Hello, dollar
CONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN
New York—Most visitors to New York from Old England come in two kinds—the kind with business expenses who think that everything costs the earth but don't care, and the kind who come on a package tour and don't know what anything costs so couldn't care less. There is a minority group, however, who have just enough cash to survive if they know how, and knowing how does not only consist of buying a paperback called New York on $5 a Day. This is a book published by Arthur Froomer, a Californian journalist who now has a global library of $5 a day guides, and written by a couple of nice girls called Joan Feldman and Norma Ketay. The United States Travel Ser- vice recommend it, and the only place I know in London that sells it is the Prince's Arcade Bookshop off Piccadilly. And it costs $1.95, which I think works out at 13s 6d.
First of all, I do not believe that you can possibly live on $5 a day here. You can rub along in a bad-to-worse hotel on the East Side in a boot-cupboard-sized room without even a shower, and a lavatory three floors up or down, and eat your midday meal at a drugstore for fifty cents and dine at Tad's chain of steak houses for $1.29 (no coffee, but a large potato and a piece of so-called garlic bread). Try doing this for long and your nerves, if not your digestion, will be on skid row.
A bearable hotel will cost $9-$10 here, such as the Tudor on 42nd Street where the UN officials stay, unless they are very senior indeed or have friends. You will not have much space for cat-swinging but you could give that hobby a rest and move cosily in with your telephone, television set and `bathroom'—a compact arrangement designed for very thin residents: Anyone who calculates the cost of big-city survival for strangers inevitably ignores the weather. The twenty-cents-anywhere-in-Man- hattan buses are fine until a New York down- pour starts, then you need a thirty-five-cents- for-the-first-fifth-of-a-mile taxicab, if you can get one. The subway is twenty cents, too, but before you plunge into it pop into any office of the Irving Trust and get a free subway map (that's not in the book) so that you can un- ravel tar and inn' from IND. Londoners soon get the hang of it, but they also tend to forget that twenty cents is is 6d, so short journeys are ex- pensive. Walk. It's both more direct and quicker than surface transport, but the distances are misleadingly huge. With buses, the one-way circuitry means that you are inevitably on the wrong avenue, with all the traffic roaring up- town when you want to go down. Or perhaps the best plan—if you are prepared to live dan- gerously—is to hire an American bicycle from the Bicycle Club of America, Central Park West, or Stan's Bike Shop, 353 East 10th Street, at a cost of $12 a week (or $4 a day). English bikes cost 25 per evil more. Once based in a low-priced hotel, and the Ketay-Feldman book is very good on this (so is the USTS, by the ay, with a long list pub- lished in 1965 for the New York World's Fair, though the prices are a little on the optimistic side), the two other main preoccupations are eating and entertainment—on a low budget in this city eating certainly cannot be classed in the latter category. Given fair weather there is a lot that can be done for free—Central Park and the wild woods overlooking the Hudson at Inwood Hill Park and the Metro- politan Museum of Art (this is like the British Museum, the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection rolled into one, with a free Every- man Cinema on the side). Also there are free television shows at cas and NBC if you are desperate. My impression is that American television is. There's a ticket office on 42nd Street opposite Grand Central Station, but the passes are mostly for second-rate shows.
The $5 book makes lots of recommenda- tions of places at which to eat cheaply, if not well. There are the Horn and Hardart auto- mats, which are also cafeterias. But if you shrink from names like the Gourmart and the Gourmeatery, you will quail before the pro- ducts of the automat. All tastes from bad to abominable are catered for, also some of the grub shunted through the pigeon-holes of those dispensers seems to have been there very much too long. Tad's is oK, but if you have a salad and the guy asks if you like French dressing, say no, or else he will swamp it with a pink goo that looks like poster paint and tastes like cream cheese and hair oil.
Walk around, screw up your courage to try places, and you can do quite well for meals between $2 and $3, remembering that this is 15s to £1, and you would get much more for that in London. Ignore places called pubs. They are not, and will charge you a hair-raising price for a drink ($1 minimum) and for a meal. They usually present a menu promising Old London Broil (a kind of grilled steak sliced after cooking) and sallett (with that insulting French dressing) and lots of other olde-worlde nonsense. Honest-to-God American places are good to eat in (but avoid wine—it comes in a port glass, costs the earth and tastes of any- thing but grapes), and some of the small Italian and French places are all right. But you will not eat French and Italian as you can in London—the New Yorkers would never stand for it.
But, with the dollar under control, on £50 you could survive for a week or ten days and see a lot of New York (especially the Village and the East Side where living is cheap) before either your cash or your stamina gave out.
I have come into possession of a depressing document from Finland. It is the official brochure of Oy Alkoholiliike AB, the state wine and spirit monopoly. After spending two dozen pages of full-colour art paper on their achievements as distillers and brewers, they add that the low level of alcohol consumption in Finland is caused by the limiting of sales to a few towns in which only 38 per cent of the population live. 'It is often a long distance to the nearest alcohol retail shop,' they boast. 'Nor is restaurant service permitted in the rural areas' where 'only 4 per cent of the licensed establishments are located. . . .' Another fac- tor, they chortle, is high prices. Moral: if Lou do not want to drink and drive, leave your car at home, but for God's sake don't F to Finland.
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