Spendthrift Shoestring

Leaving New York: Checklist & Philosophy

I moved to New York in 2003. When I moved here I knew I wanted to be a travel writer and editor but I had no idea how to will this dream career into existence. Over the last seven years in New York, I’ve emailed hundreds of editors, made countless phone calls, written innumerable drafts, discovered blogging, identified my budget-friendly shtick, and in turn decided that said shtick didn’t have to define my entire oeuvre. My professional shift has happened while I've lived in New York, and in many instances it's developed as it has because I've lived in New York.

In December I’ll leave New York for London for an indefinite period of time. I assume that I’ll return at some point, but I don’t know if and when I’ll do so. I’m very excited about the move and all of the professional and social opportunities it will open up for me, but I’ve also begun to feel the tug of emotion and advance nostalgia that comes with taking leave.

My solution? Urban exploration, with the goal of continuing to interrupt the everydayness of life in this glorious metropolis by tracking down various captivating corners and zones.

For about a year now I’ve been steadily making local excursions to various parks, neighborhoods, restaurants, bars, cafes, and landmarks in and around New York. I wrote a little blog post on these adventures last September, which I tried to frame as a reconsideration of the terribly maligned concept of the staycation. Now, with my leave-taking more or less scheduled, making sure that I get to the remaining sites and experiences on the list is a project of greater urgency.

I have about a dozen items left on my list at this point. Bars with fancy cocktails—a surprising number of which are located in hotels—are a priority, as are a few standard tourist sites that I’ve never visited, like the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I’ve got a few beaches (Fire Island and Riis Beach) on the list, a few cafes, some museums, some bridge walks, and rides to the northern termini of the 1 and 2 subway lines, among other items.

My primary companion in urban exploration over the past year and a bit is my friend Rob, who I hope will visit me in London at some point to apply our urban exploration habit to another glorious metropolis.

Brooklyn: Fort Greene in up! Magazine

This week my short retail overview of Fort Greene was published in WestJet's up! Magazine online. My musings can be read here.

Some Reflections on NYC's Budget-Friendly Hotel Scene

This fall, I visited scores of budget and midrange hotels in New York City for EuroCheapo. Though I never set out to become an expert on hotels of whatever type, I realize that I have become just that along the way. My ability to distinguish between the good and the bad in the generally maligned budget and midrange hotel categories has emerged as a subspecialization.

I have reviewed hotels for EuroCheapo in Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Bratislava, Dublin, Krakow, London, Munich, Rome, Stockholm, and now New York. For Rough Guides and koucou, among others, I have reviewed hotels in a range of Caribbean territories. In every location, there are interesting things to be learned about the social and cultural dynamics of places in addition to the more direct objective of assessing hotels. The hotel reviewing process, in other words, yields all sorts of other observations on local culture, migration patterns, and hotel management styles at a cultural level.

My benchmark for proprietor friendliness (and general hotel reviewer bliss) is Athens, where a typical day on the job would bring with it perhaps a dozen invitations to a coffee and long conversations about properties. Owners are usually on-site or easily accessible in Athens, or there are long-term sales managers in the office who are empowered to speak knowledgeably about rooms, clientele base, renovation dates, and other defining hallmarks.

New York is not Athens. On most occasions, showing up at a hotel and asking for a manager or someone in sales engenders panic among desk staff and a complete unwillingness to field even the simplest questions thereafter. New York hotels are top-down affairs, places where sales managers and PR teams filter access in a careful and measured manner. (I finally began to get better results when I stopped asking at reception desks for someone in management and simply introduced myself and explained that I was updating a hotel guide.) Most receptionists in New York, it would appear, have been given strict instructions not to communicate with anyone but guests about their places of employ. This is unfortunate, as it implies insecurity. As a hotel reviewer, I want to visit bold properties staffed by people who are proud of their rooms and services, no matter how modest they may be. The simplest and most basic hotel can be wonderful, after all.

There are some very good budget and midrange hotels in New York, though not as many as there should be. I closed my reviewing gig thinking that someone could make an absolute killing by setting up a hotel in New York that charges a simple, transparent nightly rate of $125 or $150 a night for simple but beautifully decorated double rooms. Said hotel would need to fight against the aesthetic objective of hotel chain standardization with simple, attractive, and durable decor and fixtures. There could be as few as two perks on tap: free wi-fi and a well-trained barista at an espresso machine in the lobby. By selling rooms at a rate divorced from the market pricing imperative and by maintaining a standard that is beautiful and not anonymous, this fantasy budget hotel would always be completely full.

The market is wide-open. Hotels in New York are too expensive and all too often terribly bland and cookie-cutter in look. Some investors need to look at the budget tourist market as a potentially sophisticated one, not simply a lowest-common-denominator/anything-goes demographic of tourists who will accept any bone thrown their way.

