High life | 16 May 2019

New York

  This is my last week in the Bagel and I’m going to give it the old college try. Two weeks without booze, ciggies or ladies have made Taki a very dull boy. The next seven days — or rather nights — will decide. The Bagel, of course, is not what it used to be, but then what is? I was recently looking at some grand Gotham landmarks, contemplating that they — and I — will not be around for ever. I walked inside the San Remo on the West Side and I was transported to a different era: high ceilings, thick walls, big windows and lots of character. Only the wildest romantic would build towers inspired by the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, topped by Corinthian temples 30 storeys up in the air. (They conceal twin water tanks.) From the turn of the last century until the 1929 stock market crash, most of the important apartment buildings were designed in the beaux-arts style.