"San Diego? Well, to be honest, it isn’t exactly top of our list."

Peter Hannan

New York, New York, it’s a helluva town, the song (and most New Yorkers’ pride) proclaims. The great Babylon of American cities, the true capital of the nation, and home to lots of very tall buildings. But no one denies that come summer the Big Apple begins to putrefy a little. It isn’t just the frayed tempers and the clogged, ever more disjointed streets suffering years of neglect. It’s the weather itself, Guatemalan in nature, its crushing tropic humidity, its stifling airlessness seeming to lead inevitably to torpor or sadism. Or both. In July and August, therefore, even the most virulent Apple chauvinist indulges in fantasies of escape.

Travel Corp., West Greenwich Village. “I don’t think it’ll be your cup of tea. Unless you’re into the Hillcrest-Black’s Beach gay thing."

Mary Gearhart

But where to go? To the east there’s Europe, linguistically alien, snooty, disdainful, and very expensive. To the west, beyond all that awful farming country, there’s, of course, California: the Napa vineyards, the San Francisco lotusland, Hollywood, the Yosemite and...well, San Diego. Linguistically familiar (well, almost), friendly, disdained, and very cheap. Could there be a moment’s hesitation in choosing one over the other?

Jade's, St. Nicholas Avenue. “If you ever want a holiday in San Diego, I can book you into a hotel with flamingos."

Mary Gearhart

It hardly seems possible that the proud denizens of the Big Apple should ever contemplate descending the Ladder of Culture as far as the dreaded Southern California. As everyone knows, the two coasts are mortal rivals. “L.A.?” the New Yorker is bound to sneer, as if he has just suddenly detected a whiff of Bohpal in the air. “If you’re going to the Third World, you might as well go somewhere that has the decency to be pretty."

And didn’t Woody say it all? The great contribution of California to civilization? The law that made it legal to turn right on a red light.

But if L.A. is at least a serious rival, lending resentment to the general contempt, San Diego is in an infinitely worse position. People at least know roughly where L.A. is. “San Diego?” the New Yorker sneers. “Isn’t that a little town somewhere near Mexico?”

Nevertheless, some folks in New York have reasons for being aware that California’s second-biggest city need not be located simply by its proximity to a colourful and alarming ethnic destination. After all, wasn’t that dumb beach in La Jolla immortalized (i.e., horribly dissected) by Tom Wolfe, New York’s best? And doesn’t most of our meth come from there too? And of course there’s Drs. Seuss and Bronowski and the Salk Institute gang. All a bit vague, though everyone does know a Sea World is there. with a killer whale called Shamu. Shamu is on TV quite a lot and may be the citizen who has done the most to put the city firmly on the map for New Yorkers. But beyond this, all is fog. The only thing our New Yorker knows for sure is that San Diego is on the edge of the known world and has nice weather, is that reason enough to go there for a break?

Actually, I have found to my surprise that San Diego is something of a secret (and shameful) fantasy for a certain part of the city’s population. After all, who would not rather see Shamu in the splendid environment of Sea World than go to the Coney Island Aquarium — and get there by means of a palm-lined, sunlit freeway rather than the terrifying Q subway train-? Who would not rather loll about on Windansea beach than struggle through congested concrete canyons, constantly assaulted by scrofulous gnomes speaking in tongues and other madmen screaming obscenities?

Travel agents do a decent trade in selling Southern California, and gone are the days when the disheveled hordes of Brooklyn and New Jersey want simply to parachute into the Hollywood Hills and gawp at the locked gates of Bela Lugosi’s villa. Apart from anything else, the riots have ended that. Perhaps San Diego, after all, is coming into its own as the last bastion of old-time California, the last California city where nostalgia for the vanished good life might still seem credible. The last 1950s city.

It all depends where in New York the ideal California holiday is being sold. Take the hippest travel agent in the West Village, for example, the Travel Corp. on West Fourth and Bank Street, a stone’s throw from fashionable Patisserie Lanciani and Toon’s and at the heart of the city’s choicest gay neighborhood.

