Click here to watch Declan's business report from New York

Sunday August 11th 2002

Fa-tut -- fa-tut -- PAARP -fa-tut - fa-tut. The canary yellow cab makes its way out of JFK airport towards New York City. You can hear (but not quite feel, because the tyre pressure is too soft) every bump on the road. Tar is quite literally thin on the ground; some sections of the road are just exposed concrete slabs and metal strips.

Even the airport - which pre-dates the Presidency after which it is named - looks like it's still being built.

The current big project is to build a railway line between the airport and Manhattan. Just think about that for a moment: there is no rail link at New York's major international airport.

Heathrow has a rail line into Paddington and 2 Tube stations. Even Luton Airport sorted this out years ago.

It is a sign of the low value attached over here to government spending - even on infrastructure. It also adds to the sense that the City is still a work in progress.

Ground Zero

Transport is a controversial issue in New York at the moment. It is even feeding into the debate on what to do with the site of former World Trade Centre - Ground Zero.

The weekend papers say local, state and national government have all agreed to use some of the Twin Towers disaster relief money to build a new public transport hub somewhere around the former Trade Centre site. This is big local news.

Ground Zero - the site of the former World Trade Centre

Before the disaster, the site was home to a major subway station, and a rail station but - almost incredibly - they were never linked. This new scheme would be the first even one-stop link between New York's different public transport systems.

But all the grumbles about transport are forgotten when the cab drives round a bend and the most famous City landscape is suddenly in front of you. They are all there - the Empire State Building, the UN's half-U shaped headquarters, and the bridges linking the lower tip of Manhattan to the neighbouring boroughs.

And there is the building that is not there any more. It's not a gap, like a broken tooth. It is just missing. If you were here before last September, you know there should be something there, and there isn't.

Tourism

I was over here on holiday last November, less than two months after the terrorist attacks. Then, the City was subdued. It was just after the Halloween holiday, the traditional start of the autumn sales when out-of-towners come in search of great bargains at Macys.

But last year they didn't. The crowds of shoppers were absent. Weekdays felt as busy as Sunday.

While New Yorkers are out at the beach, the tourists are back, maybe not as many as before, but the holiday industry seems to be over the worst

Declan Curry

This time, the City is hot - in all senses. It is 90 degrees outside in old money, and the streets are thronged. Right outside the hotel, 42nd Street is a slow moving mass of sweating humanity. While New Yorkers are out at the beach, the tourists are back, maybe not as many as before, but the holiday industry seems to be over the worst.

A quick word about the flight. Many in Britain mock Americans for their supposed ignorance of geography and other cultures, and their belief that they are the number one people on this earth.

Well, on the plane, there was a large group of medical students - twenty-something kids from Yale University - who had just come back from volunteer work in hospitals and clinics in southern Africa. These youngsters were the cream of the American educational system; they were also the beneficiaries of the vast family wealth you need to get into colleges like Yale.

And for many of them, their world-awareness was pretty limited, so Africa turned out to be an immense and unanticipated culture shock.

But while it is easy to mock them as mere do-gooders, and denigrate their summer work as a modern form of Western imperialism, remember that it would also have been much easier for them to stay at home and work off their college bills.

Flying into John F Kennedy airport on our flight were American youngsters who still heeded the call of the late President. They asked what they could do for their country, not what it could do for them.

More from Manhattan during the week on the air, and online. We have got a busy business week ahead of us on the programme, but I'll be bringing you the strange and funny stories from over here.