Tales of the city

Why is it that every time I leave New York I die a little? I know it sounds corny, but I do. I suppose it’s because it was that first great magic city I came upon after the war. The great beaux-arts and art-deco apartment towers looming in the distance, the magisterial Rockefeller Center and, of course, the noble Empire State Building were like modern Greek temples to an 11-year-old, and for some strange reason they’ve remained unspoiled and wondrous to look at to this day. Although the city has continued to alter itself at a rapid pace — gone is the Third Avenue Elevated Train, Schrafft’s restaurants, the Edward Hopper-like red three-storey walk-up houses, the walk-down spaghetti cellars, Luchow’s, the old Metropolitan Opera, Penn Station — the urban palimpsest lives.

The city’s most memorable and humane skyline was that of Central Park West, where the most important apartment buildings were constructed in the beaux-arts style, with names like the Majestic, the Beresford, the San Remo and the El Dorado. Fifth and Park Avenue were more expensive and more exclusive, but Central Park West was first in beauty and majesty.

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Ian Williams

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I didn’t realise until very late that New York is a big small town peopled by crazies and eccentrics. And lots of social climbers, too. Mind you, peel away the present, and previous incarnations emerge time and again. You now have Kravis, Trump and Perelman, but their likes were always here. Before Bungalow 8 we had Studio 54, and before that El Morocco and the Stork. Places, like people, don’t change, they just get a bit uglier. And more expensive. And ruder. New York City was described by E.B. White as offering ‘the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy’, as lyrical a description as I’ve come across, but Mr White was writing about the city in 1947, which those of you who have grown up on movies of the 1930s and 1940s are sure to understand.