This leafy junction, with its Italianate eaves and pedestrian quietness, must be as far removed from the suburban automobile culture of San Diego as any place in the United States. It exudes an effortless and refined trans-Atlantic cultural confidence and is coyly politically correct. Brownstones, elms, and quaint little shops with French names all bask in the summer heat like a quiet corner of Amsterdam. The Travel Corp.’s air of self-conscious primitivism (Mayan prints on the walls, a pre-War English aviation signpost over the door, and bits of chipped pre-Columbian statuary) goes as far as a window display consisting of a sinister green 1950s poster for Mexican Railways, “Mysterious...Adventurous...Exotic...Handy Mexico: Mexican National Railways (Workers Controlled).” Could Mexican railways ever look so mystical, even in the hands of the Workers? And where in San Diego would you find a travel agent who deliberately puts filthy 1940s brochures of the Cuban Tourist Authority in his windows? Inside, in an intimate room, three salespeople offer tours and hotel reservations for the San Diego area, but not without a shrug of irony.

“So you want to go to San Diego for a holiday?” the immaculate youth in the Southwick madras suit says, rolling his eyes a little and looking at me firmly to make sure I am not pulling his leg. “Fine. Actually, it’s a lovely place, in some ways. Lovely beaches, as a matter of fact, and some lovely hotels. Great zoo, too). And the deserts, of course. No, really, it’s a lovely place. Great climate, too. Are there things to do in the evening? Oh, yes, it’s a big city. It has an opera. A lovely opera, actually. Full of elderly folks? Not at all. What, crime? No, no, it’s not L.A. And it’s wonderfully clean. Lovely streets. Lovely parks. Lovely aquarium. Lovely. Great.” His face is looking longer and longer, as if he’s about to burst into tears.

“But if I were you...” His eyes suddenly light up and he gives me a conspiratorial wink. “If I were you, I’d fly to L.A., get a car and drive north [he underlines the word with a slight hiss]. Yes, north. San Francisco. The vineyards. Napa Valley. It’s superb. You’ve got wines, real cities, street life...ah....” He searches for a moment. “The Hearst Castle. Everything.”

By this time, he has cast a glance at me from head to toe, and his anxiety that I might actually be going to book a holiday in San Diego has visibly increased.

“Frankly,” he goes on, “I don’t think it’ll be your cup of tea. Unless you’re into the Hillcrest-Black’s Beach gay thing. Now we do a roaring trade in that ’round here. But these people aren’t going to San Diego for the zoo, I can tell you that. They’re going for the flesh.” He laughs a little nervously and verifies that no one has overheard him. “Not that San Diego has a risque reputation or anything... but, well, it does have beaches and muscle boys, and we all know what that means.

“However, if you’re not interested in that, you have to remember that what you’re really getting yourself into is a nature holiday. Look, here’s the Northwest Airlines brochure. What does it say in the page on San Diego? ‘California’s Ocean Playground. If you love water sports, you’ll love San Diego. With over 70 miles of coastline, this friendly metropolis offers prime surfing and a harbor teeming with pleasure craft and sports boats.’ ”

He pauses and smirks. “Can you believe that? A harbor teeming with pleasure craft. Better take your camera. It goes on, ‘San Diego is sure to deliver a delightful vacation experience. For animal lovers there is the San Diego Zoo, Sea World and San Diego Wild Animal Park.’ There you go. Animal lovers! ‘For shoppers there are the unusual shops of Old Town and the trolley, which runs from downtown to Tijuana, Mexico.’ And that’s it. There you have it. Animal lovers and people who want to go shopping on a trolley. Don’t think I’m cynical; I’m just trying to guide you to the best holiday for you. You don’t look like the golfing type. Now for just a few dollars more you can go on the Super California Program, Supercal, to San Francisco where, believe me, the culture....”

To the average inhabitant of the West Village, San Diego may indeed seem a distant and somewhat inexplicable phenomenon. My salesman then goes on to explain that you cannot walk on the sidewalks, you need a car to buy a carton of milk, and that “older folks” tend to like it for just that reason. “They feel safer than walking around on the streets. But we don’t really get that kind of customer here, so to be frank we aren’t really equipped to cover San Diego. People in this neighborhood are much more interested in culture, you see, so they tend to go to Mexico, Britain, that sort of place.

