The Big (and Small) Apple

(Over the next few days, I'll share some pictures I took during my stay.)

After my shock at the courtesy of the bellman, I checked into my hotel and through myself on my bed in exhaustion. But I didn't fly here to rest, so I had to go for a walk.

I’m struck by the simplicity of the streets. It is almost like the earliest city planners knew that tourists would flock to this place one day. The street numbers start at the bottom of the island(i.e. south) and get bigger as they go “up” (head north). The Avenue numbers run north south and get bigger as you move from left (west) to right (east).

Uptown is north of downtown (a simple concept that I didn’t know originated here). So if you hop on a subway headed downtown you will go south. So as long as I knew that my hotel was on 53rd street and 7th avenue, I could tell how many blocks I was from “home base.”

One thing that struck me immediately was not only how big Manhattan is (I assumed that) but rather how small it is. What I mean is since real estate is so expensive here, and so many people are so crowded into this area, that everything from restaurants to hotel rooms, to parking lots seem diminutive.

Here’s an example of a parking lot that has to deal with the reality of squeezing numerous cars into a small lot. There are lifts which allow cars to be parked on top of one another.

Also my hotel room was quite small, but still ran $200.00 a night at the conference rate. I could easily hear the patrons in the rooms on either side of me laughing, talking, or taking a shower. It wasn’t uncomfortably small, but it wasn’t the vast spaces of the South either.