The calm green spaces of New York are among the best things here. Washington Square Park is being renovated, or redeveloped, or "improved"; but Madison Square Park is as it was, and lovely. In the shadow of the Flatiron building - a strange construction, tall as American confidence and sharp as New York's image (it has an unusual wedge-like footprint) - but shaded and full of trees, with a slightly stiffly formal layout and brown gravel borders that remind you of a park in Paris or Brussels. I sat here this afternoon drinking a root beer float (that's ice cream floating in root beer, a fizzy drink with a medicinal taste a little like a mild version of Dr. Pepper) at the Shake Shack, a cute little outlet of the kind London does so badly in comparison to this, a place that actually adds life to its location. This time I am reminded of Munich and the Viktualienmarkt in particular, where Münchners drink beer and Weisswurst more lustily perhaps but otherwise much the way the Americans eat their burgers and soda. Herbert von King Park, near my hostel in Bedford-Stuyvesant, though initially off off-putting - it looks bare, the prominent basketball hoops making me feel guilty of some sort of racism in my in security - is not unpleasant, either. I breakfasted there on the day I arrived (at eight, with a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich bought from a questionable deli, although what strikes the English eye as questionable may simply be unvarnished real life to the New Yorker), sitting at a table made for al fresco chess, reading the Sunday New York Times. I wasn't alone. A group of black Brooklyners sat around a table seemingly finishing an early walk with a good-humoured chat; and a Hispanic woman walked around taking her little daughter by the hand. The park, at that time, was a picture of ordinary New York and its friendliness, beneath a slightly (to the European) stark exterior.
My favourite so far, though, is Bryant Park, off 42nd Street between Times Square and Grand Central Station. Perhaps I like it because it really is a very green space in Midtown where it's really needed - it has the feeling of one of those cramped lawns in the city of London, where office workers sprawl in the lunchtime sun. But probably the true secret is the Bryant Park Reading Room, a fine institution simply consisting of a few magazines, the day's newspapers and above all shelves of books, available to be picked up by whoever wants to sit at one of the reading room tables and read. A terrific idea, supported by HSBC (good for them) and that I'd like to see copied in every city. How about a Hyde Park or Regent's Park Reading Room? I sat and, in the fixated spirit of metropolitan comparison I seem to be in, read in a library of America volume of his poetry and prose the impressions of Stephen Crane on his visit to London in 1897, a city he found silent compared to New York:
New York, in fact, roars always like ten thousand devils. We have ingenious and simple ways of making a din in New York that cause the stranger to conclude that each citizen is obliged by statute to provide himself with a pair of cymbals and a drum. If anything by chance can be turned into a noise it is promptly turned.
I was especially struck by the truth of this sentence -
A man properly lazy does not like new experiences until they become old ones.
This struck home with me, a fortysomething whose one true vice is physical sloth and whose attitude to travel Crane has here captured terrifically. I find myself anxious to know places, to get to know them so that I'm in a sense at home there, in New York at the moment, at other times in Berlin or in Paris; I find I enjoy cities more on renewing my acquaintance than I do on first introduction.
There's a justification for public art, then. What would have been simply a short rest on a park bench led to the discovery of a previously unfamiliar writer, and a little insight into myself as well as the cultural love affair I'm conducting with America. By the way, Crane writes that the horses drawing cabs in late Victorian London would slide down hills when it was wet. Astonishing.
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