Two years ago, Cassandra and I traveled to New York for a weekend to go to a couple of Rangers vs. Yankees games. We both hated the city instantly, but for some reason Cassandra wanted to visit again. I’ve since been back three other times for work (the NBA offices are in Seacacus, NJ) and I guess she forgot about the smells. (Side note – in my San Francisco feature I talked about good and bad smells mixing. In New York, it’s kind of like that, except that you’ll smell bad and bad and bad smells mixing. For exammple, you’ll smell trash, then body odor, then dead fish, then cigarettes, then sewage, then more trash, then sulfur, then urine — all within about 20 seconds.)
I agreed to go, under two conditions:
1) We NEVER visit New York City on vacation EVER again… EVER.
2) I get to have a negative attitude about the whole trip.
She agreed, and then took a new job so she couldn’t drive down to New York on Friday with me… How convenient. She’d be flying in Friday night after I did all the work of getting the car and our stuff to NYC. Our friends Lauren and Jeannie were also in town for the weekend, so we spent much of our time with them. What we found out was that everything in New York still sucks, and if you don’t believe us, I have provided proof.
Why Driving To New York Sucks
I hate driving large distances (anything over about 30 minutes). It’s boring, tiring, and it kind of makes my butt start to hurt. I don’t like things messing with my butt. The degree of sucky is increased exponentially when I’m driving somewhere that I don’t want to go anyway, such as a gastroenteroligist’s office, a WNBA game, or New York. Unfortunately, all of these are places that have been destinations on a long drive. I left at about 10:30 AM, but we’ll cut to three and a half hours into the drive on Friday. I went with a turkey carver sandwich from Boston Market for lunch, so I was feeling the sleepiness about the time I hit the New York state line, which, coincidentally, was the same point where I ran into traffic. This is at a little after 2 PM.
Imagine your typical traffic jam, throw in about a million more cars, and then lower the IQ of everyone involved by half. Welcome to friggin’ New York. At about 2:30 Cassandra called me and said she was out of Jury Duty a little early and was going to head to the airport to see if she could get an earlier flight. I looked at the GPS. Six miles to the next exit (for the George Washington Bridge). Thirty-five minutes later, I got another call from her — at the airport, saying she was on standby for an earlier flight. I was now 5.7 miles from the exit. If my math skills were correct, I went only two miles in thirty five minutes — an average of about four miles per hour. That’s slow. Wait, what? My math skills weren’t correct? A quarter of a mile? That’s as far as I got? A quarter-mile in thirty-five minutes?
I check mobile traffic.com on my blackberry. The road I’m on is at a 9.9/10.0 for traffic delays. I think something must have happened for it to be that bad. I click on the link for more details, and the explaination is “Normal Daily Traffic. Delays between 2 hours and 2.5 hours.” That’s over a four mile stretch of road. Great. Since the only other description for the frustration involved also includes several explaitives, let’s just start a new paragraph.
Well, I was cruising along at a little under half a mile per hour on the Cross Bronx Expressway, but I decided to mix it up a little and take the next exit to see if there was a better way to get into Manhattan. I did manage to drive through a scary part of town without getting stabbed, and found a highway with a much more reasonable pace of seven miles per hour. I wonder if all those people who “Heart New York” “Heart” driving five miles in three hours. Anyway, a trip that should have taken four hours maximum ended up taking a little over six.
Why JFK International Airport Sucks
I picked up Lauren from downtown and headed to JFK to pick up Cassandra, which involved a lot more traffic and stupid people. Because of air traffic at the airport, all flights were delayed. I was starting to see a trend in this city. Because we had a little over an hour to kill, Lauren and I decided to go on a treat hunt. Lauren wanted a smoothie and I was looking for any strong substance that would make me think I was anywhere other than New York.
We parked in the parking garage for $9, checked the baby terminal that JetBlue owns and found a TCBY. They have a menu of about seven flavors of smoothies. Seems good for Lauren. Of course, they don’t ACTUALLY have any of those. Just banana. She declined because anyone who eats a banana smootie needs to have a mental evaluation. I went with strawberry ice cream in a waffle cone without the bottom part so the ice cream would leak all over my hand.
We figured if we went to big crappy terminal instead of this little crappy terminal the treat selection might be better. We had apparently forgotten that everything in New York sucks. There were fewer treats than at the baby terminal, but they do pump a trash smell into the airport so passengers can begin to get used to the smells of New York as soon as they get off the plane.
So we return to the baggage claim area of the crappy terminal to wait for Cassandra. Just in case you weren’t already irritated enough from being in friggin’ New York, they blast a voice every two minutes saying something like, “Please don’t put your children on the baggage carousel! They might get dizzy! If you need help hurting your children, please see an attendant!” Each time it got louder and louder.
