Manhattan On Manchester City Matchday

It's not a perfect day. I'd rather spend it with you. Not such a perfect day.
But hang on, it's a pretty good route around Manhattan if you ever find yourself there for a weekend in late October.

Start: The Hudson Hotel, West 58th Street
Cool hotel. Very dark lobby, white furniture, HD TVs, long wait for the lifts. £299 per night plus taxes.

The view from the Time Warner canteen

1. West Side of Central Park
John Lennon is everywhere in New York. That image of him wearing a New York tee-shirt peers out from every souvenir shop around Times Square.

It takes about ten minutes to walk from the Columbus Circle entrance, through the amber and gold trees, dodging the joggers, the cyclists and multi-dog walkers, to the towers of the Dakota Building where he lived and died. It always reminds me of Tom Brook, the BBC reporter who was first on the scene when Chapman shot Lennon. We spoke regularly when Tom provided regular movie news for Liquid News. Never had a bad word for anybody. His moustache as pristine then as it was on December 8, 1980. I walked straight past Strawberry Fields, past the man selling Beatles badges, and then realised I'd gone too far and double backed. I was just pipped to the entrance to the little graffited memorial garden by a coach load of tourists on their own magical mystery tour. I left them to it and headed out of the park.

A Blurry Mary

The night before I'd been to see Mary Chapin Carpenter at the Lincoln Centre. She's a recent discovery to me and I can't get anyone else interested. I found her current album, Ashes And Roses, on Spotify's new releases and it stuck. The opening track, Transcendental Reunion, sets the tone: a singer-songwriter song about arriving at an airport on your own amid the happy welcomes and tearful hugs and just hoping your suitcase has made it with you. (I almost got Kevin Bishop interested when he was on Olympic duty at Heathrow for BBC news.) The concert was fabulous. And there was one of those weird coincidences: the oddly agitated, silently arguing gay guys who checked into the next door room of The Hudson just before me were there. There they were, fuming their way to the lobby bar while I sat nursing a couple of beers.
There is a tenuous Lennon connection. I was due to see Mary CC in London the previous Monday but had to return the tickets to the South Bank Centre because of this work trip. I found out that I was in New York at the same time as her final tour show and booked a ticket. Last week she played a gig in Liverpool with Shawn Colvin. Colvin tweeted a picture of Penny Lane saying how being in Liverpool always made her cry. Mary re-tweeted it saying, "I know!". I re-tweeted that saying, "Yes. Awful place." Hilarious. I'm from Manchester; it's in my DNA to dislike Liverpool. At Liquid, I persuaded a reluctant Tim Muffet to do an ill-advised mickey-take on Liverpool being made the European City of Culture - full of archive bin strikes and Derek Hatton. A local commercial radio station started an anti-BBC campaign. We ended up having to do a live one-hour apology show from the docks with Ian McCulloch holding court. Boris Johnson was caught out in the same way years later. Josh those jokey Scousers at your peril.

2. Times Square
Head straight on down the 7th Avenue skyscraper canyon past Carnegie Hall (old joke sticks in head: how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice) and soon enough the neon lights and LED video screens welcome you to big brash Times Square. Never at its best in the daylight. Thronged with street performers and people queuing for theatre tickets at the discount booth.
Deborah and I went to see Patrick Stewart in The Tempest off Broadway 17 years ago, his English voice pristine among the American cast. He's from D's home town of Mirfield so we feel an affinity with Captain Jean Luc Picard of the Federation Starship Enterprise. We've also seen him a couple of times in London - in a one-man Christmas Carol (brilliant, but I'd done an early shift at GLR and nodded off before the end) and in a Cold War-style Macbeth in 2007 (he can act even when making a ham sandwich).

The Hershey's shop is the quirkiest building just off the Square; decorated with giant retro-wrappers and light bulbs, deliberately Willie Wonkerish. Their chocolate always tastes a bit odd - a bit off - to me but I stocked up anyway on some goodies to take home.

