New York City is one of the most sensationally exciting cities to visit in the world. You may think so at first - for the place is nothing short of mad, epitomizing the extremes of modern America. But spend even a few days here and the adrenalin takes hold.
Walking through the canyon/like city streets, eyes forever drawn upwards by the soaring architecture, is an experience, the buldings like icons to the modern age. And despite all the hype, the movie-image sentimentality, the island of Manhattan is massively romantic.
Whether is flickering of the midtown skyscrapers, the 4am half-life in Greenwich Village, or justwasting the morningon the Staten Island Ferry, you would have to be made of stone not to be moved by it all.
New York is not a conventionally pleasing city - or not that matter conventional in any respect. The divisions between rich and poor in Manhattan are starkly underscored on the street: homelesspick through the trash of manicured brownstone apartment buldings, and hostels linger in a gentrifying neighbourhoods.
In a perverse way, though, these tangible and potent contrasts give New York much of its excitment . That said, New York in the mid-1990s does seem to have emerged, though wearily, from a long period defined by racial strife, urban blight and general despair. Indeed, recent statistics that put crime rate at their lowest level for 25 yeras, with murderes and shootings down by 30 percent, have citizens and visitors alike breathing a sigh of relif.
The city is more straightforward plesures come from its different ethnic neighbourhoods of lower Manhattan, from Chinatown to the Jewish Lower East Side, the arty concentrations of SoHo and Tribeca, Greenwich and East Village, its architecture, the whole city reads like an illustrated history of modern design, and its art, over wich you can spend weeks in the Metropolitan and Modern Art museums and countless collections.
And there is of course, the opportunity to consume. You can eat anything, cooked in any style, drink in any kind of company, sit through any amount of movies. The established arts, dance, theatre, music - are superbly catered for, and New York clubs are varied and exciting. As for shops, the choice in this hearthland of the great capitalist dream is almost numbingly exhaustive.