Well, who can blame them? There are things to see in those places. Archaeology. Churches. Real architecture. There’s really nothing to see in San Diego, if you want my opinion. I mean, you get up in the morning and you want to see something. In San Diego you get up and.you do a bit of tiger gazing at the zoo or you go to the beach. There are no buildings to look at. Who wants to look at malls and sports boats? And Tijuana... well, don’t bother. They don’t even have any old Danish communities either, like Solvang. Now, if they had the odd Danish community....”

As I pause in the street trying to decipher the mysterious Mexican Railways poster in the window, in the insufferable tropic heat, deafened by the whirring cicadas in the trees overhanging the village streets, I try to imagine an ancient community of Danes walking the streets of downtown San Diego, all buggies, black hats, and buckled shoes. This delicious thought can only last a few seconds before being crushed by the laws of verisimilitude. And as I wander off in search of another travel agency, one that will really sell me a holiday in San Diego, I begin to wonder if for New Yorkers the place is not just a sunny make-believe land where golf courses surround every house, mustachioed men in sombreros serenade people on the Tijuana trolley, and gay abandon rules the beaches. A tremendous joke invented by the tourist board. A sinister hoax perpetrated by the Liberty Lobby. Or else a real fantasy world where cars can, as in dreams, turn right at the red light.

Once out of the green seclusion of the West Village and heading eastward along 12th Street, across the roaring sprawl of 6th and 7th avenues, I have renewed hope of finding a travel agent actually willing to sell me a real holiday in San Diego. After all, here there are once more signs of urban claustrophobia, imminent danger from the underclass, and that homicidal Ben Hur act of the New York cab driver that makes one begin to dream of being in a place where one is never a pedestrian. In the latter stages of summer, the humidity rises so high that, looking up at those slivers of blue sky over the immense clusters of roofs, you begin to wish that something in the atmosphere would explode. Even at night, the sweat pours out as the temperature stays in the mid-80s, and the city seems to sulk and growl with irritation. Time, one would think, to take wing elsewhere.

Mr. Kavafas, the suave Greek manager of Travel Appointments, Inc., at 20 East 12th Street, couldn’t agree more. “New York in the summer is hell, unless of course you stay at home with the air conditioning on and the windows closed. Those who have the money go off to Southampton or Martha’s Vineyard, and they come back when it’s civilized a^ain. Of course, some nut-cases like it, but there’s no doubt that we sell a lot of holidays in August because of the humidity thing. People just have to get the hell out of here or they go nuts. San Diego?”

He screws his face up for a second, as of scrutinizing some insoluble philosophical problem and then puckers his lips. “Well, to be honest, it isn’t exactly top of our list. See, we have quite a few well-off people in this neighborhood, what with Washington Square down the street and Fifth Avenue around the corner. And we’re right next to Gotham, one of the best restaurants in the city. Now, New Yorkers with money aren’t going to San Diego for the summer, unless they’re crazy about windsurfing or something. For one thing, if they’re going to a city, it will probably not be an American one, other than San Francisco. Why go to an American city when it’s almost closer from here to go to a European one? And then, people want to get away from the American urban thing — it’s too depressing, especially when it’s hot. We sell a lot of holidays to Rome, for example. Why? Well, you can walk everywhere, you can eat, you can go back in history.

“We, the agent, don’t have to do anything. )ust book the flights and make sure they have a good central hotel. But a place like San Diego presents all kinds of problems. First of all, the city itself is just a huge suburb with endless freeways. That’s incredibly disorienting for a New Yorker, especially one from this neighborhood, the Village, where people walk everywhere all the time. The Village is more like a European city. It’s pedestrian, has lots of cafes, book shops, bars, restaurants. There’s nothing overplanned or impersonal about it. But those cities out west are completely alienating - for Easterners. You have to sit people down and tell them what to do. You have to prepare them as if they are about to go off to a foreign country... far more so in some ways than when they’re off to Paris. In Paris at least they know what to do to orient themselves. Take the Metro, follow the signs, walk from point A to point Z, sit down anywhere, and have lunch. In a place like San Diego, it’s not that simple. The city is built on a totally different assumption. I think New Yorkers find that either annoying or intimidating. Driving around in a car for four hours a day is not their idea, shall we say, of a burningly romantic vacation.

