Holly Golightly hotel in Manhattan. Photo / Supplied.
Holly Golightly hotel in Manhattan. Photo / Supplied.
There's a scene in Breakfast at Tiffany's when Audrey Hepburn's character, Holly Golightly, is trying to explain to her new neighbour and eventual boyfriend, Paul Varjak, just what it is that she loves about the eponymous jewellery store.
When she's in the darkest depths of despair - "the mean reds" as she calls them - "the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany's. Nothing very bad could happen to you there".
Walking out on to the roof garden of The Surrey hotel, 17 storeys up in Manhattan's Upper East Side, with the sun setting lazily over Central Park to my west, I'm reminded of that sentiment. Not only because Tiffany's happens to be a few blocks to the south, but because this moment is my introduction to a city I've been longing to visit for years, and it's a transformative experience, to say the least.
The bright lights of Midtown - of Broad-way, Times Square and the Empire State Building - might be most people's first taste of the Big Apple, but the Upper East Side (or UES, to use its official abbreviation) is mine.
Tom Wolfe, author of that great Manhattan novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, once observed: "One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years."
When it comes to the Upper East Side, it's hard to argue. This is the home of the city's most exclusive zip codes, an unparalleled array of galleries and museums, and the finest retail therapy money can buy. It's the land of Mad Men and Gossip Girl, of multi-million-dollar brownstones; of Madison Avenue, Lexington, Fifth and Park. Nothing very bad could happen to you there.
We're staying at The Surrey, on the corner of 76th and Madison, nestled in a Beaux Arts building in the heart of the Upper East Side like the luxurious, modern townhouse you wish you owned. Having undergone a $60 million facelift, it's a great base from which to explore New York, a sleek oasis of cool in sepia, cream and black, and a beacon of elegance and sophistication, even in a neighbourhood synonymous with both those qualities.
The Surrey in Manhattan is an oasis of cool, with a large tapestry of Kate Moss greeting visitors. Photo / Supplied.
Appropriately enough, the hotel's signature is art. An 8ft Chuck Close tapestry of Kate Moss greets visitors when they arrive in the lobby; a collection of paintings includes work by Claes Oldenberg and Jimmie Martin. The aesthetic of the interior designer, Lauren Rottet, is "old meets new". Even the beds are works of art - at a reputed $10,000 a go, the signature Duxiana beds form the centrepiece of the Surrey suites.
Most visitors come to Manhattan armed with an extensive "to see" list compiled from guidebooks and friends' recommendations. I'm determined to avoid that approach (although I can't resist jogging round the Jackie Onassis reservoir in Central Park) in favour of simply strolling and soaking it up.
So my first excursion is nothing more complicated than a right out of the hotel lobby and then a left almost immediately on to Madison Avenue, where I spend at least half an hour imagining myself in a kind of Don Draper-style fantasy of 60s glamour. You'd be hard pressed to find one of the world's luxury labels that didn't have a presence in the Upper East Side somewhere. While the budget doesn't quite stretch to the likes of Gucci or Prada, it's still true to say you feel immediately at home in New York, unlike in London, or Hong Kong, which can be bewildering for first-timers.
Lunch is back at Cafe Boulud, adjoining The Surrey (yes, guests can order room service), one of Daniel Boulud's many ventures in the city. Casual and elegant are the watchwords, but though the atmosphere is relaxed the food is sensational.
The Upper East Side, of course, is famous the world over for "Museum Mile", a stretch of Fifth Avenue roughly 20 blocks in length that houses no fewer than nine museums, including the artwork in its own right that is the Guggenheim and the sprawling Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the largest art galleries in the world.
Holly Golightly hotel in Manhattan. Photo / Supplied.
You could lose weeks in these, but we actually spend the afternoon at the Whitney (not technically part of Museum Mile as it's back on Madison), a temple to cutting-edge modern American art that, we are told, will only actually grace the Upper East Side for another few years before it moves into a new building in the Meatpacking District.
For sundowners, I head to The Surrey's sister hotel The James, in Soho, for a taste of New York's nightlife. Unwinding by the rooftop pool and cocktail bar at dusk is enough to make me feel like a celebrity for the evening. A sort of minor character actor, but a celebrity nonetheless.
The next two days fly by as we visit Central Park, Times Square, the High Line (a 9m-high stretch of elevated railway track that has been transformed into a mile-long linear parkway), the Brooklyn Bridge and even Brooklyn itself.
Each warrants a commendation of its own, but always the Upper East Side welcomes us back, with that same kind of reassuring embrace that Holly Golightly felt each time she walked into the arms of the world's most famous jewellery store.
On our final evening, we make a pilgrimage to the top of the Rockefeller Center to catch a panoramic vista of the city's skyline at night, surely one of the finest views in the world. The bright lights dazzle in every sense. Surely, city breaks don't come any finer than this.
