Afterthought: New York
By ALAN BRIEN
MANHATTAN means sky- scrapers, as everybody knows—though the word itself, originally coined to describe the top triangular sail of a yacht, and now so New Yorker-ish in flavour to outsiders, is almost never used any more by insiders here. Boasters boast of them, sociologists deplore them, tourists adore them, natives ignore them and each architect builds one of his own, but de- nounces those of his rivals. They come in a wild variety of silhouettes. There is the hypo- dermic needle, like the Empire State building, to be seen on blowy days giving a fix into the bulging buttocks of the clouds. There is the multi-coloured ice-cream cone, like the Chrysler building, just begging to be licked and melted by the hot tongue of a hurricane named after a chorus-girl. There are tombstones, shoe-boxes, ziggurats, keeps, cathedrals, filing cabinets, lec- terns, in gold and silver and black glass, in glossy plastic and embossed metal, in carved stone and veneered dirt. You can see what appears to be every material in use except wood, which in this strange city is reserved for use as temporary road surfacing—Sixth Avenue for ten blocks south of 59th Street is paved from side- walk to sidewalk with great, polished and planed tree trunks, across which the cars bounce and
slide like monster dodgems on a fairground ride. The higher the skyscrapers rise and the nearer they crowd, the less you can see from them and the less you can see of them. The more you raise the skyline, the lower you depress the street line. In another generation, I can imagine the ground of Manhattan as dank and sunless as a mushroom farm; buried, at mean sea level, a thousand feet below the sight of the horizon.
Everybody knows Manhattan means sky- scrapers—yet how few of them there are still when you trace the island's profile from across the Hudson or East Rivers. Manhattan Island is shaped like a bottle-nosed whale. At the southern tip around Wall Street, the fortress of the financiers soars to a point as sharp as Shylock's knife, like the cutting edge of the whale's tail fin. But then it falls away in a sharp curve towards Greenwich Village, with street after street of man-size houses, among which an occasional ten-storey building sticks up like a tree in a meadow. After this narrow waist, the great bulky leviathan shoulders begin to swell out around Times Square to Central Park area, which the visitor remembers for ever as New York. The water-starved, water-lapped solar plexus of New York City seems to be bloated with holding its breath, whether to spout in triumph or scream for help it would be diffi- cult to decide. (New Yorkers are notoriously ambivalent about the Manhattan which enriches and robs them, excites and poisons them, makes them boast of its shortcomings and failures as the world's biggest and wo:st. Mayor Lindsay. newly elected after a campaign which sold him as the sole Samaritan capable of saving a com- munity hell-bent on suicide, has announced his slogan for the future to match President John- son's 'Great Society' and President Kennedy's 'New Frontier' —it is 'The Proud City.') North of the massive collar bones and enormous domed head, the whale town tapers off into Harlem along its long, low nose.
Even in mid-town, walkers will notice on every street innumerable small shops, offices, even hotels, apartment buildings and private houses, which do not rise above three, four and five storeys. There are 75,000 people to every square mile of living space on Manhattan, while 35.5 per cent of the island is cemented and tar- maced over with roads, highways and express- ways. Remembering this, it is surprising how much of the land does not bear the weight of layers and layers of flats and offices. 'The Obstinate City might be a more apt slogan for New York as it is, rather than as it aims to be. Not every inhabitant is delighted to sell off his lease or surrender his freehold to retire to the suburbs on the profits. One of the. most cheerful and reassuring sights (and sites) to me in all Manhattan is the shuttered, burglar-alarmed. red-brick mansion. walled in with its deserted patio. on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 61st Street. looking o% er the corner of Central Park towards the flowery. be-statued square in front of the Plaza. No one seems sure how many years this residence of Mrs. Marcellus Hartley Dodge has been so ostentatiously, shabbily unused. but the city authorities angrily assessed its land value a couple of years ago as at least £600,000.
But where the streets and avenues are laid out with geometric precision, there is little enjoyment for the old-Nshioned, London-trained walker. The length of a block is just sufficient to work up a fine tramping rhythm before you are forced to brake on your heels at the lights. To find somewhere to open up my muscles for a sizeable stretch I went down to the ramshackle ghost- village around the Fulton Fish Market. Here, within a few hundred yards of Wall Street, with the great FDR Drive rumbling on stilts almost overhead, there were small, random streets of painted, peeling houses and warehouses, junky shops and fishy cafes, of a stagy picturesqueness rarely seen outside the set of a Tennessee Williams play.
There were vacant lots, like old English bomb sites, piled with rubbish and patrolled by wild cats. The roads were barely made up, with great pools and fissures, and across them half-open boxes of angry purple fish were scattered. I lounged against the wall, under the rusty iron fire-escapes in the warm, almost stifling. Christmas weather, and watched gulls the size of swans with razor beaks squabble with old women, in rubber raincoats down to their ankles, over who should have the scavenger's share of the abandoned catch. At the end of the streets was a miniature waterfront with small, bobbing fishing-boats moored to jetties. If I had come across the scene photographed in colour in a magazine I should have placed it anywhere except on Manhattan.
The skyscrapers have done their best, and their worst, but the island obstinately refuses to be converted into a giant pin-cushion of steel and concrete and plastic. If Mayor Lindsay wins his battle to save the city from itself, per- haps there will be something to be really proud of after all.
Previous page