“And then there’s something else. A perception of the character of the people themselves. You know what New Yorkers think of Southern Californians at the best of times...the dullest, most plastic flakes on earth. A little arrogant, I suppose, but there you are. For me it’s not necessarily true, but I do think that Southern California is definitely not picturesque, despite the beautiful landscapes. They’ve ruined the coastline, turned it into a gigantic, monotonous suburbia. And it’s incredible how there is nowhere where you can, say, sit out in a restaurant by the sea and really enjoy the ocean. Some of our customers in the past have really complained about that in San Diego — everything is turned away from the sea, instead of embracing it. It’s bizarre.

"Of course, in Mexico you can find literally hundreds of places where you can eat overlooking the sea. But north of the border, you feel deprived of it. In fact, one of the strangest things about San Diego, despite its image as a beach town, is that there is very little feeling for the sea there...very little in the way of fish markets or seafood restaurants, no celebration of the ocean in a day-to-day way, no places where the sea itself is a part of the way of life except for the whole beach bum thing, which is unbelievably banal. You feel that this city could be anywhere in the Midwest and that the sea is just there as a kind of accident. That’s how I think of San Diego, actually: a kind of small Kansas sitting on the coast by mistake.”

He looks out wistfully into the agency’s window display, which is a lush cornucopia of Greek iconography: plaster heads of Pericles, miniature bronze Athenas, black-figure pottery, photographs of the windmills of Mykonos and bare-breasted Minoan bull-jumpers. It does indeed seem a far cry from the sun and surf of San Diego, despite the latter’s aspirations to body-worshiping sensuality.

“We’re Greeks,” he goes on humorously, “so I guess I see everything in terms of its being either like Greece or unlike it. Now California is like Greece in so many ways — sun, mountain scenery, Mediterranean climate, produce. You expect it to be the same. Believe it or not, a lot of Greek American New Yorkers come here looking for ‘somewhere that’s like Greece which isn’t Greece.’ In other words, somewhere that has all the natural delights of Greece, the light, the sea, the semi-arid land, but which is at the same time exotic, different. So I often recommend California. Of course, they sometimes come back quite confused and depressed. The whole place seems quite incomprehensible to them. Sometimes. Sometimes, though, they come back enchanted. You can never tell. For me, it’s history that makes the difference. The knowledge that, wherever you go in Greece, the dead are with you, that extraordinary things have happened there. That’s the missing component in San Diego. There’s no gravity. Personally, I don’t mind it, but....”

Mr. Kavafas cannot, in truth, tailor-make a substantial holiday in San Diego for me without consulting other experts. And so he recommends that I go on to two travel agents on Fifth Avenue, International Tours at number 184, and, most promising of all, Mirque Travel on the 17th floor of the Empire State Building. Fifth Avenue, he explains, is in a curious way free of the prejudices of neighborhood class. You can get anything you want there. Even a vacation in San Diego.

“And if you can’t get it in the Empire State Building, go to Brooklyn or the Upper West Side, way up in the lower middle-class areas. That’s where you’ll get a San Diego expert. That’s where the demand is.”

It’s a short walk of ten blocks to International Tours, but already the neighborhood changes dramatically. Fifth Avenue has a slightly harassed look about it these days, and in the thousands of offices that cram its windswept buildings, there is an anxious, sweatshop feel — a beehive long past its prime. Panhandlers with Parthenon plastic coffee cups stand at the crossings, mumbling incoherently, a huge crowd of men in skull caps wafts past a corner of Union Square gabbling excitedly in Italian, with little bags of pasta in their hands; on the other side of the junction of Fifth and Broadway, the Ishmaelite Black Jews in black leather gloves and keffiyeh are screaming in front of a giant Star of David. “The Lord He didn’t make yo butts for yo to go into brothers. He made yo butts for a different reason altogether!” In certain parts of New York, it is necessary to walk quickly. And with every step taken, San Diego seems more and more impossibly remote.

