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He’s the Scots-American who made America great the first time and we’re celebrating his very special birthday today.

Yes, Alexander Hamilton, whose Caledonian roots we are famously reminded of in the opening lines of the titular musical.

‘How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished, in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?’

Or become the centrepiece of a rap Broadway production?

There is, of course, another Scots-American sheriff, and New Yorker to boot, in town now who will be front and centre of the 250th anniversary celebrations.

Hamilton’s New York

Whether this year is also the 270th anniversary of Hamilton is difficult to say.

Records for bastard, orphan sons of a whore and a Scotsman weren’t too reliable back in the mid-18th century.

And historians argue about whether he came mewling into the world on January 11, 1775 or 1777, which means it could have been 1776 too.

Which is what we’re hanging on to for the purposes of our lesson today.

Now Hamilton, of course, bestrides Broadway and has done since Lin Manuel Miranda’s show opened in 2015.

On a pedestal

But few will, in truth, venture further afield in NY to see the places that define him or his granite statue in Central Park.

Unless, of course, you are a Scots Anglophile history buff, fresh up from Washington DC.

With an unusual request of a Kimpton Hotel receptionist to point out on a Subway map where I could walk in Hamilton’s footsteps.

Now New York had much to thank this Scots-American for.

As did the nation for his financial acumen in saving the new country from certain bankruptcy.

The world’s debt to Scots-Americans

Hamilton raised the New York Provincial Company of Artillery of 60 men in 1776, and was then appointed captain.

The company took part in the campaign of 1776 in and around New York City.

As rearguard of the Continental Army’s retreat up Manhattan.

And served at the Battle of Harlem Heights shortly after, and at the Battle of White Plains a month later.

Just a little to think on what the world owes to Scots-Americans.

Countries

Hold a torch for all our Statues of Liberty

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Lady down, but after the collapse of an 80ft Brazilian replica in a storm a celebration here of the others, as we hold a torch for all our Statues of Liberty.

Particularly with 2026 in the Oo Es of Eh marking 140 years.

Since the erection of the first and most famous on Liberty Island in New York Harbor.

Army of Ladies

The enfant of French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and Gustave Eiffel, mais oui, that one.

Back in the days when the Americans and the French were the best of amis.

Now, we’re not sure if the 305ft Statue of Liberty is the most replicated statue in the world.

But there are hundreds of them.

And wouldn’t it be a great game to go around getting selfies at all, or as many as we can, of them?

But clearly not when it’s stormy.

Two for the price of one

Now somebody’s obviously done it before and if they haven’t I’ve just blown it by giving them the idea.

But how about ticking off the two hundred or so in the Oo Es of Eh, with one Coloradan chum telling us of two in the Centenary State.

Of course, there is none quite like Lady Liberty, whose torch was a beacon of hope for millions.

Sailing in from the Old World, like my four uncles.

And the sight of which for any flyer on their first visit to New York, and I was just 17, is also truly stirring.

Did you know though that upstate there are two Lady Liberties in the one monument and that they are 100 years old this year?

The two Liberties stand 333ft above downtown Buffalo.

On top of step pyramids at either end of a block-long building.

Each is 30ft tall and has an interior ladder that can be climbed to its torch.

Although disappointingly we aren’t allowed to do that any more.

Though disclaimer we were never up there to get into trouble, honest!

Get an eyeful of Paris

Now, it’s as it should be that Paris should have its own Statue of Liberty, but eight?

A present from the Americans in Paris to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution, this one sits on its own island too.

And it’s the biggest too, at 37ft 9ins), a quarter as big as the one in New York.

Originally facing the Eiffel Tower it was turned around in 1937 to face the Big Apple.

While among the others the Left Bank has its very own.

In the grand central aisle on the ground floor of the Musee d’Orsay on the Left Bank.

And, naturellement, the land of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite there’s a a 40ft high version in Colmar and a terracotta replica in Lyon.

And one in Bordeaux, seized by Nazis in World War Two (and replaced many years later).

Been there, seen that

Now, it will come as little surprise to those who know and love the museum-loving Dutch that they will have their own kooky version of the Statue of Liberty.

With a 33ft replica of Lady Liberty holding a can of beans in Assen, which we’re reliably told is a thing in the region.

Or that in the village of Cadaqués in Spain which Salvador Dali called home, there is an unusual version on top of a small tourism office.

With both arms and hands up holding torches.

That Lady Liberty has spread her arms around the world obviously pleases this wide-eyed adventurer and idealist.

We expect the boys (and girls) from Brazil will get Lady Liberty back on the plinth in Guaiba, Rio Grande do Sul.

And were we there we’d be putting our hand up to help too.