Why Parking In New York Sucks
Because I had done research and decided that driving and parking was still cheaper than flying and cab-ing, we parked in the cheapest place within a mile of the hotel, but still more expensive than going, “Wait, why would we pay money to go to friggin’ New York” and not going at all. It was $33 per 24-hour period. It was one of those places that parks cars so close together that they don’t let you do it yourself. You drive to the front of the garage, give them they keys and they do the rest. As you walk away, you will, as I did, see your car going about 30 mph around a hairpin turn with the tires squealing as it goes down the garage ramp. As an added bonus, when you decide you want your car back, you get to wait for about fifteen minutes while they move all the other cars on top of your car so that they can get to yours.
Why the Paramount Hotel Sucks
Imagine for a moment, if you will, you are hosting a party at your home beginning promptly at 7 pm. It is important for your career that people are impressed by your party, and you decide to make your place look as nice as possible. You buy a big screen TV, fancy overhead lighting, and all new wooden flooring. Unfortunately, at 6:58 pm your dog throws up all over the new floor in the kitchen. Rather than cleaning it up, you take a really nice rug and throw it on top of the vomit. It covers up the sight of the vomit, but the rug eventually gets squishy and the smell is still there. (You might think that was more graphic than you care to visualize, but I just had to spend a weekend in New York, so deal with it)
Welcome to our hotel. It’s in (for New York standards) a “nice” part of town (Times Square) and the lobby looks all trendy. That is, after you find it… There are no signs anywhere, including the inside or outside of the hotel, that say “Paramount Hotel.” If I were designing a place that people couldn’t find even if they were trying, it would be just like this hotel. When you walk in, you get a “this place is artsy” feel. Lots of checkers, low lighting, colored elevators that mess with your eyes. However, you soon find out that ALL of this is to cover up for the fact that it’s a crappy, stinky, run down hotel with rooms the size of cruise cabins (that sounds like an exaggeration but it isn’t at all), uncomfortable beds, 15-inch televisions with bad reception, and people working there that just don’t give a crap. But I guess they think that the sink that looks like a funnel makes up for it all.
(After I wrote that last paragraph I re-read it, and to make short story the same length, those exact two paragraphs are now a review on trip advisor.)
Why Times Square Sucks
Everyone is a tourist in Times Square. The locals avoid it like I avoid having children. Add to that the fact that there are about five million tourists this time of year and all of them are within one block, and you have a mass of irritation unlike any other. It really doesn’t matter where you are or where you are going. Someone is going to be in your way, and chances are that they have no idea where they are or where they are going. Also, if you think that they’d do something about the city smelling like trash in the touristy part of town, you’re wrong.
Why the ESPN Zone in New York Sucks
I know. Nobody ever thought I’d write that an ESPN Zone sucks, but this one is special. It is in Times Square. That means that there are ninety gajillion people there, any game in the game room ranges from $2 to $4 to play, and a burger will run about $15. The service was fairly bad, and the food isn’t great.
The dining room doesn’t have much in the way of a sports feel. There is a bar upstairs, however, with TV’s everywhere and nice recliners and comfortable seats. It looked like it would be the ultimate place to watch sports. Too bad it has a seperate, secret waiting list that they didn’t bother telling us about until well after we put out name on the list at the front door. So, instead of getting to eat at the part of the ESPN Zone with the sports, we got to experience the part without the sports.
Why Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty Suck
At the security checkpoint to get on the ferry over to the islands, I actually had a guy tell me to take each item individually out of my pocket. For example, as I was taking my keys out of my left pocket, he saw I had something in my right pocket and said, “Take the wallet out of your other pocket!” He did this enough that finally I had to yell, “I’ve done this before, back off!”
At the statue, they search everyone more closely than they do at the airport. If you brought a bag, you’re forced to rent a locker for several dollars. Everyone has to go through the little puffer machine. It’s an hour-long wait for the chance to see a small museum whose whole purpose is “This thing is made of copper” and the opportunity to walk up about fifteen stories of stairs so that you can see the view from the top of the pedastal. You can’t walk up the inside of the statue anymore because apparently it isn’t safe. Fire codes and all. Once at the top, you get to have people push and shove into you as you look at New York. If you smell really closely, you can still smell the urine from the streets all the way at the Statue of Liberty. Did I mention this little workout only costs a little over $20 per person?
Why NBC Studios Sucks
NBC is ridiculously proud of their studio. Maybe that’s why they ask you to get there at least half an hour early for an hour long tour. Or maybe that’s why the tickets are $18.50. At any rate, their gift store is about twice the size of the Celtics and Bruins gift shop, and it’s mostly filled with junk. This is where they make you wait for the tour, so you’re surrounded by old women, children, and men who just want to go back to wherever they came from and sleep away their misery.
