New York

Harry’s first time in the city and the final stop of a three-week crossing of the United States. Across two videos he does a deli, a hotel, a run, a haircut and a full day inside Hasidic Crown Heights, and uses the city to close the argument he had been running since Hawaii about what Americans are actually like.

His conclusion is that he was wrong about them, with one caveat he applies here: strangers strike up conversations with strangers all over the country, and rather less so in New York.

Practical shape of the city as he finds it: taxis are expensive, the subway is fine and fast, space is the constraint on everything including hotel rooms, and the whole place is simply costly. Chelsea and the waterfront walkway built over an old railway line are his evidence that the city is working hard at being liveable.

Katz’s Delicatessen

Founded 1888, and the pastrami on rye is what it’s for.

• You take a ticket at the door. Queues can run an hour; at Christmas, staff told him two hours outside plus an hour inside.
• Volume: 7,000 kg of pastrami a week, and 2,000–3,000 people a day — which the counter staff describe as quiet.
• The counter hands you a free taste of the meat while you order.
• $36 for the sandwich and a drink. Harry calls it possibly the best sandwich he has ever eaten and worth every penny.
• The When Harry Met Sally scene was filmed here, which is half the reason for the queue.

The Equinox Hotel

Equinox is a gym brand; this is their first hotel, and it’s rated the best in New York and top 50 in the world. Modern, dark, and small in the way New York hotel rooms are, with a minibar of creatine, vitamin C, sleep masks and CBD oil instead of snacks, and free yoga and stretching equipment in the room.

Book it on card perks — see use card perks at expensive hotels. An Amex Platinum brings a $100 credit, breakfast, early check-in, late checkout and an upgrade. Harry’s upgrade didn’t materialise because he booked the same day and the hotel was full; his lesson is to book ahead.

The gym is the reason to stay: it runs the height of the building, is open to the public as well as guests, and comes with indoor and outdoor pools, a hot tub, a cold plunge, sauna and steam rooms. A pool at all is rare in New York. Everything is weighted in pounds. It gets busy enough that he couldn’t get space in the pool.

The bed, unusually for the trip, is hard.

Crown Heights

Hasidic Brooklyn, at Kingston and Eastern Parkway, and the part of New York Harry gives the most time to. Around 15,000–20,000 Hasidic Jews live in Brooklyn — the largest population outside Israel — across more than 200 Hasidic groups, each named for the place it came from. These few blocks are roughly 90% Jewish; further out it becomes mixed.

The reputation is that it’s closed. Harry’s guide’s first claim is that Crown Heights is the opposite, and the video bears it out: you can walk into 770 Eastern Parkway, the Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters, unaccompanied and look around. It was a Jewish doctor’s house, bought in the 1940s when this was an affluent neighbourhood close enough to hear the Brooklyn Dodgers’ home runs, and more than 4,000 synagogues and Jewish centres worldwide were started from it. Inside is a wall of 1970s telephone equipment — a hookup system built by yeshiva students to broadcast talks live to hundreds of locations from Rio to Alaska.

The community runs its own institutions: Shmira, a neighbourhood patrol, and Hatzalah, a volunteer ambulance service that Harry is told beats the city’s response times because the crews know the streets.

Guided tours of the neighbourhood are bookable — see Rabbi Yoni, who explains the dress, the observance and the kitchen, and answers the awkward questions rather than deflecting them.

Notes from locals

• The city changed more after Covid than at any other time, per a barber who declines to say whether for better or worse — only that it isn’t the same.
• The famous $5 two-slice pizza is, in the same man’s view, overrated: he liked it when he was younger and doesn’t now. The story people tell is that the difference is the tap water.
• National Guard in the subway, which Harry notes is not an everyday sight.

The thing he takes from America

New York is where he states it: Americans are friendly, and he had expected the opposite. His theory is that they also back each other — someone doing well gets encouragement — where Britain has tall poppy syndrome and cuts them down. He flags it as an opinion while giving it, and thinks it’s part of why the country gets ahead.

Rankings from the trip: Will’s favourite city is New York for the energy, and his least favourite Las Vegas for feeling fake. Harry’s favourite is Miami.

Harry’s tips

• Book the expensive hotel through a card, and book it early.
• Take the subway. Taxis here are priced like everything else.
• Go to Katz’s early. The ticket system means the queue is the whole experience otherwise.
• Book a Crown Heights tour if you want the part of New York that isn’t on the list. It was the densest day of Harry’s whole America trip.

The Brooklyn food tour

Booked in advance and led by a local guide, and its thesis is that New York food is immigrant food — Mexican, Chinese, Italian and Caribbean communities that arrived for economic opportunity, in that order on the map.

• Mexican pork and pineapple, from a population concentrated on the west coast because of proximity but very large here too.
• The Chinese community grows its own produce upstate, so Chinatown’s ingredients are local — a jobs story as much as a food one.
• Vodka sauce pizza at $5, which he has never encountered and rates highly.
• A Jamaican patty he says he’d have called an empanada blind.
• Brooklyn is twice the size of Paris at 2.7 million people, and the average American eats 63 donuts a year (both from video – unverified).

The Plaza

• $1,000 a night for the hotel from Home Alone, opened in 1907, renovated in 2008 at a figure he gives two versions of and doesn’t resolve, and a National Historic Landmark.
• Right on Central Park, which he rates above the view — office buildings.
• The upgrade landed this time, along with a $100 credit, on the same premium card that failed to produce one at the Equinox because he booked the same day. See use card perks at expensive hotels.
• He catches himself trying to save $9 on a soft drink in a $1,000 room, and says so.

Source

• A Foreigner Takes on the Streets of Manhattan 🇺🇸 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxdwBFwWHA8
• First Time in the Home of a Hasidic Jewish Family 🇺🇸 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8B356F8u2s
• 30 Days Travelling USA - American Dream or Failure? 🇺🇸 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ttOIcmgZYk