How to blow a teenager’s mind? Take them on a trip to New York…

A 13th birthday is a momentous milestone, but a festive no-man’s land. Ten-pin bowling and cake feel old hat by now, but house parties with contraband are still years away. At a loss I ask my son, Jody, what he would do if he could choose absolutely anything. His response: “Go to New York.”
A stopover in Dallas Fort Worth on the way home from Jamaica last August is the closest he’s ever been to the US — and was the highlight of his summer holiday. The terminal’s Chick-fil-A burger joint had been his idea of spiritual communion; its 7/11 store more thrilling than Disneyland. No destination feels more exotic to him than New York — nor, paradoxically, more familiar. Television, music and movies have shaped the city’s contours in his mind far more vividly than London, where he lives; the Brooklyn Bridge is more real to him than the one in Battersea. Indifferent to football, he lives for basketball and already plans to study at NYU.
A Venn diagram of activities that a teenage boy and his mother enjoy has little overlap. New York, however, I can do. On the eve of his birthday in late April he comes home from school, changes out of his uniform and an hour later we’re checking in at Heathrow.
It turns out that the bygone glamour of air travel can be magically revived — just tell Virgin that your son will turn 13 over the Atlantic. The captain congratulates him over the tannoy and after we land a flight attendant takes Jody into the cockpit and allows him to sit in the pilot’s seat. For weeks he has been counting the minutes until we get to NYC; now he doesn’t want to get off the plane.
If you asked an AI bot to generate an image of classic upscale New York it would probably look exactly like the Carlyle. In this Upper East Side hotel’s gleaming black-marble lobby, even the gilt-leaf lift is a legend — famous for hosting a chance encounter in the 1990s between Princess Diana, Steve Jobs and Michael Jackson. There is no hotel in Manhattan more iconic. Jody will never get another chance to see New York for the very first time, and who knows when he’ll next be back, so if we want to go big and do this weekend in style it has to be here. With its awning canopy stretching onto the pavement, it resembles every classic picture-book skyscraper that Jody has seen in comic books and cartoons.
Our 32nd-floor, two-bedroom suite, on the other hand, looks like nothing I have seen before. It’s more oligarch’s apartment than hotel suite, and the mid-century furniture, silk wallpaper, monogrammed pillowcases and kitchen are topped off with a handwritten welcome note sealed with wax. The gigantic living-room window looks to Jody like a flat-screen TV, so preposterously cinematic is its view across Central Park. But then so is the view north from the kitchen. From the third window, looking south from our bedrooms, Madison Avenue is a golden ribbon of fairy lights. We can see most of New York without leaving our room.
The birthday begins with a street-corner-stand hot dog before a long walk south, past the gaudy shimmer of Trump Tower, on a pilgrimage to the NBA store. Jody’s familiarity with the city quickly becomes disorientating; he seems to know more of it than me. Passing St Patrick’s Cathedral he tells me: “That’s where Spiderman held his father’s funeral.” In the NBA store’s multi-floor maze he communes with his tribe, finally among fans as transfixed as he is by the obscure detailing of a gazillion different basketball-shoe designs.
Times Square looks tacky and tired to me, but not to a teenager. Agog at all the shops selling cannabis, he buys a giant Reese’s cup in Hershey’s World of Chocolate that weighs a pound. Multiple King Kongs, Mickey Mouses and Elmos weave through the tourist crowds, but the man who charms him most is a young rapper handing out QR codes for demo music. When he signs ours: “To Gangster Mom and Cool Jody,” my son looks like he might faint.
How gangster I was to pre-order attraction city passes is doubtful, but they prove an absolute bargain. Unsurprisingly, nothing in the city is cheap, though a New York C-All Pass grants entry to ten of its best sights — such as the Top of the Rock Observation Deck, the Statue of Liberty and the 9/11 Memorial — for a fraction of the usual admission prices (£181 for adults; £132 for children aged six and above). We sail into the Empire State Building without queueing, hurtling up 85 storeys before losing our nerve at the penultimate floor, from where cowards like us can view the entire city below through glass without having to brave the outdoor observation deck above.
