By Julie Myerson, FT.com site
Published: Aug 17, 2007
The first time we took our three children to New York - aged eight, six and five - they were in heaven. Or if not quite heaven, then certainly they thought they'd landed smack in the middle of a Spiderman cartoon. Never quite adjusting to the time difference, they fell asleep in taxis, demanded bagels at 2am and pinched and punched each other all the way to the top of the Empire State Building.
Occasionally my husband Jonathan and I did wonder whether the whole thing had really been worth the effort. Might they have been just as happy (and more awake) at Legoland? Still, the three of them sighed about that trip for years afterwards. The highlights? The cuddly leopards in FAO Schwarz, the "smoke coming out of the pavements " and one perfectly ordinary pizza eaten one perfectly ordinary lunchtime off Madison Avenue but still recalled with misty-eyed awe a squillion lunchtimes later.
That was 10 years ago. Now the breathless little pizza-eaters have grown tall, spotty and are not so easily impressed. Returning with the younger two - Chloë, 16½, and Raphael, 15 - it's clear that, fed on their constant diet of Big Apple-based soaps, these hoodie- and Converse-wearing wise guys think they already know everything there is to know about Manhattan. "I'm going walking in Central Park at night, " enthuses Raph when he hears our hotel is close by. ( "No, you're bloody well not! " we tell him.) "I just want to chill in the West Village, " sighs Chloë.
Seven hours of movies and a big dose of travel sickness tablets later, we touch down at JFK. "Wow! " Chloë seems intensely excited even by the passport control queue, "It's all so - American. " If passport control is impressive - the uniformed staff actually smile - then our hotel, the Mandarin Oriental at Columbus Circle, is as well. We've never slept in a skyscraper before. Reception is on the 35th floor and our rooms on the 54th. The bedroom windows are floor to ceiling and Manhattan looms below like a vertiginous black-and-white movie.
Dazed by the beauty of it all, I stand at the window to change. "Should you really be walking around naked? " asks Jonathan, pointing out that there's another skyscraper right opposite. I laugh. At this unreal height, it feels as if neither I nor my nakedness really exist.
But the Xbox in the children's (sorry, teenagers') room certainly exists, and so do the super-helpful concierges - especially the one called Ken. Ken knows everything - and nothing is too much trouble. "You'd like to see a baseball game? Well, sure. Now where do you like to sit? Oh. You don't know the rules of baseball? Well, let me explain... "
I'd like to be able to say that my children came here for the Staten Island cruise, the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art, and the chance to get the flavour of the real Manhattan. In fact, they really came here to shop. The first morning, after a disappointingly healthy take on French toast (served with fresh fruit, for goodness' sake!) at Café Café in Broome Street, they investigate Canal Street. Here, Raph instantly buys a pair of $3 sunglasses that fall apart three hours later, and Chloë is infuriated at the lack of vinyl records. "You said Canal Street would be good. Well, it's not. It's a tourist rip-off. "
We try to explain that the whole point of an unknown foreign city - even when you're doing something as apparently simple as shopping - is that you don't know where the good places are until you find them. That's the pleasure, that's the holiday - you never know what amazing something is just around the corner. "Which corner? " Raph wants to know.
Luckily Bleecker Street, with its coffee shops and scuffed record stores, makes Chloë a whole lot happier. But the find of the morning is Yellow Rat Bastard on Broadway - three loud dark caverns stuffed with all the clothes the kids crave, American and cheap.
"Wait till you see this shop downtown called Century 21, " I tell them - it's a huge discount clothes warehouse that comes highly recommended by our local friends. We jump in a taxi (cheaper than the subway for four). What I don't tell them is it's right next door to Ground Zero.
"It's really just a building site, " everyone had said but it's not. It is not. Even approaching it on this ordinary blue-sky morning, on these calm and everyday streets, my heart starts to pound. It's impossible not to think of the dust clouds and running faces we saw on television. We scan through the long list of names in silence and stare at the empty space, now dotted with hard-hats and cranes.
"Do you remember when we went in the World Trade Center last time? " I ask the children. Raph shakes his head.
"You bought a Biker Mice T-shirt, " Chloë tells him.
"And I couldn't remember which tower I'd said we'd meet up in and I lost you all for nearly an hour and in the end this lovely shop assistant remembered what you looked like and found you for me. "
"And she's probably dead now, " says Raph, and we look again at the list.
