background.

Underneath the Manhattan Bridge, it seemed a popular place for locals to have a little picnic or even an afternoon nap.

This bronze bust is located in Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn and commemorates the life of William Jay Gaynor, the Mayor of New York between 1910 and 1913. Gaynor was seen as a good man who was a reformist visionary, particularly in the area of criminal justice.

The memorial, made from pink Milford granite, was designed by Adolph Alexander Weinman who was also responsible for some of the sculptures at Pennsylvania Station,a location which might have perhaps been seen as one of the architectural wonders of the modern world. Some of Weinman’s works were saved, but it was the photo of one his works, Day, in landfill that was an important trigger to salvage even more. As a random aside, it was the disastrous incompetence of Stuart T. Saunders, who ran Penn Central which demolished the station, and he died in Richmond which is where I’m writing this blog post. Saunders also sought to destroy Grand Central railway station, but good men and women were able to thwart his aims. Anyway, I’ve digressed again.

The rear of the memorial. Anyway, the reason I started on this post was not to complain again about the demolition of a beautiful railway station, but it was to comment that there’s a famous photo taken just after a politician was nearly assassinated. And that photo is of Gaynor, although he somehow survived and had bits of bullet in his neck until his death a few years after the assassination attempt in August 1910.

And there’s the photo, with Gaynor rather obviously the one in the middle.

No real text to this post, but I just liked this photo of a rainy morning in New York. I had been warned by someone just how rainy it was when walking down the steps of the hotel (well, pod place) but hadn’t quite expected it to be as bad as it was. That’s the disadvantage of being confined to a small pod away from any windows. Fortunately, I’m fully prepared for most weathers on this trip and my waterproof coat and bag cover came out, as I can’t have my McCain’s bag getting wet (primarily as the damn thing takes ages to dry). The location is Bryant Park which was first laid out in 1847 and is named after William Cullen Bryant, a long-serving editor of the New York Evening Post.

Excuse my random placing of this post when, as far as this blog is concerned, I’m still not at the end of my time in New York (although I left a few days ago). But, it’s a convenient time for me to write this and so this is where this is going. Oh the editorial power…..

But, back to New York, which I’ve visited on a number of occasions before. It’s fair to say that there is a frightening side to New York, just as there is to nearly every major capital city in the world (although I’ll leave Warsaw out of this, as the Poles have a capital city run with such incredible efficiency and competence that they have avoided anything frightening). But the element that is most exciting to me is the liberating side of no-one, really no-one, cares what you’re doing.

There were no shortage of what might be considered odd incidents that I saw in New York, whether that be people lying down on the floor asleep in the middle of the subway carriage, people with an absence of clothes, a homeless woman and a shop-owner having a fight, a man dancing slowly across the road and so many more. But what is more notable is that, far more even than in cities such as London, no-one really seems to pay much attention other than a slight glance to the side at what is happening. Partly that’s no doubt just not wanting to get involved, but also because these things happen with such regularity that they’re not notable any more. I find freedom very exciting and there’s little doubt that you can be just about anything that you want to be in New York.

The levels of poverty are though beyond that of most western cities, with homeless people forced to find nearly any quiet spot that they can hide away in. There were plenty sleeping on platforms of the subway network or even beyond the parts that passengers are allowed to go. The scale is immense, there are just under 55,000 people in New York who are homeless and part of the municipal shelter system, but there are tens of thousands more that are sleeping rough and no-one can accurately count that. The damage to their physical and mental health is immense, but a figure that surprised me is that only 7% of all the homeless people in shelters are white, compared to the population of New York which is over 40% white. The system can’t cope and is nowhere near coping.

There are some world class businesses operating in areas of the city which have great poverty, not least some of the craft breweries which I visited this week. They either have to work around the problem, or try to give as much back to their local community as they can. But, as it stands, homelessness in New York is higher than at anytime since the Great Depression in the 1930s. None of it bodes well for the future.

One of the other challenges for the city is that crime is now escalating out of control, up 31% in one year. There are plenty of newspaper and magazine articles at the moment about how dangerous New York is, and it’s reached the stage now that I’m not sure it’s really a place for families. At some stage, someone is going to have to turn that situation around to prevent investment in the city starting to fall. The strength of the dollar in the global markets will also reduce the number of tourists, so these could well be challenging times for the hospitality industry.

The city’s police is looking to respond to this situation by looking at privatising more of their non police work, particularly relating to traffic roles which currently take up on average 15 to 20% of a police officer’s time. They need to get more police officers on the streets, but they’re still a long way off being able to do that and their 36,000 officers are struggling to cope. That’s a similar number of police officers to those in the Met police in London, but the challenges in New York are perhaps on a higher level. Low level crime is evident all over the place, not just with the amount of fare evasion that goes on across the subway or shoplifting from stores. Often fare evasion goes on in the vicinity of station staff who likely just use their discretion and a willingness not to get involved in a dangerous conflict with anyone, it gives a feeling of lawlessness.

But, despite all those challenges, the city remained exciting to me, it’s still full of opportunities and hope for the future for many. It’s a loud and vibrant city, indeed the noise sometimes doesn’t feel far off how loud some cities in India are, which I can imagine loses its appeal after not that long. However, it’s much more of a 24-hour city than somewhere such as London, not least as its subway has always operated for 24 hours a day, which makes it feel alive all the time. As an aside, I remember when I lived in London the excitement of being able to get to a 24 hour supermarket at any time because of the bus service at night, although I actually never felt the need to go to Morrison’s or wherever at 02:00.

I’d merrily visit New York again, but it feels like its edges are getting ever harder and it’s becoming ever tougher. For the average visitor who is constantly cautious, I’d say that the city is safe as long as care is taken, although there are some neighbourhoods that are of course best avoided. There’s evidently a lot of money in the financial district, and some of the soaring apartment blocks mostly near Central Park have properties selling for tens of millions of dollars. In a comment perhaps appropriate for British politics today, I can’t though see much of that money trickling down to those sleeping homeless at the foot of the apartment blocks, nor not much hope for the underprivileged in the city.

Some web-sites say ‘of course New York is safe, it’s the same as any western city’, but I’m not sure that’s entirely true, particularly when comparing to many European and Asian cities. This article from Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-is-nyc-safe-crime-stat-reality/, gives an in-depth look at the challenges which New York currently has. The new Mayor of New York, elected in January 2022, doesn’t seem to attract much international press in the way that some of his predecessors have, but Eric Adams is a former police officer and hopes are there that he could change things. One of this first actions though was to try and hire his brother on a salary of $240,000 per year, which required a waiver from the Conflicts of Interest Board, so Adams proposed a cut in salary to $210,000. Although the board was having none of it, they reduced his salary from the suggested $210,000 per year to $1 per year, which is some pay cut. Time will tell whether Adams can turn the crime statistics around.

But, I’ve digressed somewhat, I very much enjoyed my time in New York and liked the improvements to the public transportation system which made it much easier to pay. The city seemed relatively clean, things mostly worked and the selection of craft beer was world class, so that did for me.