I think it was comedian Bill Hicks who declared he always knew he was in New York when the smell of a dead person reached his nostrils. Having just returned from the city, I can vouch he was - if a little harsh - almost right. Cadavers no, but in a single fifty yard stretch of sidewalk I did detect pretzel, hotdog and human excrement.
What a place. Nothing quite compares and everything contrasts (right down to the tramp eating the giant pizza with extra topping and another dozing beneath a billboard for mortgagedreams.com). To me, it represents freedom and a period of responsibility-light existence, carries me back some thirty years to a memory of sitting as a teenager on Fifth with a burger in one hand and a cigarette in the other and an entire year of pre-university travel ahead of me. It's hard to conjure that magic again.
Things were scruffier and rougher in those days before Rudy kicked butt. Characters straight out of low-budget crime dramas offered 'a smoke' and more on every corner; the Moonies were recruiting in earnest (I even gatecrashed their world headquarters for a dare); the cops were surly and the people querulous. I loved it, right down to a tour guide shouting 'put some pep in your step and some pride in your stride' and the dire warnings from well-heeled friends in Connecticut advising never to alight from a train at 125th Street in case I was mugged, stabbed or eaten.
That first visit, I recall becoming trapped in a seedy peep-show off Times Square and emerging several hours later poorer and looking like a squeezed lemon.
Mind you, the London of that time was neither the sparkling alpha city of today nor especially salubrious. The streets were filthy and the food disgusting, the public buildings blackened with grime, the punks in full cry and King's Road nothing more than a meandering denim emporium. As for Carnaby Street, it had lost its Sixties chic and embraced the drab and dismal Seventies. Squats and Wimpy bars said it all. Wind on three decades and both New York and London seem to have raised their respective game.
Older and wiser, I am less impressed by the skyscrapers of New York - the wow factor has gone - and less enamoured with its claustrophobic density and raw urban energy. There is no escape in New York, no true pockets of calm, no avoiding the yawning potholes, no chance of sunlight ever reaching ground level. It is for the hard-boiled and single-minded, for those who do not mind the rudeness and the ceaseless flow and the elbowing through daily life.
For sure, New York has much to offer. London might have the Wallace, but its rival has the Frick (I would kill for those two Holbeins); London has Tate Modern, but New York has in its Museum of Modern Art an institution that relies on a stellar collection rather than the novelty of its building; London has the South Bank, but New York possesses Carnegie Hall. London contains Richmond Park and Hampstead Heath, the redeveloped swathe of docklands, the Nash terraces and the clubs of St. James, but New York embraces the gentility of Brookland Heights, the vibe of the Village and the joys of the Upper West Side.
And yet. I arrived home in London and breathe a deep sigh of contentment at its relative civility and varying tempo. London has gardens and garden squares, a string of urban villages that lend character. In London, there are vistas of Wren and Hawksmoor churches; there is the garden of St. John's Lodge off Regents Park; there is the walk along the Thames between Albert and Chelsea bridges or east from Waterloo to Tower bridge. New York might offer horsedrawn carriage drives in Central Park, but it will always fail to manufacture what Americans would call history and I would dub effortless and idiosyncratic charm. I doubt if a single sweetpea ever flowered in Manhattan.
To me, New York is like an old friend - brash and somewhat neurotic - with whom one is gently appalled and cannot quite remember how it quite started. Yet fondness remains. My father lived there for several years and lost a fortune in the Wall Street Crash of '29. His regard for the city never diminished. Winston Churchill was run down and hospitalised by a car: his loyalty remained intact.
I was profoundly affected walking the site of Ground Zero. Many friends had narrow escapes. Again memories of the past, of younger days and more carefree visits, reared up. That day of 9/11 was a punctuation mark for everyone, a seminal moment when America woke up and the real world intruded, when even Irish Americans had to accept they could no longer equivocate over the immorality and brutish awfulness of terrorism. The new towers are rising quickly and the area will be reborn. Like London and its Great Fire, the restlessness and vitality and forward momentum of these great metropolises will ever prevail and expunge the scars.
Give me urban life over television dinners and winter weather in the countryside any day, the theatre, the concerts, the bustle, the madness. New York or London, take your pick. And when it comes to top trumps, we in London might have riots, but New York has bigger bed bugs. Whatever your prejudice or preference, reflect on this: at least neither city is Los Angeles.