Two Days in New York: Friday

First up: a group walking tour of immigrant New York with Ray La Raja, native New Yorker. Being a native New Yorker he walked and talked so fast he had lost 75% of the group within three minutes of leaving the hotel, and those of us that had managed to keep up with him spent the next two hours trying to meet up with those who hadn't.

Herding 18 adults should be easier than it turns out to be, and there are some who are less herdable than others, but eventually there were 18 of us again. Redder and sweatier than before we regrouped at Battery Park, down on the waterfront at the southern end of Manhatten.

It was really, really hot.

We walked up the island through the skyscaper tunnels - in which sunglasses are worn as ornament only - through the financial district. Wall St, the Stock Exchange (left), Trump Tower (lots of ostentatious gold ornamentation), city hall.

Ground zero was so comprehensively fenced off that all that could be seen were the cranes poking up above the site.

There were, however, numerous hawkers selling 9/11 memorabilia.

Directly across the road from the site is St Paul's chapel, built in 1776, and in which George Washington worshipped on his inauguration day in 1786.

It survived the great fire of New York which wiped out most of the financial district in 1835, but is now most famous as the place where many people sought sanctuary from the blast of 9/11.



We saw the gorgeous and delicate Woolworths skyscaper, which, with no green and red spots, seemed as far as could be removed from the utilitarian Karori mall version I seem to find the need to visit most days at home.

By this time we were about to die from heat, so, in order to catch a breeze off the water, we walked half way over the Brooklyn Bridge.

The formal tour over, some of us headed off to Chinatown in search of lunch. Decision-making with a group of seven people of different nationalities, even about where to have lunch, makes the practice of multi-cultural democracy seem almost impossible. We were red, sweaty and getting grumpy.

After lunch I dumped the group and went to visit the Tenement Museum, on the lower east side. The museum is a recreation of the rooms of a number of different immigrant families who lived in 97 Orchard St between the 1890s and 1920s.

Over this period the streets in this area were the centre of clothes manufacturing in the US, mainly through the work of the Jewish families that migrated here from Germany, Lithuania, Russia, and Poland, many of whom were tailors in their home countries.

At the turn of the century 40% of men's clothes, and 70% of women's clothes in America were made here in tiny family living rooms: cutting, sewing and ironing in buildings with no running water, no toilets, and no form of heating.

We spent an hour inside the un-airconditioned building, and I thought I might topple over with the heat. 'Sweatshops' they truly were.

I walked the 40 or so blocks back to the hotel, passing through Little Italy, Noho, Soho, Grenwich Village, Madison Square, and then up Broadway. By the time I reached the hotel it was starting to get dark, but the streets were filled with people, the shops were open, and it didn't feel in the slightest bit unsafe. Cuba St on a Friday night feels much more dodgy.

New York is the first city I have been to where the dominant ethnic group does not seem, at the street level, to have a natural dominance. It felt like a city where anyone could claim to be a citizen. As a human endeavour, New York is hugely impressive.