We go to Target, which is a bit like Primark, if Primark sold literally everything. In homage to the stars of his favourite TV programmes, Lucifer and Rick and Morty, he buys a silvery hip flask like those that the protagonists of both shows carry — which he fills with Diet Coke. In this city where no one bats an eyelid at King Kong or spliffs in shop windows, we find that the sight of a 13-year-old casually swigging from a hip flask can still turn startled heads. He also stocks up on jumbo bottles of Chick-fil-A sauce. “And look! Pizza rolls!” Pizza what? Into our basket goes a bag of the little frozen parcels filled with pizza topping. His knowledge of American junk food is encyclopaedic.
Back at the Carlyle that night the crowd in the bar have apparently walked straight off the page of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. The men wear bankers’ braces, signet rings, designer jeans with loafers and handkerchiefs in blazer pockets; the women are Wolfe’s translucent Social X-rays.
Dinner in the restaurant is haute-cuisine performance art. The chef flambés our 40oz tomahawk steak with a reverence seldom seen outside the Vatican, and the birthday cake solemnly presented to Jody is a confectionary concept new to both of us. “A crêpe cake!” a waiter explains. The weightless tower of wafer-thin crêpes and cream is so exquisite that when what we can’t eat is delivered to our suite later Jody locks it in his bathroom, in case I go sleepwalking in the night (as I often do, particularly in hotels for some reason) — he doesn’t want to wake up to find I’ve unconsciously polished it off.
I’m fairly confident that we must be the suite’s first and last guests to cook frozen pizza rolls for breakfast. To me they are revolting; Jody considers them divine. On our way downtown we can, however, agree that one thing London does better than New York is underground transport — the subway’s decaying grime is irreconcilable with the gloss above ground. But then we also agree, who cares? “Let’s just move here!” he says. “Yes!” I say. “Why not?”
The upside of the shameless consumerist greed of New York always used to be its electrifying customer service. I’ve briefed Jody that every inconsequential transaction will feel like theatre. Every cash till, I told him, will appear to be manned by either a wise-cracking comedian or delightful out-of-work actor.
Not any more. Outside the Carlyle’s timelessly deluxe confines, the customer service is so spectacularly grumpy that it would make even London blush: a lift attendant in the Empire State Building barks at a poor man pushing a wheelchair as though he were a burglar; blank shop assistants serve Jody in surly silence — the city’s mood has become unrecognisably sour. Luckily, being accustomed to London and loving nothing more than me being wrong, he doesn’t care.
Heading downtown to NYU, we stop at every 7/11 for more junk-food snacks, but he’s less charmed than me by the graffiti and rusting fire escapes around Washington Square Park. Back in Midtown, the Edge in Hudson Yards blows our minds — a glass-framed ledge of pure vertigo jutting out from the 100th floor of a skyscraper in defiance of gravity, it feels like a helicopter ride.
The itinerary for our final day is supposed to be a sightseeing cruise to the Statue of Liberty, but summer has arrived when we wake up, bathing Central Park in sunshine. My suggestion of a quick stroll through the blossom appals Jody. “You don’t come here for a walk in some old park,” he says. I negotiate ten minutes, but eight hours later only the threat of missing our flight can drag him out of the park — or, more specifically, off the basketball court we found just minutes into our stroll (near the Museum of Modern Art).
On this court he has found heaven. Pick-up games in New York turn out to be surprisingly welcoming to a British teen, and terrifyingly fierce. The rotating churn of players swoop, sweat and shout at each other from end to end all day. Jody walks off the court looking years older and inches taller than the boy who had boarded at Heathrow.
At JFK he leaves me and his bag at the gate: “Just going to look for one last 7/11.”
This article contains affiliate links, which can earn us revenue
Decca Aitkenhead was a guest of Virgin Atlantic, which has Heathrow-New York returns from £354 (virginatlantic.com); Rosewood, which has room-only doubles at the Carlyle from £632 (rosewood.com); and CityPass (citypass.com)
Become a subscriber and, along with unlimited digital access to The Times and The Sunday Times, you can enjoy a collection of travel offers and competitions curated by our trusted travel partners, especially for Times+ members
Sign up for our Times Travel newsletter and follow us on Instagram and X