Once the tour begins, they give you a metal lanyard to hold your ticket for the tour around your neck. The reason is unclear, but about two minutes after you get this metal lanyard, you’re forced through a metal detector. I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I know that a metal detector is likely to detect metal. That is why I took off said metal lanyard and placed it into the bin to be passed around the metal detector, only to get yelled at for not wearing it. Meanwhile, the guy on the other side seemed to wonder why I was the only one who hadn’t set it off. No wonder NBC only has one decent show (The Office).
The tour is guided by a male / female tandem. On the tour, your first stop is the Late Night With Conan O’Brien studio on the 6th floor. The girl’s points of interest for this studio are the star Conan stands on when he does his monologue, and saying “Isn’t it smaller than you expected?” about fifty times. She also notes that all of the furniture is covered because NBC shoots exclusively in High Definition, and sounds like a commercial. Someone should tell her that EVERY network shoots exclusively in High Definition now.
The second stop is up two floors to the Saturday Night Live studios where the guy takes over. He makes a few jokes about violence towards Ashlee Simpson and then tells us that it’s a live show. I thought about asking, “So then why do they have the word ‘Live’ in the title?” but I decided that the group of idiot tourists wouldn’t get it. So I wondered what we were going to see next as we were walking out of the studio. Turns out that is about it. They take the group into a play room with a green screen so that one person can get in front of a map and prove that they don’t really have a map of the country on the wall in the news room, but then they’re done. To be fair, I guess they wouldn’t want to over-excite people before they head back out into New York and get them ultra-depressed.
Why Caroline’s Comedy Club Sucks
Caroline’s might be the most famous comedy club in the country. They get the biggest of big names in there. This weekend was Darrel Hammond, best known for his Bill Clinton impressions on Saturday Night Live. Daniel Tosh was also in town at another club, but we decided on Caroline’s because we had already seen Daniel Tosh, and Caroline’s was closer.
The club is right on Broadway in the Times Square area. If you think about the most inefective way you could possibly assign seating, that’s how Caroline’s handles it. Basically it’s a “First come, first served” plan where you get assigned a number by the time you arrive, but is then dependent on New Yorkers not being selfish and trying to just jump to the front of the line when they start seating. When the doors open for the show, they start calling numbers and seating people. This would work if they hadn’t packed 1,100 people into a room that comfortably holds 250. This means that when ten numbers are called, it’s an all-out free for all to see who can shove their way through the crowd and get to the door. Of course, if there’s someone without a number that gets to the door first, they get seated instead of the people with the numbers. Oh, and if someone doesn’t even buy tickets, they can just hand the guy seating people a couple of 20′s and get seated directly next to the stage, leaving people that paid for tickets to stand in the back without a seat.
Once inside, since we were sitting in a group of people either from New York or visiting Times Square, everyone was (and I’m generalizing here because it’s 100% accurate to do so) a bad person. The guys next to Cassandra and I were so drunk they were laughing at the chips in their nachos because they looked like people at the table. One of them had a habit of putting his arm around Cassandra, which I had to push away several times throughout the night. In general people around the room were just obnoxious, so much so that Darrel Hammond, halfway, through his show just said, “I give up – I just want to get out of here” and then killed the next 25 minutes so he could leave. It seemed like everyone attending the show wanted to make it about them, probably because they were, being from New York, bad people. But, to make up for the experience, by the time the show ended, it was about 12:30 AM and we got the excitement of walking the streets of downtown New York City late at night and playing the gunshot lottery. We didn’t get shot, but it is unclear as to whether or not that means we won, considering we had to wake up in friggin’ New York the next morning.
Why the Trip Home Sucks
Despite being warned by Nathan that much of Manhattan would be closed due to the NYC Triathalon on Sunday morning, Cassandra was insistent that we drive by Central Park on our way out of town. Of course, Central Park is nowhere near the “way out of town” unless you go completely across town to get out of town. Not only is going completely across town tough to do when every other road is closed, it also creates stand-still traffic on every road that remains open. All of the sudden we had another third-of-a-mile-in-an-hour situation. After leaving the hotel around 10 AM, and sitting in traffic at Central Park and figthing our way north to get out of the city, we hit the Yankee Stadium area just in time to catch traffic for their noon game.
Traffic was heavy most of the way through Connecticut, our GPS broke and wouldn’t charge, it took us about six hours to get back, I almost fell asleep driving, Cassandra and I weren’t really on speaking terms for the ride home, and we got to spend an hour and a half in the dark outside of North Station later that night waiting for AAA because she left her door open Friday and her car wouldn’t start. I wouldn’t have expected the trip to end any other way.