New York is not my favourite city. My favourite city is London, but New York is a very close second. Sometimes when London isn’t listening I tell New York that it’s my favourite, but when London walks back into the room I grin suspiciously and go on about how the Underground is better than the Subway and curving streets are so much nicer than straight ones, but it’s hard for a proper city person like me to hide it, New York is just great. It literally does feel like you’ve stepped onto all those TV shows, those movies, those great records, and certainly all those Spider-Man video games I like so much. It’s an urban sketchers paradise. Arriving by train through New Jersey I was filled with excitement at a glimpse of the skyscrapers. There seem to be more of them than last time; my most recent visit was in early 2016, which in historical terms was a long long time ago now, a special birthday trip with two of my oldest friends. Obama was still president. Leicester were going for the league, with Spurs and Arsenal chasing. My visit before that was in late 2008, with my wife and baby son,  just before Obama won his first election, just before Lewis Hamilton won his first championship, and Spurs had just recently won the league cup, which would surely be the first of many trophies to come. And my visit before that was in another age still, at the end of 2002, the middle of the first George W. Bush term, still in the recent post-9/11 world, my first trip to New York, a city I’d wanted to visit my whole life. It was exactly as I imagined and it remains so, but my gaps between visits keep getting inexplicably longer. We got to our hotel on the corner of 6th and 28th, in the Chelsea neighbourhood, staying on the 28th floor with an incredible view down towards the World Trade Center, looking up at the Empire State Building and over to the Chrysler. Not gonna lie, that view was pretty world-beating. I could not wait to get back down to ground level though, and explore the streets, so I went for a walk towards Madison Square Park. The traffic, the people, the sounds and the smells, I love being back in an urban environment. The Flatiron Building was all covered over, but I sat in the park with a milkshake and sketched up towards Midtown, as that Empire State dominated proceedings. I walked about the neighbourhoods a bit before heading back up to the hotel, where we got a massive proper New York pizza and watched The Avengers. 

I have a lot of New York sketches and will try to present them thematically or geographically, but for this post here are some sketches from the area of our hotel. There were lots of florists everywhere, this may well be called the Florist District. It isn’t though. I looked up the Manhattan neighborhoods on Wikipedia, and while this is very much within Chelsea, it was historically called the Tenderloin, the area between 5th and 7th, 24th and 42nd. I don’t know if people still call it that. There were a lot of flower shops though, and hotels. I drew the one above while on my morning sortie. 

I always like a morning stroll when I visit a new place, before the family get up. Chelsea is a good area to explore. One morning I was walking down 23rd Street, the sun was casting Spring light down the long streets making everything look like an album cover, when I spotted a place so steeped in musical history it knocked me off my feet to see it. The Hotel Chelsea on 23rd Street has so many pop-culture names associated with it that it could be a six season Netflix series all of its own and still have secrets to share. Writers, musicians, actors, filmmakers. Maybe urban sketchers, though I have never stayed there. Bob Dylan stayed there, and Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix, Madonna, Edith Piaf, Alice Cooper, Bob Marley, Iggy Pop, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morisson, you name it. This is where Sid Vicious stayed with Nancy and where she died, allegedly killed by Sid. Rod, Jane and Freddy probably lived there for a bit, for all I know. Writers like Kerouac, Burroughs, Miller, Twain, Ginsberg, Quentin Crisp. Dylan Thomas lived and died here in 1953, so did Brendan Behan a decade later. Sarah Bernhardt slept in a coffin while she lived here. Stanley Kubrick, Al Pacino, Eddie Izzard, Bette Midler, they all stayed here and I’d like to have been in the hotel bar that night. Ironically I don’t think Jose Mourinho or John Terry have ever stayed here. I stood across the street with that Joni Mitchell song in my head, while the traffic wrote the words. I had to check on my phone this was definitely the right place, it would have been embarrassing to have sketched it with all this cultural history going through my head only for it to be the wrong place. I bought some cannoli from a place down the street and went back to the hotel. Check back for more New York explorations…