NYC 14-15/9

Our first stop on Monday morning was the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on 5th Avenue. We arrived before the opening at 10:30, and were able to beat the growing queue in buying tickets. Woo hoo! It comprises six main floors with different types of exhibitions or collections on each one. Some highlights included great works by Picasso, Dali, Van Gogh, Pollock, Warhol (the soup cans!) and Magritte, one of my favourite artists. There were also extensive photography, design and architecture collections. The design component had some excellent chairs and electronics from the 70’s. We were keen to have some of the decor in our future house! Following our time at MoMA we headed to the Rockefeller Centre, to a viewing platform known as ‘Top of the Rock’. It is 70 stories above street level and offers a great view of the city and of the Empire State Building in particular. You can see most of Manhattan, over to Brooklyn and New Jersey from the top. We had a clear day and the view was amazing. One surprise was the the Statue of Liberty looks very tiny from there, it is a fair way away, but movies give you the false impression that it is a massive feature in the NYC skyline. The Rockefeller Centre is also home to NBC studios. We had a brief look around the shopping concourse as well, it’s a massive buiding. Leaving the Rockefeller we saw the Radio City Music Hall on our way to Grand Central Station. Next up was the Chrysler Building, this great art-deco inspired building has some great features in the foyer, hopefully they will turn out in the photos. We had planned to go out to dinner to a particular restarant named The John Dory (we’d read about it in London) but unfortunately it had closed, perhaps not being terribly successful in the credit crunch. Over the road from the closed restaurant was The Chelsea Market, a great collection of fresh food stores, bakeries and lunch places but we didn’t find anything that tickled our fancy. Both of us were pretty tired and just wanted to be waited on rather than trying to organise something ourselves. We consulted our guide book again and by luck after a manic cab ride ended up at a great Italian restaurant on 79th Street where we had fantastic food and service, we think the evening turned out for the best. For Tuesday, our last full day in NYC, we were up early to catch the Number 1 train from 96th St Subway Station all the way to the Statten Island Ferry Terminal. It was about a 25 minute journey over to Statten Island and the same back again. The main purpose (of course) being the view of the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty, this time looking a little bigger as we were a lot closer to her. While onboard we had a talk to a Brooklyn local. I should say it was mostly him talking with a series of rapidfire questions about Australia and anything else that popped into his head. A real New Yorker. Once we’d returned to Manhattan we took the subway to the Time Warner centre near Columbus Cirle. There was a fantastic food market in the basement where we bought some provisions for lunch. They had absolutely anything you could want for lunch down there and it was hugely popular with the local people on their lunch break. We headed back out to eat outside under the statue of Columbus in Columbus Circle where we could do some people watching. After lunch we did some more walking along Broadway, stopping in a few more stores - Urban Outfitters (where we both could have spent a small fortune on vinyl, collectibles and t-shirts) and Victoria’s Secret before we had some Subway takeaway for dinner. All in all, we had a fantastic time in New York City. 99% of the people were really friendly, we had excellent food, great service, saw fantastic sights and art and it was easy to get around - great!