New York is the habitually unfinished city, home to a thousand exoskeletons and as many more vaguely futuristic building sites, a town in a constant state of flux. It is now also the most expensive city in the world (it just overtook Hong Kong), a place that makes London — itself ridiculously expensive but after Geneva rather embarrassingly only the fourth most expensive — seem almost reasonable. It’s now 25 to 30 per cent more expensive to eat out, get a taxi, stay in a hotel, buy a pair of trainers or even consider the cheaper secondhand options on the sidewalk outside the Strand bookstore.
Post-Covid, New York is now the place where you are forcefully encouraged to give your waiter an additional 25 per cent service on a meal that will almost certainly cost at least 25 per cent more than it would have done in February 2020. A cab from JFK is going to cost you north of $80, while a trip to Newark is easily three figures. It is a new city in other ways too, particularly in the more pronounced difference between uptown and downtown. Uptown is clean and “Tony”, downtown dirty and smelly (although I didn’t see the rats everyone had told me about); my old Vanity Fair colleague Graydon Carter says New York is “filthy”. Uptown (anything above 14th Street) is The Whitby Hotel (the midtown boutique of choice), and downtown Nine Orchard, a bank-turned-hotel with one of the most photographed rooms in the city — a cocktail lounge with the bank’s original vaulted ceiling (it’s been voted Esquire’s hotel of the year).
