Wednesday 15th April 2009 – A New York Breakfast

The hotel was on the lower west side of Manhattan, in an area known as Chelsea.  It is a hotbed of Irish bars. But there may be less than there were.  The beer has much improved in the twenty years since I was last here.  Once the CO₂ has been swizzled out of it, there are discernable hops and malt.  I think American palates must like the acrid taste of the gas (Or, perhaps like most people nowadays, they have not acquired a taste for hops and malt, but have acquired a taste for CO₂).  Of course the swizzling attracts much attention, even though I am now sufficiently practiced at it not to cover the neighbourhood in foam.  By the end of the evening, I am even more practiced.  The beer now comes in pints, or at least what Americans call a pint, which is much smaller (by about a fifth) than I am used to.  But it comes in 'nonic' glasses, which don't slip out of the hand when the swizzle-foam lubricates the sides. 

The hotel exhibits much faded glory.  It has been refurbished in a style I don't recognise, but must include in its title the word 'bizarre'.  The doors are metal, and have been given that patterned-turning finish which fifties sports car enthusiasts loved to see on their engines.  What it didn't include was double-glazing.  So the night was noisy.  I spent it with a demon gang of garbage men, collecting dumpsters (which is what Americans call those large commercial waste bins).  Morning investigation revealed that there was a large manhole cover in the middle of Eighth Avenue which was rocked noisily by large vehicles.  But the demon dustmen were better company in the night.

The rental car for the next part of the journey was waiting only a few blocks away, so there was time for that great indulgence of a New York stay, the Great American Breakfast.  Breakfast in a New York coffee shop is the most enduring of my memories of New York.  I always made a point, when going to start work in New York on a Monday morning, to arrive on the Saturday night, and give myself a whole Sunday to recover.  I remember a particular event on an early, perhaps even the first, visit.  I had settled down at the counter with a vast plate of breakfast when a young woman came in obviously selling newspapers.  She was quite irate when I asked her for one: she only had one; to my untutored eye, and, would venture to suggest, to any untutored eye, one copy of the New York Sunday Times looked like a holepaperboy's round.  Thereafter, these Sundays were spent in a leisurely consumption of breakfast and the Sunday Times.

            The coffee shop this time, opposite Penn Station, didn't run to a counter, but breakfast was just as good, and just as vast.  The waitresses still exhibited that curious mix of maternal solicitousness, and peremptory rudeness that is forever the hallmark of New York. 

There was no New York Times this time, but the government, perhaps a little guilty about the doings of its immigration service, laid on a special entertainment.  The coffee shop was just opposite the main New York Post Office, a vast Edwardian pile, occupying a whole block to itself.  And it was 'Tax Day'.  This is the day when all Americans have to submit their income tax return to the Government.  And the rule is that they must get it post-marked on Tax Day.  So the Post Office figures large in the ritual.  It stays open till midnight, and the New York one had a whole row of mobile post offices parked outside.  Of course, anyone wanting to demonstrate on anything remotely connected to tax, knows the main post office is the place to be.  And every television station knows this is where the oddball stories of the day are going to be.  So we had a circus.

 

Then it was into the car, straight along 34^th Street, through the Midtown Tunnel and out onto the Long Island Expressway: with another New York Breakfast to remember.