Manhattan Diary

Friday 18^th March2011

Woke at an ungodly hour of 3.30 (as planned) and phoned Dad at 4am to confirm that I was awake, although I only caught the most fleeting glimpse of he and Mum when I boarded the 4.43 from Platform 6 at Colchester North Station. I was glad of the advance preparation, as physically this early in the day in miserable, expensive England, I just felt akin to moving one foot in front of the other, my senses not my own.

Arrived in London Liverpool Street after a short wait at the signals ("on time" the driver said), and then headed on through my favourite city, towards arguably the greatest city in the world, by taking the Piccadilly Line from Holburn all the way to Heathrow Terminal 3.

All seemed to go well, although it was already past 7.30, but with the obliging help of American Airlines the luggage door was reopened for me, and I zipped along the travelators to Gate 13(!), with all the other Economy passengers.

Reset my watch to American Time, and therefore the Boeing 777 was underway at the same time I'd left North Station – 4.43. It was a hazy afternoon at JFK when eight hours later I stepped on US soil for the first time (technically my first outing on US territory was at the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede.)

It’s funny how your preconceptions are built up about a place: from what I imagined of Manhattan as a vast sprawling metropolis, the reality was actually a little different, certainly from what I observed when I took the Long Island train to Penn Station, with lots of small single floor houses in the more run-down parts of Queens - until the two most famous gleaming towers (the beautiful Chrysler and the Empire State) came into view. In a way it reminded me of the approach to Liverpool Street - London is likewise becoming more and more Manhattan nowadays.

I couldn’t resist a glance up at the Empire State Building as it was so close to Penn Station, and then as it was such mild weather (late spring/early summer in atmosphere), I took my first walk through New York City, passing one or two more famous landmarks such as the distinctive Flatiron Building, the County Court House (as seen in the films Twelve Angry Men, The Godfather and the recent Adjustment Bureau), and as I continued along Broadway I detoured to find a place that I’d always been meaning to visit in NY: the corner of Church Street and Lispenard Street, where a French film crew were innocently shooting a documentary film when they happened to catch sight of the first tower of the World Trade Center being hit.

I visited Ground Zero itself much later as darkness was setting in, and also made pledge to visit a McDonald’s at 160 Broadway nearby - that I remembered seeing standing in dust-filled defiance of Al Qaeda on September 11^th.

With the next train back to my hotel in Queens Village not due until 9.42, I had time over to go the whole hog down Broadway towards Battery Park, and caught my first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty this evening.