NEW YORK // I’ve now had five weeks in New York and sampled the city’s lifestyle across a broad spectrum: first as a quasi-academic at Columbia University; next as a working journalist chasing the business beat in Manhattan; and for the past few days and a few more to come, as a tourist complete with wife and excited seven-year-old child.
I’ve moved from the solid granite apartment blocks of the Upper West Side, to the quaint town houses of the Village, and on to the hotel land of Midtown, and travelled virtually everywhere interesting that Manhattan has to offer.
I’m left with two questions: how can ordinary New Yorkers afford to live and work in the city? And how can other Americans afford to visit for their holidays?
This is not just the whinge of a tourist from the UAE who is seeing the credit card bills for the first month and wondering where it all went. Per-capita income in the UAE is considerably higher than that of the US, so I should be well equipped financially for an extended visit here. But … where did it all go?
Of course, this is no ordinary city. If the greater New York metropolitan region was a country, its GDP would rank as the 13th biggest in the world.
It is the global capital of capital, with Wall Street still by far the biggest financial centre on the planet.
Add in all the other industries in which New York has world dominance – media, advertising, property – and you see it’s an exceptional place indeed. So good they named it twice, in fact.
But, compared to Dubai at least, everything is just so expensive. You can virtually double any item of expenditure, from grocery bills, to taxi fares, to lunch and dinner at a reasonable restaurant.
It seems impossible to get out of the local grocery, which my daughter, Amira, insists on calling “Spinneys”, at less than US$50, even for the most basic shopping list. At first I was taking yellow taxis everywhere, until I began noticing the speed with which the dollars were flying out of my wallet.
Any trip is at least double the equivalent in a Dubai taxi. Now I take the subway, which I find satisfyingly atmospheric.
I just had dinner in a nice sushi restaurant with wife and daughter in the East Village. Excellent food, although we did not go for the top dishes, some water and a beverage for me. The bill came to $170, which, by the time I added the morally obliged tip, meant hardly any change out of $200.
A trip to a Broadway show for two set me back $350; three tickets for a Times Square attraction came to $100.
My wife had heard that Apple products were much cheaper here, so we trekked off to the big subterranean store on the corner of Central Park and Fifth Avenue. But she was disappointed to find that – once tax and warranty were included – an iPhone was significantly more expensive than in a mall in the UAE. There's a wonderful scene in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities – the novel that defined New York in its bull-market 1980s madness – where the anti-hero Sherman McCoy describes how his huge salary as a Wall Street "master of the universe" was simply "haemorrhaging from his wallet". I can sympathise with the luckless Sherman.
Despite all that, it’s been a privilege to have spent some time in what is, surely, still the capital of the world. In retrospect, I’m sure, it will seem worth every dollar.
fkane@thenational.ae
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