It's been almost twenty years since I was last in New York and things certainly have changed. The much vaunted "clean-up" instituted by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani is in evidence everywhere: Times Square has transformed from pimp's paradise into shiny tourist mecca, the East Village where I'm staying is no longer full of junkies and punks but looks more like an up-market Surry Hills. Most surprising of all, the subway cars are no longer smothered in graffiti but are shiny and new, with the only paint job: an American flag posted on each carriage.
That said, NY retains its intensity. This time around I avoided the tourist pitfalls and instead, wandered the streets, breathing in the ambiance. One doesn't have to walk far to encounter social history: near where I'm staying, is Charlie "Bird" Parker's former residence (oh, and Madonna's first home); a couple of blocks on, the facade for Led Zeppelin's "Physical Grafitti".
Further on still, the site of the "Exploding Plastic Inevitable", now a tattoo parlour, where Andy Warhol kicked off pop art. And of course, throughout the East Village and Lower East Side, those fantastic shop fronts and window displays that seem quintessentially New York.
I avoided Broadway and the big shows at night and instead tapped into the local scene: most memorably, the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe, a collective where for a $5 admission and the price of a cheap wine or two, one can see what this part of New York is about. The night I arrived it was open mike and the talent was extraordinary: a punky performance poet confronting the crowd with her take on casual sex; an angry black rapper and a group of black girls singing acapella; a young Asian guy with an experimental violin piece that rarely used a bow but was incredible nonetheless. All of it mind-blowing and original, so far from the polished blandness of The Voice and other cynical exercises. 