The Staycation Reconsidered

People in the travel industry don't much like the idea of the staycation, a concept seemingly perfectly tailored to a recession. Much of the opposition within the industry to the idea of the staycation seems to reside in the idea that the more people stay at home the less money they spend on transportation, hotels, restaurants, and other touristy things, with all sorts of pernicious and negative knock-on effects for tourism writ large.

Honestly, it's not completely clear to me why traveling types are so opposed to the staycation. As far as the economic argument goes, people can spend lots of money enjoying themselves at home, on precisely the sorts of things for which tourists shell out cash—including hotels. This past weekend I got into a conversation with two New Yorkers who, like me, have been sorely tempted to book a night at the Standard, the hotel that straddles the High Line. The Standard is merely the most obvious current choice for a local hotel bed hop, but it's not the only one. I'm currently updating hotel listings for EuroCheapo's New York guide and I've already come across three hotels where I'd happily shack up for a night.

Hotels aside, there are plenty of ways that staycations can generate tourist dollars. If everyone in New York City with budgeted travel funds took a week off at home and put, say, half of their vacation budgets toward local restaurants, activities, and other amusements, that would surely amount to an enormous sum.

To be honest, I kind of like the concept of a staycation, if the point of the staycation is to find a way to explore one's hometown or backyard in new or previously undiscovered ways. Last summer, when I had eight weeks to romp around London—well, six, once my jaunts around the UK and beyond were taken into account—I assembled a long list of things to do and see. My list was varied. It included neighborhoods, parks, restaurants, walks, cafés, bars, and various products. This list made my time in London a blur of excitement. It felt as if I was unpeeling a different layer of London almost every day.

I loved this way of experiencing a city, and when I returned I decided to find a way to replicate the process here at home. It's helped that my friend Rob and I have settled over the past few months into a pattern of taking little exploratory adventures around the city. These excursions have cemented my commitment to re-exploring New York, but at a certain point I realized that I needed to write a New York list in the spirit of my London activity list. As it now stands, my New York list is a running tabulation of hometown places and activities I haven't yet experienced: various hotel bars for fancy cocktails; a Bosnian hamburger joint; Wave Hill Park; a ride to the end of the 1 subway line; highly recommended tattoo parlors, and so on.

Does a staycation along these lines trump the sheer joy of engaging with different cultures, languages, and customs? Of course not. But if a hometown's richness and variability can be revealed in countless new ways through a staycation, I say book your trip tonight.

On Yelp, Taste Good Malaysian Restaurant, and Group Evaluation

I've always resisted turning to sites like Yelp for restaurant recommendations in favor of the opinions of experts. The best restaurants, cafés, and other venues, I've always been convinced, are best divulged by people I've deemed to be experts—by staff writers at magazines and Web sites I like, or by friends with focused obsessions on the best beignets, street tacos, obscure cocktails, and other essential things. Or, alternately, if the experts in question are too snobby to recognize the ordinary brilliance in front of them, the best things fly below the radar altogether. The more plebeian types of superlative things are either very easy or very hard to find or they're expressly unpublicized or they're so plain and to the point that they escape acclaim. Until recently, my general aversion to review sites has approached the status of personal gospel.

On Sunday night, after a day of great eating with Matt and Nathan and Richard—Prime Meats for brunch and Steve's Authentic Key Lime Pies for a snack—we had a vague idea to look for dinner in Queens. I hopped onto Yelp on Matt's iPhone to do research. Matt* has taken to claiming that we've never been steered to a bad restaurant by Yelp. After thinking about it for a little while in the wake of our Sunday dining experience, I realize that he's right. I can't remember a single highly-recommended place on Yelp with multiple reviews that wasn't good.

On Sunday we settled on Taste Good Malaysian in Elmhurst Queens, a restaurant with very strong reviews, as an appropriate place to eat. And when we finally pulled up, I immediately had a great feeling about the place. It is a hole-in-the-wall with little in the way of signage and even less in the way of décor. The tables are worn and the clientele was almost entirely Malaysian. We ate lots of amazing grub, including popiah, roti with chicken curry sauce, tamu emas (blocks of golden tofu), and beef rendang. After returning home, I did some research and discovered that the restaurant has tons and tons of fans beyond the Yelp universe.

My conversion from skeptic to Yelp devotee is still cautious, but it marks a definite shift in my approach to the group evaluation function of social media. I've also been reading James Surowiecki's very convincing The Wisdom of Crowds and I am convinced that various of Surowiecki's points about the surprising accuracy of collective syntheses of information has had a hand in my evolution.

I won't stop hitting up my friends for tips or peruse the listings sections of magazines and blogs that I like, and I'm not ready to trust the crowds on every subject. (I'll forever be taking my own friends' evaluations of hotels and beach towns over those most popular on user-generated sites.) But I have complete faith that when dozens of random people rave about a restaurant in Elmhurst, they're most likely onto something.

*It was actually Richard who expressed things in these terms, but Matt has communicated this idea on several occasions recently.

List: Local NYC Faves, Air Berlin Deals

I'm not in countdown mode for my Nordic adventure quite yet, but I have been very busy of late—with the cryptically aforementioned Project K as well as a huge backlog of other obligations.