Only in the company of teenagers could you move so quickly from Ground Zero to a discount store. But we do. Century 21 is cheap but it's loud and tiring and also a lottery as to whether they have your size and in the end we give up without buying anything.
We go to a café in the West Village and while Jonathan and I eat salad, the kids go straight for the heavy fried material.
"Can I get some fries with my salad? " asks Raph, who has started to look and talk like an American.
Later a New York-based friend takes us walking in Riverside Park with her two little boys. "This is a real park, " she tells an unconvinced Raph, "Central Park is more for the tourists. "
"Would you get mugged here? " he asks her hopefully.
A cool wind blows in off the Hudson and we dodge the roller bladers and pull her smallest boy out of the path of high-speed cyclists. He's content but the teenagers are flagging. "I'm fine, " says Chloë when I suggest she needs food; "I want to stay up all night. "
Determined to do some proper sightseeing ( "I'd rather go back to Bleecker Street Records, " says Chloë), we go to Battery Park to get on a ferry to the Ellis Island Museum, only to find long queues. "We should have asked Ken, " we all sigh, wondering how Ken would have solved it for us. Bribed our way up the queue? Moved the island a bit closer to the hotel?
Instead, Chloë and Raph demand an immediate lunch at a diner. Followed by some more shopping on their own in SoHo. "And then can we go to the petting zoo? " asks Raph.
"The what?! "
"The petting zoo. It's in Central Park. It has polar bears. "
"Come on, " says Chloë, "It's instead of Ellis Island. " So they do the petting zoo while we do Saks. They also go on the subway alone (together) and make their way successfully back to the hotel.
We trudge slowly back up Fifth Avenue and along the green sun-drenched edge of Central Park. The air is so Manhattan - manure (all the carriage horses are eating their buckets of oats), hot dogs and the warm urine smell that comes up from every pavement grate.
"I love the way Manhattan fits together, " says Raph later, "The grid system. I love how easy everything is to find. "
"I love the side dishes, " sighs Chloë.
"Side dishes? "
"I mean I love the way everything comes with chocolate milk and fries. "
"It doesn't come with it, " Raph points out, "That's just how you always order it. "
Then it's off to the baseball game. We take the subway to Shea Stadium and then - just like the movies - guys constantly walking through the crowd offering all manner of side orders. We have little idea of what's going on in the actual game though, and Jonathan has to restrain his desire to compare every element unfavourably to cricket.
But then we get the moment we're waiting for: a previously-benched hitter comes on for the final inning and as one, the crowd rises to its feet to hurl abuse. Native New Yorkers by now, we enthusiastically join their screams of "Cheat " and "Steroids " and "Disgrace " even though we haven't a clue what the poor man has done wrong.
Teen tricks
The thing to remember about teenagers, just like toddlers, is that they don't know what they want. The big difference - and the one that makes them harder to travel with - is that they think they do. So you need to trick them into thinking that they're making all the choices and decisions.
1 Teach them to use the subway, then take a deep breath and let them do it. Time off for you, independence and a proper sense of travelling for them.
2 Check out in advance where the good vinyl record/CD/grunge clothes stores are. Teenagers don't like to be dragged around in the heat but they are desperate to shop. We wished we'd let our two loose on the bit of Broadway where Yellow Rat Bastard (478 Broadway) and a whole lot of similar stores are, a bit earlier. They were in heaven, and could easily have spent a day there.
3 American food can be ideal teenager food. The choice, the fries, the sauces, the staggering portions. We went to a couple of lovely places for breakfast - Café Café (470 Broome Street) had a wholesome muesli vibe; and Florent (69 Gansevoort Street) is famously good if you want the real shiny American diner experience. But actually the sensationally cheap little diners (on just about every street) were every bit as exciting to our kids.
4 Jet lag is your friend. Teenagers wake up earlier in NY. It is even possible to get them out of the hotel by 10am.
5 Reconcile yourself right now to the fact that - even though they're in a new country with a million exciting new experiences awaiting them - they're going to spend a great deal of time watching TV. Yes, American TV just like they watch at home. Forced to choose between a trip to the Guggenheim and a repeat of a Simpsons episode they've seen a hundred times, try not to weep too hard as they plump for the latter.
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