Creaking city

Although New York thinks of itself as a five-star city with a reputation for high-class services and superb hospitality, I beg to differ. Just about everything Jenny and I did ran into some unexpected glitch.

* At the Whitney Museum we went through a door marked Exit which set off an ear-splitting security alarm. There was no warning the door was alarmed.

* There was a one-hour queue in scorching heat for the Ellis Island ferry, as it goes via the Statue of Liberty. They don't have a ferry for each island.

* My plane from New York to Chicago touched down 3¼ hours late. This was put down to thunderstorms and air traffic control problems.

* The water only ran hot in our hotel room after 8 am. Before that it was cold. According to the hotel, we weren't running the taps for long enough.

* One pizzeria menu included a personal pie, a regular pie and a large pie. When we asked the waitress what sizes these were, she didn't know and recommended slices instead. It's only my second day, she pleaded.

* Virtually all the museums and galleries were closed on Monday, as opposed to Chicago where most of them opened on Monday.

* The signage to tourist venues was so poor we were forever asking people for directions. Even the Ground Zero Visitors Centre was hard to find.

* The key cards for our hotel room kept failing and we were constantly getting them reprogrammed. The hotel blamed over-sensitive locks and cards.

I could go on, but I think I've made the point. So many things weren't properly thought through, had technical faults, or were badly planned. It seems to me that New Yorkers are too complacent (or easy-going) about their malfunctioning city, and ought to be a lot more assertive and demanding.

Pretending everything is fine and making out we're just nit-picking tourists is an odd attitude to say the least. My answer is, Long Live Chicago!

Photo: The Whitney Museum of American Art

New York

So here we are in New York, which Jenny and I haven't seen for 12 years but which seems much the same. Skyscrapers hustle and bustle, tiny hotel rooms, pizza, art galore, baseball, skinny women in weeny shorts, overpaid city slickers and underpaid grafters.

The major change is of course the huge vacant lot where the World Trade Center used to be - and whose roof we stood on the last time we visited. Construction of the new buildings is now well under way.

Like Chicago, people from all over the world are mingling and working together. We went to the Immigration Museum on Ellis Island to learn how immigrants once applied for citizenship, the restrictions and prejudice they faced, and how they got by in this unfamiliar country. There are many sad and tragic stories. Some didn't even survive the dreadful conditions on the overcrowded boats.

To complement that, we revisited the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which shows how typical families lived in an Orchard Street tenement at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. They had to contend with grasping landlords, contaminated food, lethal infections and uncleared refuse.

Naturally we looked in at the revamped Museum of Modern Art and the brilliant Dali exhibition, complete with some of his movies. We also had a peek at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Pawel Althamer's strange human figures.

But my conclusion after several days here - I prefer Chicago. It seems to be going places while New York is standing still or even going backwards. The gap between rich and poor is very visible, with ragged hobos outside opulent office blocks. Air pollution is severe as is traffic congestion. The sewers always overflow after heavy rain. It feels like a city struggling to cope with limited resources. Still a Big Apple, but a Bruised one.

Photo: Ellis Island, just south of Manhattan, where more than 12 million immigrants entered the USA.