bite the big apple

And a happy New Year from the Big Apple –from New York.

The first night I arrived here in Manhattan I was awakened by a call from a friend in Australia. Discombobulated by the time change and a smidgeon of jetlag I couldn’t go back to sleep.

So what do you do in NY at 2 o’clock in the morning? You get up, ignore CNN, get dressed, leave the famous Algonquin Hotel – the writers’ and actors’ pub – and walk to Times Square to buy a hotdog with mustard from a street vendor. Two dollars. Next day I saw them for one dollar. Thank your mother for the rabbits. And a pair of winter gloves from a street hustler for five bucks. At 2a.m. Broadway was still teeming with people. And, as George Benson would sing: the neon lights were still bright on Broadway.

To get there I had to pass my old stomping ground. My old work places. The venerable New York Times building and the Paramount Theatre building where bobby-soxers used to have swooning pre-Beatles hysteria for a skinny singer called Frank Sinatra. Make it here, you can make it anywhere…

And what hit me, as I headed for the nocturnal hot dog vendor, was that it had been thirty years since I permanently LEFT this metropolis. The Big Apple. A place I still believe sculpted my early adult thoughts – and later newspaper and radio attitudes -- by reading Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson and James Reston and Jimmy Breslin and interviewing people like Gloria Steinem. Three decades since I went home to Australia from Gotham City after nearly eleven years of living in one of the most exciting, most influential, places in the world.

New Yorkers would argue with that comment. Not ONE of the most exciting, not ONE of the most influential. The most exciting and influential. The only place to be. To them the rest of America doesn’t exist. Let alone Europe or Asia or Australia.

I surprised my Australian phone caller when asked what it felt like to come back after such a long time. My initial reaction, when I saw the Manhattan skyline with the Empire State building and the distinctive Chrysler Building, was “I’ve come home”. But, eventually I realised – on a 2004 Christmas visit -- that Thomas Wolfe was right. You can never go home again. It was another life in another lifetime. My favourite hangout for newspaper journos, Gough’s Chop House. opposite the New York Times building on West 43rd Street, was torn down to be replaced, ironically, by the Reuters News tower.

Downey’s, a favourite Irish Eighth Avenue watering hole, has long gone. Replaced by a euphemistic “gentlemen’s club” which, apparently, means a joint where they serve booze, have table top strippers and show dirty movies.

Ah, nostalgia aint what it used to be. So, at the birth of 2005, permit some jottings from an old journo’s journey.

I didn’t go to Ground Zero. Didn’t go to the razed space that used to feature the famous World Trade Centre twin towers. Not sure why. Just couldn’t face it and some New York friends told me (when I confessed) that they felt the same way. Maybe because, when I was living on the Palisades in North Bergen, New Jersey, back in the 1960s I saw them rise majestically from nothing at the bottom of Manhattan. And on a return visit dined at the breathtaking Windows on the World more than 100 storeys about New York City.

Speaking of food, New York is an awesome place where you can pay a fortune or eat for virtually nothing. In the 1960s I remember paying $400 for dinner for two at a place called The Palace. You had six waiters and they replaced your hot bread roll every fifteen minutes. Whether you wanted it or not. The silver samovar they served the soup from was worth $12,000. Forty years ago.

At the ritzy 21 Club in 1966 a hamburger cost $25. Aristotle Onassis ate there a lot. He could afford to. And yet, as I mentioned, you can get a hotdog for a dollar. You can get bacon and eggs and hash browns for peanuts. And the coffee stream never stops from the minute you sit down in any restaurant.

Their delis still serve the biggest and best corned beef or pastrami on rye sandwiches in the world. Street vendors also sell massive, ghastly, salt-encrusted pretzels which New Yorkers love.

But it is inhumanly cold. So cold that New Yorkers waddle up Fifth Avenue in boots and sweaters and jackets and scarves and overshoes. Tears freeze in your eyes. Moisture in your nose, to be indelicate, freezes and the nasal “shards of glass” make your nose bleed. Several days of that and I knew I didn’t want to live there any more. Even more, I still call Australia home.

Times Square has changed dramatically. It used to be as sleazy, even sleazier, than the King’s Cross of the Sixties. The grubbiness has gone. The porn shops with their inflatable dolls have gone. A deliberate policy by city officials to make their most popular tourist attraction more attractive. And it has worked.

It was all a worthwhile exercise. For research for a new book I am writing about Aussie journalists, at home and abroad, I hung out with the legendary, indestructible, Steve Dunleavy from the New York Post at a real New York bar called Langan’s on West 47th Street. Went downtown to sit in on the extortion and murder conspiracy trial of one of mafia boss John Gotti’s sons. The man they called The Teflon Don. Gave a whole new meaning to the term “justice is blind”. When the court adjourned the judge left the bench with his guide dog.

And because it’s my business I diligently read the New York papers every day. The New York Times is still pompous – and with an in-house ombudsman -- runs an amazing screed of corrections and amplifications each day. The Daily News is trying to be respectable and subsequently looks grey and drab. The New York Post – owned by Rupert Murdoch and edited by an Australian, Col Allan – is predictably cheeky.

My major reflective personal reaction to New York this time? It is true…. you can never go home again.

Happy New Year.

January 2, 2005

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004