New York City on a mission to lure visitors back
Remember the buzz of Broadway? Window shopping on Fifth Avenue? Oh New York, how we miss you.
Remember the buzz of Broadway? Window shopping on Fifth Avenue? Walking the High Line to hang with Chelsea hipsters? Oh New York, how we miss you.
With the US vaccination rollout occurring at lightning pace, the city is launching a $US30m ($38m) campaign to lure people back to a magnetic metropolis that attracted 66.6m visitors in 2019. Destination marketing organisation NYC & Company is expecting 36.4m people to head to New York this year. Although Australians are highly unlikely to be among them, it’s a vicarious pleasure to learn about all the new things happening in one of the world’s most exciting cities.
Let’s start with arrivals. LaGuardia’s revamped Terminal B has been transformed, with double the facilities of its previous incarnation and a cavernous central hall featuring the Orpheus and Apollo sculpture formerly at the Lincoln Centre.
For a view of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings and Central Park, with glass-floored overhangs looking down on Madison Avenue, the Summit observation deck in One Vanderbilt opens in autumn to offer the highest vantage point in Midtown.
Art is happening everywhere: Jackson Pollock at the Guggenheim; Yayoi Kusama at NY Botanical Garden in the Bronx; Cezanne at MoMA; an immersive digital Van Gogh experience at a venue yet to be announced.
Broadway reopens in September with classics such as Chicago and The Phantom of the Opera plus fresh offerings, including Thoughts of a Colored Man and Mrs Doubtfire.
T+L is particularly eager to see the luxurious appointments of Aman, due to launch in the heart of Manhattan in June, but we’re also curious about the incongruously tropical Margaritaville Resort in Times Square and the 40-storey Ritz-Carlton New York NoMad.
Yes, it’s all go-go-go in New York. But I guess if we can’t make it there, we won’t be making it anywhere.
PENNY HUNTER
Book club
THE WRECK
Meg Keneally
The cover of this 2020 novel initially put me off. I’m not a fan of period romances and the image of a woman looking out to sea, gown billowing, watchful and waiting, possessed of perfect wavy tresses, seemed passive, a tiny bit too Daphne du Maurier. Happily, the author’s byline was the real lure and, whoosh, I was instantly immersed in the life of Sarah McCaffrey — “rebel, radical, stowaway and survivor”.
I’ve read little fiction set in the fledgling colony of NSW from a female perspective, and Keneally’s interest in, and research of, this period is deep and richly textured. She has based the plot, with creative licence, on two real events that shape McCaffrey’s journey. The Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, in which many protesters were killed for gathering in the name of parliamentary reform, is the impetus that sets Sarah on a dangerous course. That, and hunger, poverty and a passion for social justice.
After a failed rebellion in London, Sarah escapes aboard the Serpent on a perilous passage to Australia. The second event is the ship’s sinking after striking “jagged, indifferent” cliffs just before reaching Sydney; Sarah is the sole survivor.
Keneally says she used the wreck of the Dunbar near The Heads in 1857, several decades later than the book’s timeline, as inspiration. So Sarah’s arrival is dramatic, she’s on the run, ”bands of fear” encircle her chest but she’s wily, strong and proud, keen to meet up with fellow radicals in NSW.
None of this will end well, I thought. But then there’s Molly Thistle, as enterprising a widow as could be imagined. Keneally refers to the bonneted and bespectacled Mary Reibey, depicted on our $20 bill, as inspiration for this character, who ran a boarding house, owned substantial land and amassed great wealth. Thistle becomes pivotal to Sarah’s future in a strange place “that hadn’t quite made up its mind on what it wanted to be … A few handsome stone buildings with ornate trimmings quickly gave way to meaner structures … some just pieces of wood laid up against each other”.
Sarah was part of “a faceless mass, toiling down in the basements of grand houses or begging on the streets”. But can she really hide from her past? And now, Keneally’s earlier success, Fled (2019), based on the life of convict Mary Bryant, has flown to the top of my
reading list.
SUSAN KUROSAWA
View from here
SEASPIRACY
Netflix
If you’re contemplating the perfect meal of fish and chips (extra salt) or even a tasty snack of tuna on toast, read on warily. Seaspiracy is a 90-minute documentary from young British filmmaker Ali Tabrizi and his Australian-born wife Lucy, which is cresting in Netflix popularity. Spoiler alert: it heads in the same direction as the Tabrizis’ 2014 film Cowspiracy, which argued the case for a plant-based diet.
Narrator Ali says he has been “fascinated by the ocean for as long as I can remember”. “But this romantic vision … completely changed. I was forced to confront a side of the story I never knew, a story of just how huge our impact on the seas has become,” he says.
The film, made over five years in worldwide locations, opens with the problem of marine plastic pollution. Having just returned from a visit to far North Queensland, where plastic debris washes up on even the most remote beaches, I am all ears. But the main target is the fishing industry, particularly illegal syndicates often also involved in drug trafficking and human slavery.
In the doco’s sights, too, are conservation organisations “motivated by profit” and claims on retail labels of sustainable fishing. The more grisly moments, unsurprisingly, depict whale hunting in places such as the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic.
Ali acknowledges that there are people who rely on fishing for their sustenance, but his website advocates the move to a vegetarian diet, extension of marine reserves to 30 per cent of oceans by 2030, and an end to fishing subsidies.
Critics of Seaspiracy are many, including some participants in the film who claim unfair dealing and others who call out “facts” as plain wrong. Its style tends towards shock-horror, but there’s food for thought, so to speak.
GRAHAM ERBACHER
Spend it
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