The view from a 17th floor corner room of the Midtown Manhattan Hilton is excellent. I know I am back in New York but we went to the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal to be sure. The clams from Long Island Sound are chewy and salty – delicious.
I first came here in March 1981 and was put up by the company at the UN Plaza Hotel opposite the UN HQ on the East River. It was a short stay to cover for a colleague who was on holiday and in my last weeks as a sugar futures broker, before the International Petroleum Exchange started trading in gas oil futures at the end of March ‘81. I was back for almost six months in 1983 when the New York Mercantile Exchange, hitherto trading heating oil (same as gas oil) futures, started trading West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures for delivery in Cushing Oklahoma and my firm wanted a piece of the action.
The city has changed for the better since those days. It’s safer, cleaner and there’s less graffiti. Yesterday we took the AirTrain, a small train on an elevated track, from the BA terminal to Jamaica and transferred to the E Line to 7th Avenue. From the seat belt sign being switched off to walking into the hotel took 1 1/2 hours. It used to take almost as long to get through Immigration and then public transport into Manhattan was terrible. Yesterday it was faster than a yellow cab and much cheaper.
Annoyingly, because I drink way too much coffee, there is no coffee machine which is OK but there is not a kettle or mugs, A couple of blocks away there is a branch of Pain Quotidien that opened at 6.30 and has good coffee; latte with an extra shot served in a bowl. I was reminded of the coffee I had in a similar bowl when I was living in a convent outside Rheims in 1972 for la vendange. Although we had real coffee brewed in an earthenware jug for breakfast at Barmeath it cannot have been very strong and the milky French bowl was bliss on a cold morning with frost on the grapes at 7 in the morning. The staff solution to the dearth of caffeine here is to go back to PQ this evening and buy supplies of cold brew to take away for morning consumption.
It is Robin’s birthday tomorrow. Not an auspicious date.
The AirTrain is a welcome option, though the “taxi and limousine” lobby managed to keep it from bringing people straight into Manhattan, necessitating a change either to the subway or to the Long Island Railroad.
Look forward to hearing more of your NYC adventures. It is always fun to see a familiar place through fresh eyes.