America, Countries, Deals, Flying, Ireland

Eiretale of New York

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And it’s an Eiretale of New York which is enough to get the boys of the NYPD choir singing Galway Bay.

With the Tourism Ireland team getting an early Christmas gift in the form of a Best Destination in Europe award for the 12^th year in a row.

Beating off heavyweight France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Croatia at the New York bash.

Prize guys: Tourism Ireland’s Alison Metcalfe and Paul McDonagh

Subscribers to Travel Weekly Readers’ Choice who held their 23rd Awards in New York may not be aware or little care.

But the NYPD do not actually boast a choir.

Although they do have a Pipes and Drums band who played on the video.

And who mimed the words to the Mickey Mouse March because they didn’t know the lyrics to Galway Bay.

An Epic revision

You can only imagine Shane MacGowan took some artistic licence because boys of the NYPD Pipes and Drums band didn’t scan as well.

Of course, it’s a birthright of the Irish to lay claim to any number of truisms we now take for granted.

With St Patrick, actually a Welshman, the daddy of them all.

And it is in that rich tradition that Shane and Epic the Irish Emigration Museum have followed.

With the award-winning tourist attraction marking the Great Man’s passing two years ago by assembling their very own NYPD choir.

To sing Galway Bay, just before the bells on Christmas Day.

All on video as part of the They Gave the Walls a Talking exhibition to showcase the diaspora.

Which Shane of course did more to champion than most.

Singing Galway Bay

It was one-such Irish emigrant Dr Arthur Colahan, native of Fermanagh but reared in County Galway who wrote the much-loved song about the City of Tribes while living in Leicester.

While it was another Irish-American, Bing Crosby, whose mother Catherine Harrigan’s family hailed from County Cork who popularised the song.

Making Galway Bay at one point the biggest selling record of all time.

And you can’t get better Christmas cred than Bing and Shane a double act we’d have loved to have seen.

And we’ve even come up with the perfect collab… Eiretale of New York.

While Aer Lingus will fly you to the Big Apple with pre-clearance out of the Oul Country and we found a sample return flight from €566.76 for next month.

America, Countries, Food

Hot Dog… Chicago’s is dragged through the garden

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And something to line my stomach before my flight back to Scotland. Hot Dog Chicago’s is dragged through the garden.

On account of its green add-ons and more later.

For many of us Europeans, and other types, the hot dog is our gateway to street food Stateside.

So if you got your first taste of a dwaaag from a Manhattan vendor you might imagine that they’re uniform across the country.

Hot Dog years

Check in: Skyscrapers in Chicago Airport

Wrong, there’s a pack of dogs out there.

While we’re road testing the two best known here, New York and Chicago.

Our source, or should that be sauce, are hot dogoligists (OK, we made that up).

At the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (and we didn’t make that up).

They run us through a history of the wiener and the origin claims of Frankfurt and Vienna.

With even Homer and the Ancient Greeks thrown in for good measure.

New York on a roll

Now, just like the hamburger, there is consensus that German immigrants took their sausages with them to the States.

And their first port of passage was naturally New York.

Where inevitably there are rival claims for who was the first to make a buck out of the-then dachshund sausage.

Either an immigrant in the Bowery district, along with milk rolls and sauerkraut in the 1860s.

Or more specifically baker Charles Feltman, who in 1871 opened up the first Coney Island stand.

Selling 3,684 dachshund sausages in a milk roll during his first year in business.

Hot stuff

How the sausages came to be known as hot dogs is also shrouded in mystery and mythology.

With one version crediting a vendor at the New York Polo Grounds on a cold April day.

Shouting ‘Get your dachshund sausages while they’re red hot!’

And sports cartoonist Tad Dorgan taking the story and running with it with a sketch.

Of barking dachshund sausages nestled warmly in rolls.

And because he couldn’t spell dachshund he wrote hot dog instead.

A tale of two US sittings

All of which is filling, albeit pretty interesting, in the discussion around the NY and Chicago hot dogs.

The NY offering leans heavily on the sauerkraut and brown mustard with onions^.

While the Chicago dog which really took off with the World Fair in 1893 packs in a lot more.

Served on a poppy seed bun, topped with mustard, tomatoes, onions, sport peppers, green relish, dill pickles and celery salt.

Which I slurp down at the airport bar with a Boston Sam Adams in the company of Hawaiian Chase.

Because hot dogs are a communal event I’ve enjoyed from Washington and Ben’s Chilli Bowl to Venice Beach.

And Hot Dog Chicago’s is dragged through the garden. And me after it.

America, Canada, Countries

Living again with dinosaurs

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They came, they saw, they brontosaurus then up and left… but now they’re back and we’re living again with dinosaurs.

