New York’s Noel

New York City may be the Big Apple at all other times of the year. But in December, it’s the Big Christmas Tree, decorated from the Battery to the Bronx.

Some of its holiday baubles are new, like laser shows on the 125-foot vaulted ceiling at the recently refurbished Grand Central Terminal, or permanent, like Wollman Memorial Rink in Central Parkand the icicle-like spire of the Chrysler Building. Many more are old friends from the city’s ornament box, like Santaland at Macy’s on Herald Square, imprinted by the classic film “Miracle on 34th Street” into our collective Christmas consciousness.

This year the windows at Macy’s are dressed with scenes from the 1947 movie about a man in New York who thinks he’s Santa Claus. When I saw the display in late November, the sidewalks were already jammed with shoppers clutching bags and children’s hands. But I squeezed my way to the window showing the “Miracle on 34th Street” judge proclaiming once and for all: “Mr. Kringle is Santa Claus. Case closed.”

The judge in my heart ruled long ago that there’s no place like New York at Christmas for getting into the spirit. For shopping, revelry, feasting and a spiritual lift. For Salvation Army bands and little girls in red coats.

This has never been truer than now, given the city’s economic robustness. Tourism, employment, construction, the population and even subway ridership are at record highs. I lived here for 20 years, but I’ve never seen it as crowded, bountiful and flush as it was late last month. It’s as if New York has already eaten its Christmas pudding and is about to burst.

These days it’s hard to walk down Fifth Avenue, get a cab, reserve a table in a restaurant or find accommodations at any price. Hotel occupancy and rates peak as Christmas approaches. At the Hudson, the trendy new Ian Schrager hotel on West 58th Street where 200 of the 1,000 rooms are priced at $95, all I could book two weeks before my trip was a minuscule double for $235.

I stayed there and at four other places--old and new, uptown and downtown, budget and deluxe--partly to sample what’s available. The variety also gave me the chance to tour, dine, shop and experience the holiday zeitgeist in several neighborhoods, discovering what’s new in the city I left three years ago.

On the Avenue

Everyone from Hong Kong to Hoboken knows you should walk up Fifth Avenue, especially at Christmas. The 10-block stretch between 49th Street and Central Park South takes in top sights and elegant shops like Saks; Rockefeller Center with its ice skating rink and 80-foot Norway spruce; St. Patrick’s Cathedral; the landmark Peninsula, St. Regis and Plaza hotels; Tiffany & Co.; Cartier (wrapped in a big red bow), Henri Bendel and Bergdorf Goodman (near 57th and Fifth, where a gargantuan snowflake hangs over the intersection)--not to mention that children’s paradise, FAO Schwarz.

I stayed two nights just off the avenue, at the frumpy but wonderful Wyndham Hotel on West 58th Street. It’s usually full, though the hotel doesn’t even have a brochure. (“Don’t tell your friends,” one of the receptionists told me.) My eighth-floor suite had two huge rooms, a kitchenette, big walk-in closets and a tub in the bathroom (increasingly rare in hotels here), all decorated in ‘50s drawing room style. And all for a big-city steal of $195 a night.

I still couldn’t afford the 18-karat white and black gold diamond ring at Cartier for $7,500 or a Christmasy glass bead necklace for $3,995 at Takashimaya, the Japanese department store on Fifth Avenue near 54th Street, although I had a window shopper’s lunch at the quiet, oasis-like Tea Box restaurant in the basement of the store. The meal started with a fragrant pot of Takashimaya Supreme black tea, followed by seared tuna on Japanese pickles, a lightly fried oyster, rice with seaweed bits, and spicy pork in a triangle of puff pastry. Lovely for $20.

I climbed the spiral staircase at the Mysterious Bookshop on West 56th Street in search of gifts for my favorite whodunit addicts, bought my brother-in-law an ugly Christmas amaryllis bulb at the New York Horticultural Society on West 58th, had a facial at the Bliss Spa on East 57th. (“You’re going to look beautiful,” said my facialist, who added, “Trust me, I do Natasha Richardson.”)

Saks and Lord & Taylor no longer dominate in the Fifth Avenue Christmas window department. Just as popular now are the windows at the Warner Bros. store near 57th Street, where Harry Potter is solving mysteries, and Disney, near 55th, with 102 Dalmatians running amok.

I felt the rapture of Christmas during the 11 a.m. choral Eucharist at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth and 53rd. The Rev. Andrew Mead’s sermon was erudite, the church’s neo-Gothic reredos breathtaking and the music of the St. Thomas Choir of Men and Boys soaring. After the service, I rented a pair of ice skates at Wollman Rink in Central Park, near East 62nd Street, where you can look up to see the pearly gray plate of the winter sky bordered by the skyscrapers of Central Park South.

All of this would have been enough even without Museum Mile, a half-hour’s walk up Fifth Avenue, where the Metropolitan Museum of Art presides. This museum manages to stay new (galleries of Byzantine works recently opened under the Grand Staircase) but deeply familiar. I stopped to see Kunz Lochner’s four full 16th century German armor sets; “Madame Charpentier and Her Children,” painted by Auguste Renoir in 1878; and the antique Neapolitan creche in the museum’s medieval rooms. In the last tableau, a horse rears beneath an Oriental king who has come to visit the baby Jesus, and a hunter stops, in surprise, at the manger.