International Tours is on the fourth floor of one of the narrow, dingy, and vertical hives, reached by two elevators decorated with flapping industrial awnings and, far from having the plush exuberance suggested by its address, looks at first like a Dickensian factory filled with dozens of desks of flagellated clerks. On the back wall, along with the tattered posters of Jakarta and South African safaris (the text reads “South Africa: the Civilized Adventure”), is a row of dusty clocks showing the time in cities around the world — including, curiously, Tijuana.

A blond man in a Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirt comes bounding up, looking as if he might devour any customer that comes through the door. And as it happens, a glance around the room reveals that I am in fact the only customer there. Everyone looks up for a moment, then goes back to their computers.

Scott Winsten, national director of sales and marketing, shrugs and offers me a seat. “It’s a bad recession,” he admits.

Feeling a surge of despair this time at getting my vacation in the land of surfboards and sunshine, I immediately blurt out: “I want to book a holiday for my mother. She wants to go San Diego. Don’t ask me why. She just does. You do do vacations in San Diego, don’t you?”

This demand causes a small cloud to pass over Scott’s face, but only for the fleeting moment necessary for a professional salesman to swallow a massive disappointment.

“Well, we sell them to corporations,” Scott replies, beaming and reaching up for his corporate package brochure for Business Rendezvous in San Diego (Coronado Bridge lit up at night on the cover and a one-legged flamingo in an artificial pond).

“Businessmen love San Diego. They like the fact, for example, that you can drive everywhere, that you don’t have to bother with all this pedestrian stuff and that the service industries are incomparable. In fact. Southern California has the best service industries in the world, and San Diego is just about the best in Southern California. Compared to New York, San Diego is incredibly clean, efficient, and friendly. People in banks and so on actually do things for you. There are rarely any real hassles. For them, it’s what America should be — or what it was once outside of New York. So I sell a lot of conference space there. And these guys don’t sightsee or take bikes into the desert. They don’t even go to Mexico. They sit in a hotel all day and then go to that Gaslamp place for dinner. They think it’s all incredibly cute. Can you blame them? But as for everyone else, your average New Yorker, I can’t say I’ve sold a vacation to San Diego in a long time. Las Vegas, sure. New Yorkers love Las Vegas. I even sold a desert vacation last week to a group of survivalist machos. But San Diego... I don’t know. It’s a bit vague, frankly. They have a great zoo, o'f course. And is it the lowest murder rate in the U.S.? That’s two things in its favor.”

He looks over slyly and hopefully and adds, “Perhaps your mother would consider going somewhere else in California. It’s a great big state. What about San Francisco? Or the Napa Valley? (He reaches for another brochure altogether and thrusts it expectantly into my lap.) Or the Hearst Castle?"

It is time to move on to the Empire State Building.

For those who have never negotiated this venerable monument in search of a travel agent promising a package vacation to San Diego, certain warnings are in order. If San Diego seemed remote amid the cacophony of Fifth Avenue, in the bowels of this Fritz Langian monolith, New York’s ultimate dream of itself, it seems as distant and irrelevant as the lunar Mare Tranquilitatis. Could California ever invent, let alone cope with, an elevator system so enigmatic, so fabulously irrational? Mirque Travel is situated on the 17th floor, but the unwary first-timer will almost certainly take one of the lobby elevators that stop only at the 28th, be forced to go up to the 44th, change to the 66th, and then come down again to the 17th. Tourists from the West, it seems, are much amused by this wonderful slice of New York life.

The 17th floor is a long, silent network of corridors with glass-pancd doors. Here and there are lonely men sitting behind desks covered with half-made shirts or dusty files with a stupendous backdrop of skyscrapers behind them. At the very end of this sinister vault, completely vacant, filled only with the distant rumble of elevators, is room 1770 — equally empty and abandoned. Only a single torn poster stuck to the door. It shows the Del Mar racetrack with the Pacific behind it, a luscious bowl of California grass sitting in a dreamy sub-tropical sunset. It seems a thousand times more real than the 17th floor.