It doesn’t take the release of Walking With Dinosaurs on Sunday, May 25 (BBC, 6.25pm) to release our inner Ross Geller… but it helps.

Ross, of course, plies his palaeontology out of the world-renowned American Museum of Natural History.

And devouring everything prehistoric (but not Ross’s sandwich) should be on your itinerary in New York.

Particularly when you need to occupy your overactive kids on a rainy (or sweltering) day in the Big Apple.

When you don’t even have to go overland, just hop out at the Subway Station and the doors are wide open for you.

A day and night at the museum

The Museum of Natural History (yes, that one out of Night At The Museum) is pay-what-you-want and you’ll want to big.

Now America’s rich prehistoric past is a counter to Yankaphobes who love falsely to point to the continent’s lack of history.

Despite dinosaur fans being able to walk in their footsteps coast to coast and everywhere in between.

Yale to Universal

We got a behind-the-scenes look at the free Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut.

Which dinosaur fans know was where the velociraptor from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park was born.

And where they are brought back to life through the wizardry of Universal in Orlando and Hollywood.

And you can get up close and personal to Dino.

A Dino’s graveyard

Feeding time: Universal Studios Hollywood

Of course, here on this British island of ours we pride ourselves on our BBC being free too, apart from the £174.50 licence fee.

And while you’re waiting to get out to Dinoworld you can travel to the four corners of the earth while not leaving your sofa.

Such as Pipestone Creek in Alberta, Canada, featured on the prog.

Nicknamed the ‘River of Death’, Pipestone Creek is home to a mass grave.

Thousands of Pachyrhinosaurus, each the size of an elephant, were buried here, killed in one day.

The Calgary is here

See the discoveries first hand at Philip J Currie Dinosaur Museum in Grande Prairie, where the bones are cleaned and analysed.

Tickets for adults (18+) cost from $15 CAD / £8.

Return flights (London to Calgary) cost from £570 pp with Delta.

Canadian Affair offers tailor-made trips to Grande Prairie and the rest of Alberta.
Alberta.

And a Dublin Zoorasic Party

While nearer to home our pals at Dublin Zoo are planning a Zoorasic Party takeover.

Hosted by Jurassic Park science advisor Dino Don Lessem.

The exclusive Zoorasic Trail Takeover ticketed events runs from June 26-29, on sale from tomorrow, May 23.

Countries, Culture

Play nice on the Dublin-NY portal

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They’re brothers by a different mother, sisters by a different mister, so come on just play nice on the Dublin-NY portal.

Because, guess what, you’ve only just gone and got this interactive twinning of two of the world’s great cities suspended.

By flashing body parts and images of the Twin Towers on it.

Now we all know the bonds and family links that tie the Fair City and the City that Never Sleeps.

Including our own, with all four of my Irish mum’s brothers making their way to America and swelling its population.

And that Dubliners and New Yorkers share the same edgy, anti-establishment view of their world.

Sign of the times

But there is a line that’s been crossed and spoiled the fun for all those stepping into each other’s worlds.

Whether looking out of O’Connell Street into Broadway or back the other way.

All of which brings up again the Holidos and Don’ts of proper responses at tourist sites and historic attractions.

Particularly following a trip last week to the Hollywood sign.

Or at least as close as you can get which is about 800m.

Now it’s only 50 years since we could all, if we were fit enough, clamber up to the sign.

Before antisocial types forced the authorities’ hand through graffiti and desecration of the site.

Now if you try to get near the sign the LAPD will warn you off by loudspeaker that you will be fined $3,000 for your troubles.

Not that that seems to deter folk as we witnessed on our trek in the Hollywood Hills.

Please do not touch

The same has become true of Uluru, Ayer’s Rock to the old father-in-law when he lived out there and went walkabout.

Sometimes, of course, it’s mere overexcitement that causes people to go too far.

And mean that the guardians of the Pere Lachaise Cemetery have now had to put a glass screen over Oscar Wilde’s grave in Paris.

Or entitlement as pushy photographers try to capture a corner of a cherub on the Sistine Chapel.

Of course, alas, tourist desecration is nothing new with the original Vandals, a tribe from the East, sacking Rome.

And generations helping themselves to Classical infrastructure lying around for their own home.

We should be grateful then for what is left and how complete the centrepiece of that other Classical powerhouse, Athens’ Acropolis is.

No thanks, of course, to Britain, who hold on graspingly to the Elgin Marbles.

Reach out across the oceans

Now, coming back to the question of today and our cri de coeur…

Modern technology allows us to reach out across oceans to the descendants of those who left generations ago and could not come back.

So play nice on the Dublin-NY portal because remember they’re brothers by a different mother, sisters by a different mister.

Tag: https://www.nyctourism.com/

The Scots-American who made America great the first time