New York City and the Sistine Chapel are both the victims of improvement. In 1999, when the five-year cleaning of the Sistine Chapel was completed, visitors walked into those hallowed halls and saw Michelangelo’s frescos gleaming in Technicolor. The paintings had been restored to fully realize their potential. But something didn’t sit right about the scrubbed pink cherubs and Moses’ stark white robes – the cleanup had washed away some of the painting's authenticity, had daubed off some of its character and scrubbed clean its history.

New York City’s renaissance under the Giuliani administration was similar in effect. The former mayor chucked out characters like the guerrilla window washers – vagrants who would attack car windscreens with soap and water as you waited in traffic and then demand to be paid. His administration closed down peep shows and drove up rents; the improved areas were colonized by Gaps and H&Ms. New York is now among the safest cities America: Business is booming, it is beautified and sanitised.

It is nearly bereft of character.

But shh… True York is still out there, head down, hoping to remain unnoticed by its enemies – property developers and politicians – but desperate to be known by its friends. Welcome.

The Highline

10th avenue beginning at 34th St, spanning 22 blocks to Gansevoort St.

The Highline is an abandoned high-rise railway line and New York’s secret green soul stretched out by the river in the Meatpacking district. All you’ll see of it are its rusting iron girders and the shadows it casts on the area’s rapidly gentrifying industrial blocks. But an aerial perspective from a neighbouring building (or the line itself should you sneak up – which is now illegal), reveals a true wilderness blooming above The Jungle. Abandoned since the eighties, the skeletal railway line is a veritable prairie, dotted with native NYC wildflowers (yes, they exist). Sow thistle and daisy fleabane blossom among unruly grasses in the surreal air-scape, as well as far-flung flora whose inexplicable presence has been rumored to be from seeds that cascaded off the wheels of low flying aircraft.

It’s a relic from the mid 19th century when the West Side of Manhattan was a death-trap. It wasn’t gangs of hoodies that took out innocent pedestrians, but thundering freight trains that barrelled down tracks set plumb in the middle of the street – not the city planners’ finest decision. Bystander mortality rates were so high that a temporary solution employed a mounted flag-bearer who trotted out in front of locomotives waving pedestrians out of the way, known as a West Side Cowboy. Once locals began to label 10th Avenue “Death Avenue”, the city decided it was time to step in and build an elevated railway. However, the proposal was met with fears that the miles of track would spawn shadowy warrens of vice like those that thrived under similar structures. The solution was a railway threaded through the third stories of the buildings along the route, an innovation unlike any of its time.

Unfortunately, for us purists in search of untrammelled New York City, this gem was recently “discovered” by urban planners and is now championed by celebrities like Kevin Bacon and Diane von Furstenberg, who along with politicians are haggling over the fate of the aerial wilderness. It is in process of being transformed into a manicured public park only after the rusty behemoth is deemed liability-proof – a smart move given the American penchant for suing. Catch it while it’s still real.

The Hungarian Pastry Shop

1030 Amsterdam Avenue
(between West 110th and 111th streets)
New York, NY 10025
(001) 212 866-4230

The conceit of this constantly thronged bakery café is that these Hungarian pastries actually taste quite bad. Aside from a croissant or two on offer (note: croissants are French), the chalky biscuits and gummy cakes are better left in their glass display cases. The service system here is unfathomably awkward – you order at the counter, give the server your name and go sit somewhere to wait until she wanders around the café shouting your name, casting about wildly for you. But the many customers who are mostly bespectacled students from nearby Columbia University, splayed across rickety chairs, rucksacks spilling textbooks, tweed jackets artfully elbow-patched, come strictly for the ambiance, the excellent bottomless coffee, and the toilet.

The toilet in the Hungarian Pastry shop (or Hung Pay as it is known as to the cognoscenti) serves as an anarchic message board of the Ivory Tower. Its frequently whitewashed walls are scrawled with an ever-changing anonymous dialogue of brilliant political commentary, philosophical musings (citing Kant, Sartre and Bertram Russell et al.), Avant Garde humour and Post-Modernist poetry. The queue frequently lags as patrons read the exegeses and make additions of their own, and it has been suggested that punters quaff all that coffee just to have an excuse to use the loo.

C’est Magnifique

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