Bada Bing! Chomping the Big Apple
By Kathleen Bolton | August 18, 2008 |
Last week I had the pleasure of spending a few days in New York City and doing all the touristy things.
God, I love NYC. Like Juliet, Sophie, and Barbara I found inspiration in travel. NYC — aka Gotham — a place where filth and beauty sleep side-by-side, and every language in the world can be heard marveling at breathtakingly (and breathtakingly crass) Times Square.
Where else do you see mighty obelisks of chrome and steel . . . 
. . . hiding a middle-America icon.
Crass monuments to American consumerism (don’t ever take a kid into the M&M store unless you want to spend big on bad chocolate): 
And breathtaking wonders (looking up at the Swarovski chandelier in lobby of 30 Rock):
NYC at night pulses and seethes (Times Square at 44th and Broadway):
It’s no less impressive during the day (looking up at Empire State Building): 
We didn’t go to the top of either 30 Rock or the Empire State Building. Why pay $30/head (and wait in line for two hours) when the sights on the streets are far more impressive? Besides, my last visit to the top of a monster NYC icon was the Observation Deck of the Twin Towers a few months before 9/11. I’m going to keep that as my gold standard of views.
My notebook is filled with vignettes and character sketches of the people I encountered in NYC. As a writer, discovering unique characters to avoid cliches is a godsend, and I found a whole novel’s worth of characters in one picnic lunch at Bryant Park (I recommend Chipotle on 42nd St. across from the NYC Library for a cheap and tasty takeout).
The other benefit to travel is the delight of filling up the brainpan with new information that can sift down into your writing. It’s exciting to be able to access those moments and know they are wholly unique to you and your work.
Photos by Sophie Bolton
Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She writes under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ani Bolton.
She has written two novels as Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter–both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins, and Tamara Blake, for the novel Slumber.
It is possible that in some of my previous lives, I enjoyed the country life. But the truth is, I was born in Manhattan, and I love it. I ‘know’ the smell of it. Even as dirty as it can be, I understand why people love NYC. A week after 9/11, my brother and my sister and I met in NY and went down to where the World Trade Center was, now just a burning mass of charred metal being bulldozed into submission. It snowed a gray confetti and the air was thick with a white, pungent smoke. As horrid as all those deaths were, the city escaped the gruesome sight of bloodied bodies. But it didn’t escape the whispy ghosts clinging to what they remembered. Walking the streets north, we could hear the bagpipes from afar until we came upon one of many NYFD funerals. And I remember thinking that dammit, they bombed MY city.
I just finished reading “Eat Pray Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert. In the book, Gilbert travels to recapture her sense of self after a divorce. In the process she meets a man who lived in NYC, but was booted out of the country after 911.
Together, they sit on a beach in Bali, drawing maps of the city in the sand, sharing all the wonderment of NYC with each other, using sea shells to denote their favorite shops and landmarks.
-Sounds divine to me…
One day, I shall go.
Of all the places on this earth I want to travel to, NYC is a MUST on my list.
I couldn’t go to Ground Zero, thea. Too many ghosts floating around there.
Kelleybell, you will love it. There’s a ton of stuff to do there that’s free, too. One day I hope to do a writer’s walking tour…see Poe’s house, that sort of thing.