Two notes.

1. Two local faves made it into Monocle's July/August issue: Café Select, which I raved about here back in January, and the nearby McNally Jackson Bookstore.

2. European readers—or anyone intending to spend any time in Europe soon—ought to get online immediately to try to nab some very cheap Air Berlin flights. How cheap? Fares begin at €29 for one-way flights throughout much of Europe; at €149 for one-way flights to destinations in North America; and at €199 for one-way fares to destinations as far-flung as Bangkok and Windhoek. These fares have been released in celebration of the airline's thirtieth birthday. Best of all, they include all taxes and charges. This promotion is on through tomorrow.

New York: Wet and Cold

Annabelle Thorpe's piece in the Guardian on Wednesday trumpets ten places to beat the heat in New York this summer. It's funny, on this cool and wet June day, to think about cooling off, though no doubt we'll all be hunting for relief from the heat shortly.

I like three of Thorpe's suggestions in particular: the Bronx's Wave Hill, 230 Fifth Rooftop Garden (a place I have to admit I've never visited), and the High Line, which I've been excited about for months now. According to the park's Web site, Section 1 of the High Line, which stretches from Gansevoort to 20th Street, will open on June 9. High Line history here.

New York: Searching for Alexa Chung

There's nothing like hosting a guest for recharging one's impressions of New York. Richard flew in on the red-eye on Thursday morning and stayed through this afternoon. On Thursday, we spent the entire afternoon at the unbelievably wonderful New York Spa Castle, which went from being completely off my radar to making me want nothing more than to become a full-time connoisseur of Korean spas. ($35 for hours of soaking in tubs and sweating in saunas on weekdays? Amazing! There's even a free shuttle from the Flushing Main Street station on the 7 subway line.)

We did a fair amount of wandering during R's visit. We took in Grand Sichuan, Baoguette, the Whitney, the Hudson's Library Bar, La Floridita, Taverna Kyclades, various Balkan markets in Astoria, and, today, Williamsburg—which brings me to Alexa Chung, the British television presenter/model who lives in the neighborhood and who is, quite likely, about to become extremely famous here following the debut of her MTV show.

Chung was one of the tabloid staples I came across last spring and summer in London. I did not warm to her at the time. I recall one feature consisting mostly of a list of her favorite things, which I found to be quite unimaginative. I've done some research since, however, and I realize that I like her writing—see her column in the Independent—quite a bit. She finds New York alternately enthralling and mystifying, and comes to the sorts of conclusions that fascinated new arrivals do. I hope she retains this excitement and resists the ennui that descends upon too many New Yorkers after a while.

Incidentally, I hadn't visited Williamsburg in over a year. The mish-mash of hipster, Hasidic, Polish, Puerto Rican, and Dominican struck me as more interesting than ever. Richard snapped a ton of photos, which I can't wait to view. Throughout our stroll, we looked for Chung. She was nowhere to be found. 

In an aside, Richard also characterized me as a sporadic blogger. I was startled but quickly realized that in fact I've been awfully sporadic with this blog lately; in addition, many of the posts I've managed to slap up have been short and Twitter-like. Apologies.

List: White Slab Palace, Niemeyer, Promises

Back in New York and working away with Nathan on a big project. Three quick things.

1. White Slab Palace. Nothing makes me feel more like a curmudgeon than being annoyed by bad service. Most of the time, I don't really care if my waiter is preoccupied or off in his own world. But last night at White Slab Palace, the Swedishish place that has essentially replaced Good World, I found myself grumpy. The service was slow and clueless. I ordered Good World's signature Berzerker cocktail only to be told by a waitress that it wasn't on the menu. Then, after being promised a drinks menu that never arrived, I grabbed one off the bar and discovered that the Berzerker was indeed on offer. The grub was fine but nothing great. And there was a security guard who stood around blocking the route to the bathroom. A security guard? Really? The whole experience was a huge reminder that hipsterism and good dining in New York City are all too often mutually repulsive.

2. Niemeyer. I've had an architectural crush on Oscar Niemeyer's French Communist Party headquarters in Paris forever. It's sort of my dream building—modernist, brutal, undulating. It was only through poking around the other day online that I chanced upon some images of its interiors. Check out Olivier Pascaud's gorgeous photographs here. That conference room almost makes me want urgently to have French Communist business to attend to.

3. Promises. Photos of San Sebastián, Bilbao, and Santander to come.

New York: The Jane's Cheap Single Rooms

My friend Suzanne Russo of Around the World in Gold Stilettos told me about the Jane Hotel last week. It's a budget hotel in the West Village with shared bathrooms and tiny but stylish single rooms. Rack rate is $99, but there's a special going on right now through early April with rooms priced at $75. Long overdue, this development, and perfect for our economic moment. I can only hope that we see more hotels of this caliber and price point opening up in New York and other expensive cities in the next year or so.

Note: The hotel remains unfinished. Some facilities are not yet up and running.