Manhattan at its best

The block I’ve lived on these past 35 years is next to what no less a Manhattan authority than Woody Allen has called the most beautiful street in the city. At this time of year, the elms and poplar trees give my block a country feeling, which for me is as good as it gets. Country living in a city is what it’s all about. An English writer once described the place as being without trees, ‘but as if by a miracle little heaps of twigs and blown leaves gather in the gutters’. Looking out of my window I wonder what city she was referring to. The Bagel is leafier than London, at least where I live, so there. The copper church roofs glisten at sunset, the lights come on in the Rockefeller Plaza, the lambent air intoxicates; the theatre crowds, the pretty girls in their summer frocks all give promises of sex and summer.