I paid my first-ever visit to New York City this past week­end. It was a fun time, but not quite what I was expect­ing. Thanks, prob­a­bly, to all the adu­la­tion heaped upon the town in lit­er­a­ture and pop cul­ture, I fig­ured it would be some insane Mecca of enter­tain­ment, arts, and cul­ture. The stores would be inde­pen­dently owned, I fig­ured, and the streets would be lined with great restau­rants and nice pubs. Instead, I dis­cov­ered that New York is not ter­ri­bly spe­cial except in one way: it is out­ra­geously large.

New York City has, in fact, suc­cumbed to nearly all the forces of homog­e­niza­tion that dom­i­nate mod­ern com­merce and ruin our cul­ture. Look­ing for a great restau­rant in Times Square? Try the Olive Gar­den. What event are those peo­ple on the fabled Fifth Avenue side­walk queued up for? The daily open­ing of an Aber­crom­bie and Fitch store. Every bank seems to be a mega-chain. I quickly dis­cov­ered that my plan to stum­ble upon inter­est­ing restau­rants and bars would not work. With­out the ben­e­fit of prior research or the knowl­edge of a local guide, I found my only hope for find­ing decent enter­tain­ment was to enlist the ser­vices of the hotel concierge. In New York, you have to seek things out. The only things you can reli­ably hap­pen upon are bode­gas and pizza joints.

Some more things I liked about New York:

• The muse­ums. The Amer­i­can Museum and the MoMA are both incredible.
• The Dakota. As we walked by on the way to the Amer­i­can Museum, the stuffy-looking door­man here started gush­ing excit­edly to a small band of tourists about the John Lennon mur­der. It brought me some per­spec­tive on NYC culture.
• Cen­tral Park. Great idea, great loca­tion, and great execution.
• Le Parker Meri­dien hotel. I had a very pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence at a Le Meri­dien in Sin­ga­pore last year and, con­sid­er­ing its prox­im­ity to the muse­ums I wanted to visit, I felt good about this choice. Indeed, it was worth the money. I got ran­domly upgraded to an immac­u­late 37th floor room fac­ing Cen­tral Park. From there, we watched the lunar eclipse unfold, framed per­fectly between some sky­scrap­ers. And at break­fast we rubbed shoul­ders with the Vienna Phil­har­monic, which was play­ing a gig down the block at Carnegie Hall.

Some things I dis­liked about New York:

• The ultra-bright, super-animated video signs that are now appear­ing every­where, even on stores and banks. These things are so ridicu­lously bright at night that they are painful to look at. A sign at Macy’s was cycling through pic­tures of iPods and cell­phones on a white back­ground. It illu­mi­nated the road pretty intensely. Build­ings and store­fronts, in my opin­ion, should be designed to func­tion in syn­ergy with the city around them, rather than work­ing to force their mes­sages upon inno­cent passers-by or oth­er­wise scream­ing out for atten­tion. One can achieve dis­tinc­tion with class and func­tion. This is a com­mon urban design con­cern that you’d think New York­ers would understand.
• The sub­way. The train win­dows are all etched with graf­fiti. Okay, so maybe clean them up like every other city? Worse, the sig­nage and maps are clut­tered, poorly con­fig­ured, and some­times ter­ri­bly con­fus­ing. One would think that in a city so full of graphic design­ers, artists, and thinkers, their own sub­way would be easy for novices to nav­i­gate. Not so.
• The freak show. New York’s pop­u­la­tion is an exceed­ingly diverse group, so you’d expect to find a large num­ber of weird or obnox­ious types. But seri­ously, they seem to occur here in num­bers that are way out of pro­por­tion to the world average.