New York is an experience I'll not forget. Take the population of Sydney and double it. That's about how many people live in New York City, a city one tenth the size of Sydney yet capable of handling a reputed 49 million visitors a year. Space is king in New York where elevators are narrow, and toilets not so easy to find. Yet it has a huge public and much loved park, Central Park, which is over half a km wide and 4 km long. Horse drawn cabs, rickshaws or bikes are the only way to get around it, other than walking.
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New York is museum central, shopping central, restaurant central, nightlife central, central to America. You name it, everything happens in New York. Garbage in tight clear plastic, heaped on the pavement below tall apartments scents the air until the ubiquitous garbage truck ambles by with pick up men running along side. Stong coffee and cooking hamburger smells waft by in competition. Repairs and maintenance would have to be a costly headache in New York and scaffolding a lucrative business. There's scaffolding around so many buildings. Why, it took a whole year to put up the scaffolding both outside and inside St Patrick's Cathedral! Cost of restoration is estimated to be 179 million with completion slated for the end of 2015. All this, and church services proceeding as usual!
Meals are huge in the USA, our large cup of coffee is often their small. According to a friend, coffee in New York has improved a lot. That may be so but any Australian trained barrista would make good money making a decent cappuccino or latte because s/he would have few competitors. So many cafes and restaurants offer breakfast, lunch or dinner when you want it and if that is 4am it’s not a problem.
Taxis buzz around the streets diving in and out of lanes, their canary yellow brilliance making them easy to spot. Yet in crowded theatre land, New York's Broadway, the $3 per minute rickshaw cyclist comes into his own squeezing through the gaps to deliver you on time. The rickshaw drivers are all young and fit. Many are relatively new to New York and spellbound by the American work ethic: work hard and you'll get rich!
No surprise then that the rags to riches story surrounding California Chrome grabbed the city by the throat. In a city that's hard to cut through with so much happening, everyone had heard of California Chrome and had an opinion on the horse's chances of winning the triple crown, not won since Affirmed in 1978. The Triple is a series of three races held over a five-week period on three different courses. California Chrome's owners included a guy who worked in a factory in California and an old knockabout horse trainer. A mate of theirs told them it was a dumb ass thing to put their money into a horse so they named their stable Dumb Ass.
We joined the other 102,000 people in a transport crush, rushing to Belmont to claim our grandstand central seats for the race of all races, the Belmont Stakes. From my vantage point I could see the horse owners in the boxes below surrounded by the swollen crowd. And the crowd were chanting for California Chrome. Their excitement took physical form and raced round the stands infecting everyone. Frank Sinatra Jr added by singing New York, New York. A rapper, everyone else knew, chatted up the excitement which broke all bounds roaring a chant, ‘California Chrome, California Chrome, California Chrome’.
Well, as it happened, the horse didn't win; we finally made it back to New York and in the early hours of the morning found a restaurant catering for night owls.
