I like this photo, it is a bit film noir, but it capture the pervasive sense of hustling everywhere tourists are in New York. I love the city, but it has become challenging – difficult – to carry a camera in Manhattan or to be a visitor and a tourist. It is a wonderful city to photograph, but for me, it has also become  a predatory place. If  you are marked as a visitor, as a tourist – the camera seems to suggest this to the hundreds of hawkers who now prey on outsiders in mid-town – you are a target, set upon by immigrants from New Jersey in character costumes – Elmo, Spider-man, the Statue of Liberty; aggressive men selling tickets for tour buses, for bicycle rentals, for pedicabs and street tours.

They line the streets around mid-town and leading to Central Park, they flood the entrances to the park, they step in front of you, yell at you, follow you, sometimes badger you. One men trying to get me into a pedi-cab that competes with the carriage horses in the park stood in front and demanded to know at least five times why I wasn’t getting into a cab pulled by his brother.  I had to threaten to get a police officer to get him to stop.

The hawkers gather in packs and clusters, sometimes they line up behind one another, sometimes four or five of them approach you one after the other. You often have to wade through a bunch to move up the sidewalk, yelling “no, thank you, no thank you,” but that doesn’t often work. They yell it’s a good Facebook photo, or the girls (or the wife) will love it, or “give it a try,” “have fun,” “see the sights.” I love walking and looking around, I am not into battling my way through crowds, it feels a bit like New Delhi near the park.

I have a good-sized Canon camera and I’m not wearing a suit, so I guess that marks me as prey, but it is daunting now to walk even a few blocks, there is the sense of being observed, pursued, harassed. I didn’t like it. Well inside the park, it quiets a bit, but it never seems anywhere where there are tourists.

The pedicabs are a fascinating addition to the predatory chaos that is being a tourist in New York. (I guess I am a tourist now, I have lived in New York many times, visited there hundreds). The prices of the cabs are not regulated – some charge $3 a minute, some charge $9 a minute, the city is flooded with complaints by tourists, especially foreign born tourists, who end up paying hundreds of dollars for a 10 -minute cab ride powered by a poor kids, usually from the Caribbean. If you think the horses have it hard, watch these poor sweating and skinny young men try and push families through parts of the park.

The pedicab vendors hand out leaflets with photos of the carriage horses, many tourists think they are paying for a cab ride to the carriages. The pedicabs clog the entrances to the park and line the sidewalks are curiously unregulated, especially when compared to the carriage trade, which lives under hundreds of pages of regulations and is still hounded continuously by critics and animal rights activists. Why, I wonder, does no one worry about humans who weight 110 pounds pulling five or six hundred pounds of people in heat and traffic?

I love New York, but I am not liking walking around the most beautiful parts of the city, especially those near the Southern perimeter of the park. The hustling is out of control, aggressive and obnoxious. Anywhere near the park is a free-fire zone for hawkers, peddlers and sign and pamphlet wavers and shouters. If you bring a camera and show it, and even, I suspect, if you don’t, you will run a gauntlet of mayhem and pressure to get to the park. It is an interesting walk, always, but not a peaceful or pretty one. Be careful of the pedicabs – they are, on average, much more expensive than a carriage ride and a lot shorter – and be careful if you look up at the buildings too often. You are likely to plow into somebody waving a sign at you.