3. Empire State Building
Stroll across 42nd Street (even the street names have been turned into musicals) for a look round the artisan booths of Bryant Park. One specialises in nothing but different varieties of kettle corn. Go straight on through then right onto Madison Avenue. Now that's an evocative name. Reminds me of two things:
1. Kirsty MacColl's track from Electric Landlady. Johnny Marr on guitar. Kirsty was due to appear on Liquid a few days after she was killed in that motor boat accident. I was in the BBC bar when Steven Rogers came down to tell me. Quite shocking. I'd always liked her multi-layered vocal stuff right from There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis and especially her version of Ray Davies's Days.

2. Mad Men. Fabulous show. Who wouldn't want to be Don Draper? No 60s atmosphere now, though. No sign of any ad agencies, curvy Joans or silver-haired Roger Sterlings. Just more skyscrapers. But then at 34th Street look right - and there's the daddy of them all. It may not be the biggest any more but the Empire State Building is still the coolest. So tall it gets misty halfway up. No time to go up now, though. Press on to Third and East 26th.

4. Mad Hatter Saloon Bar

The Manchester City outpost in New York is in a studenty bit of of the East side called Murray Hill. This is the bar where City fans gather on match days in Manhattan. City shirts, plaques and flags fill the gaps on the wall between the big screen TVs showing the Fox Soccer Channel. It's the bar where the man the Daily Mail called the "gaffe-prone" former City chief executive Garry Cook made an infamous trip in 2010. I heard about his visit and sent along a freelance NY cameraman for Sky Sports News. Cook, looking red-eyed and jet-lagged, told the packed bar that City would beat Man United in the League Cup semi-final and go on to win the trophy. Mass cheers. Then mass embarrassment a few days later when Rooney scored another last minute winner and City were out. I met Cook a couple of times and liked his confident can-do style. The last time I saw him he was disastrously inducting Uwe Rosler into the Manchester United hall of fame at a supporters' club bash at the Etihad Stadium. I wish I'd never booked that camera.

Today a dozen or so fans watched City stutter to a 1-0 win over Swansea. Cheers all round at the final whistle and then a bonus: the infectious City anthem Boys in Blue, written by Godley and Creme from 10cc and recorded by the 1972 squad. I left with a couple of $20 souvenir tee-shirts, humming the match-day classic all the way to Madison Square Park.

5. The Flatiron Building

Love that building.

6. Union Square

The weekend before Halloween and there were pumpkins everywhere at the Union Square farmers market. Always reminds me of Charlie Brown cartoons and autumn half-terms in Norfolk; one of those bits of Americana that travelled to England and arrived on the trick or treat doorstep with added menace. The boss in Atlanta had invited us to dinner at his house the previous Wednesday: like every other house in the avenue it was spectacularly decorated with spooks, skeletons and spray-on cobwebs. Looked great. Only royal jubilees seem to prompt that spirit in the UK.

7. Greenwich Village and Soho
Artists selling their images of Manhattan on the low-rise streets, historic colonial-style houses, lots of trees, busy bars around Washington Square, a relaxed and bohemian atmosphere, a film crew near Christopher Street shooting a scene with an actor banging on the bonnet of a yellow cab - easy to see why everyone wants to live round here.

8. The High Line
A disused elevated railway that's been landscaped and converted into a very popular pedestrian walkway.

View from the High Line

Not much to see but a pleasant enough stroll with glimpses of the Hudson river on the left. Like being on a city-centre seaside pier.

9. Madison Square Garden

Venue of legends on the inside. But an ugly oval mintoe on the outside. I sat in a bar next to a Halloween cowgirl and a fairy godmother and watched the college football on TV for half an hour. It was twilight and Times Square had switched itself on when I left.

10. Times Square at Dusk.

That's more like it. Familiar from hundreds of movies and American newscasts. I'd been to meet the guys at the Nasdaq stock exchange the day before to talk about using the venue for more live inserts into Quest Means Business.

They presented me with this simulated screen grab of my projection on the screens of the building. The brutal, 60ft truth; the camera never lies.

A 15-minute walk up Broadway, via a sandwich stop at a deli, and I was back at The Hudson. A Harry Potter film was on TV when I woke up.