So, if you are being pedantic about it, I’ve now had my third visit to New York. The second one was transferring planes at JFK and I seem to recall it was either a run between terminals or a six hours delay.

The first time was a day trip from just after the SFRA conference in Schenectady.

Sidebar: on the way there I changed planes at Boston Airport – where my parents met – and asked the security guards if they wanted me to Xray my luggage. Sure, they said, if you want to.

I don’t think that would have been the response four months later

So, I only have a remote memory of what I did – I think I got a bus from Schenectady to Manhattan, and I think that I must have got the return (last) bus at 6pm, at Port Authority Station. Four other landmarks sprang to mind. If the bus was the same now as it was then, it was more than three hours each way and presumably I had five or six hours there.

I think I looked at the subway map and recognised Greenwich and Chelsea, so headed down to 23^rd and Seventh, and walked west towards the Chelsea Hotel or – as it seems to be now – Hotel Chelsea. (23 is a good Burrough and Illuminati number.) I recognised the red brick and I’m fairly sure there were pictures of famous ex-residents, but I didn’t remember the plaque to Arthur C. Clarke. Presumably Kubrick must have sailed to New York before he made 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Then, a bit of a mystery. It looks like I must have gone down Eighth Avenue and found Christopher Street. Was the bar which is The Stonewall Inn a bar at that point? I honestly don’t recall it. I think I must have known the LGBTI+ associations of the street. There was a bookshop, Oscar Wilde, which Google maps tell you was Mercer Street and I found a place there which looked almost right, but it had moved at some point to Christopher Street. It has now closed and is a coffee shop. Possibly this was the first LGBTI+ bookshop I’d been in, although Mushroom, Grassroots and Compendium had sections.

Stonewall Inn is there – although technically it is next to the place where the uprising started in 1969 – and I had a pint in there. Next door is going to be a heritage centre, opening next year. A nearby triangular square has white statues as a memorial (which is a little awkward) and if you go to the end of Christopher Street and into Hudson Park there’s a Marsha P. Johnson Memorial Fountain (although there’s no plaque indicating this).

Eastward, presumably, then, to skirt Washington Square and its Arc de Triomphe-like entry. I’ve only read a couple of Henry James novels – The Bostonians, Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers – so I don’t know if Washington Square contains the falafel concession stands. I wouldn’t have noticed the Edward Hopper’s house, which is currently closed.

I didn’t go into the park in 2023, but headed north, I assume via Fifth Avenue or University Place and to the Strand Bookstore. I assume someone must have told me about it, but it is possible I just happened upon it. I have no memory of buying anything – this time I bought a copy of Roland Barthes’s The Eiffel Tower – several piece which I think were excluded from Mythologies – and an Ellen Gallagher catalogue. (There was a book on Belgian art I didn’t buy, but it would have weighed too much.)

I remember looking north to the Empire State Building and having an I’m-in-a-novel/movie moment and wondering where the peach was. I might have gone to Union Square, but more likely east into the Village. I bought something to eat from a convenience store and was caught by as always by sales tax being added.

I didn’t find the streets I wandered last time – I probably cut across between avenues before getting level with Port Authority. Did I do Times Square? I can’t remember.

I think I went there expecting to be mugged. (Blame Martin Scorsese and a thousand movies.) I only did the one subway journey – possibly coin shortage, possibly the network seems designed north-south rather than cross-town. But I felt very safe in memory, even when trying to find where they’d moved the bus departure too.

Having serious time there this year, I still felt safe. I was mostly defaulting to the same subway to get to and from museums, then walking to other places in the afternoon and evening. I definitely want to go back, rather sooner than 2045, but it’s clearly somewhere to save up for.

I know I had a camera in 2021, a bulky SLR I’d bought before going to Melbourne. If I took it and therefore took photos, I’ve no idea where they are. Possibly in a pile of albums and wallets in an understairs cupboard. I was a little surprised that I remember so little but it was one of the first times I’d been on my own in in a big foreign city. Moments slowly came back to me during the fortnight, although I had wondered if Strand had moved.