Where, in the end, do you go to find vacation specialists in New York for whom San Diego is a real city with real allure? High on the Upper West Side, where Broadway finally peters out into a cluttered and shabby rivulet of a street in the area called Washington Heights, at the junction where it crosses with St. Nicholas Avenue in the heart of a Dominican ghetto, lies probably the greatest concentration of travel agents in the city. Is this because Dominicans are desperate to get out of the city as often as possible? Or is it simply that the outside world is more real to people who actually come from it? Whatever the reason, this eerie urban landscape of shabby blocks, great plumes of rooftop steam, and hustling street corners packed with Latino markets and clusters of drug dealers is where many come to buy inexpensive holidays in the Americas — cheap getaways to Cancun for $200, packages to Puerto Plata for even less, and, here and there, lightning vacations to Tijuana, Los Angeles, and San Diego that keep the American latino diaspora in touch with itself. And here, at the Americana agency on Broadway, in the midst of salsa-tape stalls and hawkers of fruit, plastic jewelry, and cheap auto insurance, a window does advertise a round-trip excursion to San Diego for $450. The name Americana seems comfortably in keeping with every other Spanish name plastered over the glass.

Inside, the Americana, like most bucket travel joints in Latin America itself, is little more than a glass screen like a railway ticket counter, with a dingy room behind it covered in crumpled posters. Club Med, the loudest of them, beams at the clients, “the Antidote for Civilization.” Cynthia Ovalles, the clerk on duty, begins speaking in Spanish and when asked if she might, perhaps, switch to English, looks uncomfortable and carries on in Spanish anyway. The English-speaking clerk, it appears, is only there between three and five in the afternoon. “You want to go to San Diego?” she says, suddenly livening up and smiling brilliantly (two gold teeth, but otherwise a delicious antidote to civilization). “What do you want to know about San Diego?”

“Well, actually, it’s my mother. She wants to get away from it all.”

“Of course she does. And she picked the right place. She couldn’t have picked a better place. Does she know what she wants to see there?”

In astonishment, I begin to mumble, “Are there things to see there?”

“Are there things to see in San Diego? Why, hundreds of things. Hundreds. It’s the most fascinating city in the world!”

“Really?”

“Really. Let me see. There’s the Del Mar Thoroughbred Race Club. It’s been there since 1937. Your mother would love that. Beautiful horses. And you know who set it up? Pat O’Brien and Bing Crosby. Isn’t that fascinating?”

“Well, yes it is. But...”

“And that’s not all. After she’s seen that, she can go to the Heritage Park, the Santa Fe Railroad depot, 1888. That’s real history for her. Your mother is interested in history, isn’t she? Well, if she is she can also go to the Maritime Museum. They have the San Francisco ferryboat Berkeley and the steam yacht Medea, 1898 and 1904. Then there’s the Junipero Serra Museum. Or the Mission San Diego de Alcala. Does she like golf?"

Miss Ovalles, positively brimming over with confident enthusiasm, then begins to write each touristic item down in a numerical order.

“There’s the Wild Animal Park in Escondido. Oh, that’s wonderful, believe me. They have an Australian rain forest and a Nairobi village. There’s a walk-through aviary, a gorilla grotto, a petting corral, a free animal show, photo safaris, and company banquets! That’s a whole afternoon’s activity in just one place. Then there’s Mingei International Museum of World Folk Art, the Sea World, and the Bates Brothers Nut Farm.”

“The what?”

“The Bates Brothers Nut Farm. It’s the biggest and most famous nut farm in the United States. Fascinating. And did you know that San Diego is the only city in the U.S. with a Teddy Bear Museum?

“Yes, it’s in La Jolla, which by the way I can also recommend — a really beautiful place. The Teddy Bear Museum is amazing, and not many people know it exists. A hidden treasure. And then not many people know that San Diego also has the best ostrich farm in the country, too.”

“The best what?”

“The San Diego Ostrich Ranch in Escondido — the best ostrich farm in the country. Your mother could go and see the largest birds in the world there. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

By now I have begun to wonder at what point reality and Wonderland merge — perhaps somewhere in the vicinity of the San Diego Ostrich Farm or the La Jolla Teddy Bear Museum? And Miss Ovalles hasn’t even yet begun to vaunt the marvels of the Pirates of Pinniped, Penguin Encounter, Cap’n Kid or Shamu the killer whale. In fact, she has also just gotten started on her favorite subject, the exotic marvels of this place called San Diego.

