NY Adventures

NEVER-ENDING STORY

New York weather can be brilliant, and also utterly, utterly miserable. As miserable as discovering your wife has burned everything you own and cleared out the joint account, shortly before a higher-than-expected gas bill arrives.

New York doesn’t stop what its doing for a bit a water, but if you need to kill an hour or two while the Atlantic Ocean falls out the sky, then try the Strand Bookstore.

You may happen upon it by accident; it’s not too far from the busy tizwaz of Union Square. For 80 years the Strand Bookstore has operated in NYC, and has become the most famous bookstore in the city. Boasting 18 miles of books, from the cellar up to the top floor that offers thousands of first editions, it’s easy to get lost for a couple of hours exploring this labyrinth of literature.

Strand Book Store
Broadway and 12th Street, Manhattan

HELL ON EARTH

Hell’s Kitchen is more of a puppy dog’s pantry these days. The neighbourhood, immediately west of Times Square’s twinkle, is one of Manhattan’s former slums, where Irish immigrants settled in the 18th Century to work on the docks, in factories and slaughterhouses. Blood stained the streets many times over in pitched battles between gangs.

Prohibition in the 1920s saw the street gangs evolve into organised crime rackets involved in gambling, extortion and prostitution. An influx of Puerto Rican immigrants in the 1950s brought about the return of the gang violence romanticised in West Side Story. One night in 1959, while the stage version played at a theatre on 44th Street, a Puerto Rican gang leader stabbed to death two innocent teenagers just blocks away.

Until twenty years ago, savage mobs still operated in Hell’s Kitchen; Irish crime syndicates owned the streets for much of the 20th century. Their bloody reign was ended by Mayor Rudolf Giuliani’s zero-tolerance approach to crime in the borough.

Now Hell’s Kitchen is changing, almost beyond recognition. Past the restaurants and bars of Ninth Avenue, the neighbourhood is a building site, as developers lay claim to one of the few areas in Manhattan to be dominated by high-rise apartment..