High life | 12 April 2017

Things that I once loved — Fifth Avenue & 57th Street, brownstone terraces on hot summer afternoons, cold beer and fried eggs at 5 a.m. after a night of carousing, the Sherry-Netherland — and now miss have grown ever more monumental upon reflection. I suppose that it’s normal to miss things you loved when young, yet I still can’t get over how the people have changed — for the worse, needless to say.

The city is at its best very early in the morning, the asphalt glistening after the rain or the water trucks that occasionally wash the avenues, the streets empty and still as a movie set. In the old days, on muggy nights, people used to sleep on the fire escapes in their underwear. Returning from a nightclub, especially when up in Harlem, I’d see those we then called the ‘wops’ and the ‘micks’ sleeping in their shorts and bid them goodnight.