“We sell lots of holidays to California,” she interjects during a brief respite in this marvelous catalogue. “People want to take their kids somewhere, and for children Southern California is Utopia. Middle-income families will pick it because it’s full of zoos and aquariums and so on and because it’s not Florida. They like it because you can entertain a whole family cheaply. Food is cheap. Transportation is cheap. Entertainment is cheap. And it’s cheap to get to from here. Mexicans here often prefer to go to San Diego, take a trip or two back to Mexico, and then come back. It’s a place for ordinary people who want some fun and some nature. I admit that it’s not what Dominicans go for, but then Dominicans want to go to Santo Domingo to see their families — tourism is a luxury. But a lot of whites and blacks from around here find Southern California is still the American Dream and San Diego is the unspoiled city of the Southlands.”

Washington Heights is a strange place to find this dream of a pristine American past still intact, but a visit to Jade’s agency up toward 180th Street, almost within shouting distance of the Bronx, proves that Cynthia Ovalles is right. Sandwiched between a gloomy Catholic seminary called the Annex Incarnation Rectory and the Tropical Garden restaurant (only the letters “Trop” are illumined green), the windows of Jade’s show just how a latino travel agency operates. "Seguros, Beepers Sales and Service, Divorcio rapido sin ira a corte $150, Envio de valores." Across the street, the Prince of Peace Baptist Church sends out a wailing chorus above the cacophony of the street markets, and under the scruffy windows of the Healing Stream Methodists (nothing visible through them but black hands rising and falling), a dying dog stretched out on the pavement shrouded with flies groans from time to time without causing a single eyebrow to flinch.

By the boiled-candy machines inside, Tito Roque sits all day and half the night co-ordinating New York’s cheapest package holidays for the shrewd consumers of Washington Heights. “I’ll tell you what they like about Southern California. The Hispanic side of it. You don’t find it anywhere else in America. In Miami it’s a recent transplant, and a Cuban thing. A place like San Diego, on the other hand, has hundreds of years of Spanish history.

“So people are always saying that the difference between the West and East Coast is that the East Coast has some history and the West coast doesn’t. Well, that’s not how Latinos see it, of course. San Diego means more to us than Boston. It’s close to or a part of our world. At the same time, it’s still definitely America. People aren’t going to go there because they think it’s Latin America. They’re going to go there precisely because it isn’t. It’s a very American place, paradoxically... much, much more American than New York. I think that’s its appeal — as well as being the reason why a lot of people don’t want to go there! And it’s American in a certain way. A nostalgic way. You know, low crime, smallish town, pretty clean, and all that. People in a place like Washington Heights dream about that. You’d be surprised. I have no idea if any of them ever find it in the real San Diego, but that at least is the myth. And some of them never come back, which indicates that some of them must do, no?”

By now I have forgotten altogether that my mother is thinking of taking her summer vacation in San Diego and is dreaming of nut farms, ostriches, and teddy bear museums. A short trawl through these congested, alien streets reminds one that New York is so much more fundamentally exotic than San Diego that leaving it for a vacation in America’s Finest is like returning to the familiar and to the past rather than the other way around. As night falls, the street corners fairly erupt in the tropical humidity, salsa, and the nightly paseo, submerging everything in the rhythms of the South, and you remember that New York itself is a southern city, a hot and bastardized place where nothing really holds together and from where a true American city like San Diego seems like an enigma infinitely difficult to comprehend. A man in a Boy Scout uniform runs up and down Broadway screaming at the top of his voice and blowing “Auld Lang Syne” through a bugle. Police sirens wail constantly along the edges of High Bridge Park and the Harlem River. The dog has rolled over and died, and the flies are having a feast. Dancing in the streets. New York is having its summer vacation, and deep down no one can even remember where Oregon, Canada, Bates Nut Farm, or San Diego actually are.

Tito Roque shakes my hand and calls after me, as I dodge the maniac bugle-blowing Scout, “If you ever want a holiday in San Diego, Mr. Osborne, I can book you into a hotel with flamingos. The biggest flamingos in the world.”