All of New York
A FEW months ago Messrs. Constable published the admirable New York Panorama, a brilliant specimen of the excellent work
done by the writers' project of the W.PA. during that period of federal patronage of the arts which Congress, in its wisdom, has now ended. This Guide is a pendant to the Panorama ; where the Panorama was selective and synthetic in its treat- ment, the Guide is hospitable to the claims of even furthest Brooklyn to notice and is analytic. It covers the five boroughs, area by area, listing things of beauty, of historic interest and of mere oddity, although it departs from this locality plan a little in its section called " Major Points of Interest." Naturally, the greater part of the book is devoted to Manhattan, and that is as it should be. But the painstaking description of the other boroughs reveals how much there is in New York, out- side the right little, tight little island in the middle. For one thing, there is a booster spirit that is missing in Manhattan. The self-satisfied inhabitants of the island, even the natives among them, are too sure of the position of their island home to care for the problems of growth and decay that worry the civic pride of Dallas and Fort Worth, Des Moines and Dubuque or even Chicago and Los Angeles. Where, in a lesser city, the empty floors of the Empire State building would be a cause of sincere distress to thousands who had no private interest in its fate, in New York the economic troubles of the skyscraper were a source of jest, often ribald jest. But the outer boroughs are less tough-minded.
This Guide has its full complement of projects that have failed to come off and have hurt local pride as well as pocket ; the real-estate developments of the Rockaways ; the persistent refusal of Staten Island to grow as fast as it should ; the sad story of the great port that was to have sprung up on Jamaica Harbor. The promoters of the last vision were certainly optimists, for, if we are to accept the chronology given here, they " chartered a ship and toured Europe, adver- tising Jamaica Harbour." This in 1915! One would have thought that Europe had other things to think of, but the siren words of Mr. Henry A. Meyer may have been a pleasant diversion from the news of Mackensen's phalanx, the Dardan- elles expedition and Notre Dame de Lorette! But Europe in 1915, like Europe in 1939, seems to have been curiously parochial. Nothing came of Mr. Meyer's cruise, just as Europe has belied the confident trust of Mr. Grover Whalen, who asserted last year that the old continent was too busy thinking about his World's Fair to think about a war.
As much as of London, it may be asserted that he who is tired of New York is tired of life. For an abundant life, if variety is abundance, can be sampled here. There are hot spots and museums ; straight music at Carnegie Hall, swing with Maxine and the rest at the Onyx. There are two vast Gothic cathedrals, churches for Greek orthodox, synagogues (and temples) for Jews, including Negro Jews and Abyssinian Jews. There is, at the nine-storey Calvary House, the American headquarters of the people who call themselves the "Oxford Group " and, not terribly far away, " Kingdoms " of another American religious leader, Father Divine ; " he has the world in a jug and the stepper in his hand." We are told of Klein's and Bonwit Teller's, of where there used to be the little lofts and office-studios in the days when the name Kalem meant a lot in the nascent picture industry, when Mary Pickford was on her way. We are told, too, when and where the public first heard Al Jolson speak and sing from the hitherto silent screen, where the Floradora girls did their stuff, and we are given the names of several of the haunts of the literati once visited by Mr. Deeds and by the Small Bachelor. In this Sheridan Square neighbourhood " Ye Olde Pawn Shoppe " appears to have been missed ; " Ye Olde Radio Shoppe " which has been reported to me from Madison Avenue is almost certainly a myth. In fact, even the dullest sections of the city, the East Thirties for instance, are shown to have their attractions, even if it is only that section of Bellevue Hospital where the " alcoholics, the sexually unbalanced, the hysterical and the alleged insane are under care." Few of us but must have a friend who qualifies under one of these heads. There are a few omissions and a few errors ; Mae West might have been mentioned in connexion with Welfare Island, where she spent a little time after the production of a play called, candidly enough, Sex. More serious is the bold remark that Tilden was "defeated" by Hayes in 1876. In a city so full of Democrats such remarks are surely risky? But all that can be done is to send readers to this rich feeding, where they will learn a great number of interesting things, among them that among many other features of Rockefeller Center, which are the largest of their kind in the world, is the mort- gage ($44,3oo,00o), and that in the home town of Philo Vance, Nero Wolfe and Ellery Queen there were 231 homicides in 1937 but only 78 convictions in 1936! D. W. BROGAN.
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