Farther up Fifth Avenue are the spiraling Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, currently showcasing fashions by Giorgio Armani, and the Jewish Museum, where the gift shop was selling ceramic menorahs decorated with the sights of New York and children’s books about Hanukkah.

When I arrived back at the Wyndham after all this, the bellman looked at me and said, “Someone must be happy.”

Madison Avenue Stroll

Madison Avenue is tonier and less crowded than Fifth, passing through some of the city’s most elegant East Side neighborhoods. I concentrated on the section between the Morgan Library, in a Renaissance-style palazzo at East 36th Street (with, among other things, one of the first printed copies of “A Christmas Carol,” by Charles Dickens), and the exquisite Frick Collection on East 70th.

On this route you pass the forecourt of the Villard Houses at East 50th Street, built in 1884 and now part of the 566-room Palace Hotel (thanks to a 55-story tower). Christmas lights sparkled in the courtyard, and two tasteful trees graced the beautiful curving staircase in the entry.

No decoration is needed inside Le Cirque 2000, the distinguished and expensive restaurant with high, frescoed Beaux Arts ceilings and modish lighting and banquettes.

I thought I’d have a drink at the bar but discovered that Le Cirque 2000 offers a three-course “Forty-Five Minute Executive Lunch” for $25. I had delicious lobster bisque, risotto and creme bru^lee.

Then I checked into the Palace, where I’d booked a room in the luxurious Towers section for a special weekend rate of $435. In an early Christmas surprise, I was upgraded (although I never said I was a travel writer) to a magnificent junior suite on the 46th floor, with two elegant, traditionally decorated rooms, a huge marble bath and a bank of windows overlooking the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

There are less expensive lodgings in the neighborhood, such as intimate Morgans Hotel and the new Library Hotel near the Morgan Library. And there’s at least one budget choice, Habitat Hotel on East 57th Street, which opened earlier this year and has tiny, dreary rooms in a postmodern dormitory atmosphere. I spent two nights in a double there with a trundle bed and a bath for $160 a night (including continental breakfast served in the lobby) but could get only lukewarm water out of the taps and had to go down the hall twice to ask my neighbor to be quiet.

Never mind. The marvels of Madison Avenue lay at my doorstep. In the windows at Barneys department store on East 61st Street, young women--live, not mannequins--get ready for the holidays in five living rooms decorated by decade in the styles of the ‘40s through the ‘80s. Across the street is the king of New York wine stores, Sherry-Lehmann, which had a 1989 Petrus Pomerol for $1,895.

Farther uptown, Madison Avenue becomes a galleria of posh shops--Prada, Missoni, Givenchy. I like some of the less glossy places: Leron linens and lingerie, where you can buy a set of beautifully embroidered cloth Christmas coasters for about $100, and Rita Ford Music Boxes on East 65th.

And I love the Frick, in a grand stone mansion built in 1913 by steel magnate Henry Clay Frick on East 70th Street between Fifth and Madison. Every piece in this museum is a treasure, from Fra Filippo Lippi’s 1440 “Annunciation” to Francois Boucher’s 1755 “Winter,” depicting a pink-cheeked minx in a sleigh.

A Romp on the West Side

The West Side is where I first settled in New York, learned how to use chopsticks and the subway, saw the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History (at Christmas there are two big Icarosauruses made of pine boughs at the Central Park West entrance), walked in Riverside Park and discovered that you don’t have to be rich to get the city’s best.

For instance, I used to meet friends at the elegant bar in Cafe des Artistes on West 70th Street to swill pear champagne, the house aperitif; then we’d move on for a budget dinner at Vinnie’s Pizza on Amsterdam, Empire Szechuan Gourmet on Broadway or the funky old Irish Emerald Inn on Columbus near Lincoln Center.

I had a thick, juicy cheeseburger at the Emerald Inn before seeing “The Nutcracker,” performed by the New York City Ballet at the State Theatre in Lincoln Center ($26 for a seat way up in the fourth ring). With flying beds and dancing mice, gorgeous Lincoln-era costumes and classic choreography by George Balanchine, the production remains an inviolate tradition.

A short subway ride south, the theater district was hosting another New York Christmas classic, the musical version of “A Christmas Carol” (starring Frank Langella as Scrooge this year), in Madison Square Garden. With carolers in the lobby, cotton candy peddlers and Dickensian London settings that wrap halfway around the audience, kids love it.

When I caught a cab back to the Hudson, my West Side hotel, the driver said he had been taking lots of fares there. It’s the New York hotel of the moment, designed with all the postmodern idiosyncrasy people have come to expect of Philippe Starck. A steep, narrow escalator takes you to the lobby, which has a glass roof covered in vines and is so dark, even at midday, you can barely see to register.

On the main floor are two bars and the Cafeteria restaurant. Up on the 23rd floor, my double was cool, lined in dark wood, with whimsical lamps, a modernistic sink in the bath (a Starck signature) and a plump white bed. But it wasn’t quiet, and it had little space to move around in. At $95 the stylish room would be one of the best bargains in New York, but for $235, I preferred the Wyndham.

