For more than thirty years we spent Christmas in Blackpool staying with Lesley's mother, Margaret. Now sadly Margaret is lying in a care home with severe dementia.
George is doing his own thing so in 2015 we decided to spend a few days in Weymouth over Christmas. This was fine except that on Christmas Day we could not find anywhere for lunch.
So for 2016, I decided that we would stick to the seaside theme but go to a seaside place where we would be sure of finding food on Christmas Day. New York City sprang to mind.

A Norwegian Air Shuttle Dreamliner took us from Gatwick to JFK. I had not realised that food on cheap air flights is now an optional, chargeable extra so we had to starve for eight hours.
On our USA trip in 2012 we had to queue for 90 minutes to get through US immigration. This time it was only about 75 minutes but despite that we got to our hotel before midnight local time.

My first and ongoing reaction to New York City is: I have seen all this in the movies. I already knew that the "Bronx is up and the Battery’s down" - important because it is the reverse of British usage where you go "up" to London.
This is the view if you climb out on to the fire escape of our hotel.

In fact there are a lot of dogs in New York and most of their owners seem responsible

These fire escapes look like they were afterthoughts but they were probably part of the original design

Possibly a sewer vent

Outside Schatzie Prime Meats on Broadway just up from 101st Street

Looking up Broadway from the corner of 102nd Street. Our hotel is at the centre of this photo

Cropped out of the previous image. The Marrakech Hotel at 2588 Broadway on the corner of 103rd street. I assume the hotel occupies all four of the upper floors of this building and there is no elevator! Fortunately we were on what the Americans call the second floor.

Just south of the cathedral: the Peace_Fountain by Greg Wyatt in the West 111th Street People's Garden

New York delights in superlatives. This claims to be the biggest Anglican cathedral in the world.

The choir parapet of notable figures from each century since the birth of Christ here we see, from right to left: 14xx Christopher Columbus, 15xx Galileo, 16xx Shakespeare, 17xx George Washington and 18xx Abraham Lincoln. The parapet was installed in 1922 and they left the last niche empty until the century had ended.

When that happened, they could not agree on a single person so they gave us this interesting quartet: Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, Susan B. Anthony (American social reformer and women's rights activist born into a Quaker family) and Mohandas Gandhi.

The building that New Yorkers call the Port Authority is in fact a bus terminal. Nearby it and parodying the name Lesley spotted the Beer Authority. Which is a hopeful sign that the USA is not a total lager desert. The place has sixty taps serving this wide range of beers.

The Beer Authority is entered from West 40th Street. this is the view from its window on to 8th Avenue

Harry Beck designed a diagrammatic map of the London Underground back in 1931. But the Metropolitan Transportation Authority sticks doggedly to this approximately geographical format. Points to note: it has been rotated about 30° anti-clockwise from north-up so Manhattan is straight up and down and Central Park looks unnaturally wide because of stretching needed to show the detail in Midtown.
I also found this even more complicated map dated 2010 June in their archive.

Getting about NYC is generally quite easy with their boring grid system of streets and avenues. But one trap to catch the unwary is that you can have separate subway stations with the same name. There are three stations called 103rd Street in Manhattan at least a kilometre apart from each other and another in Queens. This is 103rd Street served by the train.
Those parts of the subway which are actually underground were mainly built by cut-and-cover. Here we are looking up at the sky. Up top these are just metal grilles in the cetral reservation of Broadway.

The guard rides in a tiny cubicle midway down the train. These monitors, I think at 103rd Street for the train, enable them to check the state of the closing doors

Monster vacuum cleaner! Do we have these on the London Underground?

Automated display on the train. Lights on to show where it has yet to stop - important because the <> train does not stop at certain stations.

South Ferry station is the downtown terminus of the train. It is built on a very tight curve - you can only get out from the first few cars and they have these extending platforms to cover the gap. These three imaages show the platform extended - note two yellow strips and …

here is the platform retracted.

An hallmark of the New York subway is the lines of pillars close to the platform edge arising from they way they do cut-and-cover. This is Fulton Street station on the and lines.

An exception to the cut-and-cover construction had to be used at Washington Heights which include the highest natural point in Manhattan at 81 metres (265 feet) above sea level. So the platforms here at 181st Street station on the tunnelling construction was used. The line is reached by "three massive elevators" and and we have a wide space free of pillars.

Clearly the subway builders were not familiar with deep tube building techniques. There was a fatal accident during construction in 1903 and in 2009 an eight metre long section of the brick lining collapsed.

And even here, if we look in the opposite direction along the platform, they have reverted to their beloved pillars.

But by the time we get to Dyckman Street the subway has become overground.

World Trade Center 1 lurking behind other buildings seen from Battery Park

Emma Lazarus wrote The New Colossus, a sonnet which appears on a plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. It includes the words: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
To get us in the mood, they force us into an huddled mass waiting for the security screening which is almost as strict as airport security.

Picasa's pathetic attempt at stitching together four images of downtown Manhattan

Windows Live Photo Gallery's superb bit of stitching. The new One World Trade Center is in the center.

These crude dog outlines at the foot of the pedestal are pivoted to move about in the wind and in fact are very effective at scaring away the seagulls

This rather sweet mini fire truck is stationed within the terminal because ceiling heights especially down at the platforms would not allow a regular truck in.

One of the few sensible things that Americans do is talk about "track" numbers not platform numbers.

++++ use Draft:Steves & Sons. Link to more similar from previous US trip.

Dump no waste - drains to waterways, ie. to the Hudson. See message cast into the plate at the bottom of the photo. Compare with "no dumping" photos in other parts of the USA.

As well as being at full capacity, they are worried that the present bridge may collapse because it was built on the cheap and uses the same style as a bridge in Minneapolis which collapsed in 2007.
The location of this bridge was chosen because it was the closest they could get to New York City without the bridge coming under the Port Authority who would have demanded the tolls. Compare with the Thames where the City of London's control of the river extends a long way up and downstream from the city.

Officially Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Americans still cling to the notion that prison can correct people. They bang up 478 per 100,000 of their population — three and half times the European rate.
I found this undated image on this web page. Curiously, I need to flop it to get a very close match to my image:

The telephone poles nearer to the tower are gone but the lattice towers carrying various railroad cables seem totally unchanged.

This map dated 1931 shows an area of marsh. Since then its use as a landfill site has turned it into 30 metre high hill. It has now been capped off with soil but such sites continue to generate methane for years afterwards. This manhole is one of the methane vents.

I think these rock filled ditches and embankments are are to catch storm water and prevent big flows which might carry soil away.

Light going. Took busses. Landed up at Woodhaven Boulevard station. Walked west along Jamaica Avenue. Had a drink. Walked further west and caught the or train from 85 Street - Forest Parkway back into Manhattan.

"Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9" is apparently the official name for this firehouse. entire shift ++++
These guys and all their comrades who died on that day are honored on a firetruck based in this firehouse on the other side of the country.

You can stay in the hotel for as little as $1,450 per night or buy a residence for $5,395,000.

My own attempt at stitching two images - note the left hand half of the "one way" sign is duplicated. (I edited out the right hand half of one of them.)

Windows Live Photo Gallery's much better stitching job

This NYPD roadblock is controlling access to the "secret" entrance for residents on 56th street

This is the Samuel I. Newhouse. this and its sister ship, Barberi are the highest passenger capacity vessels in the world at 6000 passengers each.

Brooklyn Meetinghouse. Note the curved sounding board over the ministers' gallery. Compare with Washington, DC.