Today I found myself standing at the junction of Wall Street and Broad Street. The star-spangled columns of the New York Stock Exchange rose to my right. Federal Hall, the site of George Washington’s inauguration, was at my back.
What a pleasure it was to stand among this crowd and cheer for the coming of the 44th President. Oh Happy Day.
Of the several mandatory items on every tourist’s “must-see” list of New York, there is one that never seems to get old. There is nothing so wonderful as a Christmas in New York City.
The grand old Christmas traditions are alive here, allowing this city to radiate nostalgia and sentimentality so palpable it’s impossible to resist. 
New York manages to evoke the Christmases of yesteryear with dazzling authenticity. It’s as though every part of the city takes its Christmas legacy very seriously. Vendors start to appear on the street, selling forest-fresh Christmas trees dusted with just enough snow to make you sigh. You are treated to amazing harmonies floating through your window from the carolers on the street below. You are tantalised by smell of roasting chestnuts that are suddenly for sale on every street corner. Grand Christmas trees, lavishly adorned and richly illuminated, materialise in every park and public space. All the big stores reveal their Christmas lights and window displays with much pageantry, attracting crowds in the thousands by having celebrities like Tony Bennett perform at the unveiling. As you turn on your TV you are saturated with images of those iconic Radio City Rockettes, shamelessly promoting their Christmas Spectacular by high-kicking the holiday spirit into morning viewers. New York, my friends, is the home of Christmas.
Here, you can see Christmas explode as you look up that stretch of Fifth Avenue from Rockefeller Center to Central Park, with all its buildings cloaked in a dazzling array of Christmas lights. On the streets implausibly large crowds fight for territory on the footpath, most of them trying to get a glimpse of the intricate Christmas window displays. Nearby, even St Patrick’s Cathedral is not immune to the hysteria. It can seat over 2,200 people, but attending midnight mass on Christmas Eve has become so fashionable you need tickets to get in. The lobby of Bergdorf offers up men dressed as tin soldiers, singing seasonal tunes and posing for photographs. Across the street, shoppers patiently line up around the block to get inside FAO Schwarz, New York’s preeminent toy store. Inside you’ll find $10,000 stuffed animals, choreographed Barbie fashion parades, every action figure imaginable, and the giant keyboard made famous by Tom Hanks in “Big“. Everything, including the big piano, is telling you that it’s Christmas time in the city.
But, it is of course the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and its little ice rink below that is the essence of New York Christmas. To see it is instantly heartwarming, bringing back memories of all those New York romantic movies and their touching scenes of lovers skating hand in hand, demonstrably falling in love at that very moment (or later, as part of a montage with a gentle ballad). If you’re romantic and are happy to wait for hours, you too can pirouette underneath the big tree. Personally, I’ve not been game to test my form on the ice. It is, after all, the most high-profile skating rink in the world, with its audience of hundreds looking from above, each armed with cameras and video equipment.
If you stand across the rink facing the 100 foot Christmas tree, you are treated to the mother of all Christmas tableaux. Never mind that it’s utterly chaotic and bursting with people. It has the power to impress and captivate even the most jaded, tourist-loathing, crowd-averse New Yorker. Christmas lives here.
(Rock Center Rink on a slow day)
If you, like I, first fell in love with New York thanks to a Woody Allen film or two then you can’t help but have a soft spot for this consummate New Yorker, despite his unsavoury predilection for jailbait. Sometimes I like to fantasise about stumbling across one of his film shoots on a walk around my neighbourhood and having my image captured for posterity in the background of a quintessential Manhattan scene. Unfortunately Woody’s making movies in Europe these days, and even if I were inadvertently to become an extra, chances are I’d be memorialised tripping or spilling something or muttering to myself. It won’t come as a surprise that I’m not above the cheap thrill of getting close to a celebrity, but finding yourself spitting distance from Zach Braff, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Wallace Shawn just doesn’t compare to spotting Woody in the very city he salutes in so many of his films.
It’s fortunate then that Woody spends his Monday nights playing New Orleans jazz with his band at The Cafe Carlyle, a plush little supper club in a hotel on the Upper East Side. Woody has been playing jazz on Monday nights since forever, apparently he even played the night that Annie Hall won four Oscars in 1978. The Carlyle Hotel is itself a New York classic. It has a rich history as a hangout for the powerful and famous, from socialites to presidents - and there are candid pictures of John and Jacqueline Kennedy hanging in the lobby to prove it.
So a couple of Mondays ago, Dusty and I shared a classic New York experience. We had already polished off a couple of dirty martinis, a bottle of wine, and were mid-way through dinner when Woody entered from the back of the room, sat at a table right beside us, and set about inserting a reed into his clarinet. He was all hunched over and, thankfully, quite oblivious to my stares. Even though I could have, I chose not to reach out and touch him. When he got to playing, Woody on the clarinet was as neurotic, fidgety and awkward as Woody on film. It was a little odd that he never looked up at the audience with his eyes open, not even once, during the entire set of toe-tapping numbers, but you’ve got to give it up for a septaugenarian who’s religiously stuck to his weekly gig for decades. And as the clip below will demonstrate, he’s collected more than enough devoted fans to fill that room with warm applause every Monday night.
Categories: Entertainment · Music · Video
Ever wondered about the calibre of TV commercials that are featured during primetime in this highly sophisticated metropolis? Wonder no more, my friends, because this is the craze that’s sweeping the nation. It takes the prize for the most absurd consumer product I have seen advertised so far, and I can only imagine the success of this ad must be due in large part to the haunting realism portrayed by the stellar cast.
Categories: Television · Video
The leaves are finally falling on Bleecker Street after a very warm November, and the city is now fully immersed in its relentless series of winter festivals. Halloween just about collided into Thanksgiving long weekend, and even though we’ve only had a couple of days to finish up the leftover turkey, there is no doubt that it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in New York City.
So, with two of my very favourite people, Silva & Darren, passing through town on the way to their new life on the island paradise of the Grand Caymans, I was under pressure to find that quintessential New York experience which combined the atmosphere of the city with all those clichéd elements of the season. With Broadway and the grandiosity of its musicals well and truly silenced by the second week of striking stagehands, there was only one option that fit the bill – Radio City Music Hall’s 75th Anniversary Christmas Spectacular, featuring none other than those iconic Radio City Rockettes…..
The show was everything it was cracked up to be: a big salute to white, upper class New York and a cheesy celebration of the wonder of Christmas, replete with a perfectly patronising Santa Claus performing those hackneyed parlour tricks for which he’s famous - miraculously knowing every kid’s name, making skeptical little boys fly magically through the air, etc. It’s clear the producers build the show each year by jamming generic Christmas filler around the six or seven dance numbers where the Rockettes truly do rock. The sets are awesome, and seeing those Rockettes perform their spectacular routines makes the event worth every penny of the admission price, so much so that you happily forgive the crappy in-between bits where Santa helps little Jimmy understand how he can be in more than one place at the one time by singing a painful ballad. The Rockettes might be the g-rated version of those Vegas Showgirls, but there were more than enough high-kicks to satisfy even the most jaded of us, and these girls have got to be in with a fighting chance for the title of the best super-long legs in the business. Finding myself quite taken with the moment, I joined the other tourists and recorded a few minutes – here’s a little of what I’m talking about. Apologies for the quality (it’s a youtube thing), and spare me your comments on copyright, I’m a criminal defence lawyer now. Watch it till the end or you’ll miss the fireworks. Happy pre-Christmas.
Categories: Christmas · Entertainment · Video
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