The neighborhood boasts one of the city’s most acclaimed restaurants, Jean Georges, on the ground floor of Trump International Hotel and Tower. I met a friend there for lunch (about $100 for the two of us); mine was divinely chunky chestnut soup, followed by lobster on chive spaetzle, covered in pink foam. Foam, which is in this year, my companion advised, raises the holiday spirit. Who knew?

All Over Downtown

I decided I’d left my heart downtown when the cab taking me to the new 203-room TriBeCa Grand Hotel crossed 14th Street and entered the Village. There, dignified row houses, small specialty shops, churches and parks like Washington Square recall old-time New York. The city’s ethnic stew seems thickest near Canal Street, where Little Italy, Chinatown, the TriBeCa loft district and chic SoHo meet.

The TriBeCa Grand disappointed me, even though my $454 double on the sixth floor was handsomely if masculinely appointed in neutral shades of beige and green, with the fully built-in feeling of a cruise ship stateroom. It had a bath with a window overlooking Church Street, a big, low bed and a host of high-tech bells and whistles. But the lighting in the halls and lobby was garish, the staff helpless and the restaurant too austere to be inviting.

You can’t beat the neighborhood, though, with premier restaurants like Nobu on Hudson Street, Savoy on Prince Street and Bouley Bakery on West Broadway. Less expensive but no less satisfying are the Used Book Cafe on Crosby Street, Cafe Colonial on Houston at Elizabeth and Veselka in the East Village (for challah bread and blood-red borscht). I also tried Babbo, a newer restaurant on Waverly Place in the West Village, where the menu is dazzling. I had a memorable dinner there: San Daniele prosciutto with figs, quickly cooked calamari, and light white wine for about $65.

The area’s principal joy is shopping. I favor Bigelow Chemists Inc. on 6th Avenue and Flight 001, a stylish travel shop on Greenwich, for stocking stuffers. Putamayo on Spring Street has modestly priced, folksy clothes; the Open Center Bookstore, also on Spring, carries volumes on meditation and Eastern religions; and Ferrara has been selling Italian Christmas cookies on Grand Street near Mulberry since 1892.

Save a late afternoon for a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, an exquisite New York City ornament, completed over the East River in 1883. On the pedestrian boardwalk up top, reached from Park Row near City Hall, the wind whips, and the views of Manhattan are unmatched.

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GUIDEBOOK / Out and About in the Big Apple

Getting there: From LAX, nonstop service is available on American, United, TWA and Delta to JFK in New York; Continental, American and United offer nonstop to Newark, N.J. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $548.

Where to stay: Here are the five hotels I tried recently, in order of preference. Check for specials.

The Wyndham, 42 W. 58th St.; telephone (800) 257-1111 or (212) 753-3500, fax (212) 754-5638. A comfortable, old-fashioned 134-room hotel near Carnegie Hall and Central Park; doubles $150 to $165, one-bedroom suites $195 to $240.

The Palace, 455 Madison Ave.; tel. (800) PALACE-T (725-2238) or (212) 888-7000, fax (212) 303-6000, https://www.newyorkpalace.com. A luxury hotel in midtown, with 453 rooms in the main section and 113 rooms in the more upscale Towers. Doubles in the main hotel $440 to $565, doubles in the Towers $665.

The Hudson Hotel, 356 W. 58th St.; tel. (800) 444-4786 or (212) 554-6000, fax (212) 554-6001, https://www.hudsonhotel.com. Opened with 1,000 rooms in October, with outre Philippe Starck decor; rates $95 to $500.

The TriBeCa Grand Hotel, 2 Avenue of the Americas; tel. (877) 519-6600 or (212) 519-6600, fax (212) 519-6700, https://www.tribecagrand.com. Doubles, all with king beds, $454 (but $199 Dec. 17 to 30).

Habitat Hotel, 130 E. 57th St.; tel. (800) 255-0482 or (212) 753-8841, fax (212) 829-9605, https://www.habitat-ny.com. It has 317 spare, modernistic rooms; rates for doubles begin at $125 with private bath, $90 with shared bath.

Where to eat: The Tea Box, 693 Fifth Ave.; local tel. 350-0100. Lunch served 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., no reservations; $15 for the daily bento box.

Le Cirque 2000, 455 Madison Ave.; tel. 303-7788. This elegant restaurant in the Palace Hotel offers “Forty-Five Minute Executive Lunch” in the bar-lounge; three courses for $25.

Babbo, 110 Waverly Place; tel. 777-0303. A contemporary Italian restaurant in the Village; entrees $18 to $25.

Jean Georges, 1 Central Park West; tel. 299-3900. The flagship restaurant of celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Lunch and dinner served in the main dining room; breakfast, lunch and dinner available in adjacent Nougatine; a la carte and prix fixe lunches $35 to $45.

For more information: The New York Convention and Visitors Bureau, 810 7th Ave., New York, NY 10019; tel. (212) 484-1222, https://www.nycvisit.com.