Big Apple Turnover

In a sixth-floor suite, a stone’s hurl from Rockefeller Center, I lie on my back while a nice woman smears bird droppings all over my face. Let me be clear: I am not a fetishist; nor am I someone you’d normally find covered in avian eliminations, like a bronze statue in a public park. Rather, I’m at a spa called Shizuka New York, undergoing the Geisha Facial. Years ago, explains my esthetician, geishas used lead-based makeup to achieve a porcelain complexion. Unfortunately, they were poisoning themselves. The alternative: uguisu no fun, or sterilized Japanese nightingale dung, an elixir that apparently produces a “pearly lustre,” a patina to which, until today, I could only aspire.

Leaving Shizuka, my cheeks glowing like a child’s on a crisp winter day, I head up Fifth Avenue and into a phalanx of dour faces. Little wonder: The city is awash in construction noise and street repairs. The sidewalks are too small for the crush of people. Everywhere in midtown – the chunk of real estate south of Central Park that includes New York’s most fabled streets – scaffolds block the sunlight and render the walkways claustrophobically dark. Let’s just say that the city’s mood tracks the Dow as closely as any index fund.

All of which makes my mission here more difficult. I am spending a week in New York City, of all places, to be well. To relax, in a city that’s as tightly wound as a Swiss watch. To be pampered and massaged, like a Kobe steer, in some of the world’s finest spas. To rest, in the city that never sleeps. Yes, really.

My first stop is at Yelo, a spa in midtown’s heart. To call Yelo a simple spa, however, short sells its novel high concept. It is, rather, a sleep clinic/wellness centre in a setting so futuristic that you half expect side orders of Soylent Green to be served with your complimentary water.

I am spending a week in New York City, of all places, to be well. To be massaged like a Kobe steer. To rest in the city that never sleeps. Yes, really.

My reflexologist leads me down a glowing orange hall filled with private pods. Called YeloCabs – considering how unrelaxing a New York taxi ride can be, it’s an unfortunate pun – these self-contained chromatherapy chambers are tricked out with special reclining chairs, pumped-in aromatherapy scents and soothing sound effects. The reflexology treatment lasts 20 minutes and is, indeed, relaxing. But I’m skeptical about being able to nap. Yet after the pod lighting fades to black – and despite my serial insomnia – I doze off. Twenty minutes later, the pod begins to glow. I wake to the approximation of, you guessed it, sunrise.

My first time in New York was when I was 13 years old. Barry Manilow’s “Mandy” was in heavy rotation on AM radio; flared pants were a pre-ironic statement. Walking along these avenues, I felt a sense of belonging, compromised only by the parents with whom fate had saddled me. Constantly smiling and irritatingly polite, they would regularly turn their eyes skyward and marvel at the height of the buildings. I walked 20 paces behind them, appalled.

Producer: Gabriela Herman; stylist: Anat Ishai; hair & make up: Sue Pike; photo assistants: Joe Tomcho, Paul Draine; Models: Alex Kennedy-Grant, Gary Leimkuhler, Sayaka Nagata, Callann Wolff

During that trip, I ate a pretzel as big as a fedora and fell in love with a girl from Jersey with long brown hair and a chipped front tooth. And I fell in love with New York too. As a result, the New York I recall is anchored in the 1970s, when Harlem was the universal metaphor for urban blight and Times Square was firmly positioned somewhere between Sodom and Gomorrah. Today all that has changed. Over the years, New York has, time after time, made itself well.

Change is, of course, part of New York’s eternal equation. This has always been a city of immigrants, and each successive wave of tired, huddled masses brings its own customs – and, indeed, its own spas and wellness regimens. The large and well-established Jewish community has always had the shvitz; Turkish émigrés set up hammams. The growing Russian community imported its banyas, or steam baths. And Asian immigration, from Thailand to Korea, has fed a rapidly expanding spa scene, where traditional techniques are repackaged in gorgeously spare, Zen-inspired settings.

But not all serve a seriously moneyed clientele. In Queens, a short drive from the Flushing–Main Street subway station, you’ll find Spa Castle. This five-storey, 100,000-square-foot space offers both Korean massage and kimchee in a setting that can charitably be described as pre-luxury Vegas-meets-West Edmonton Mall.