The City, New York, New York: Another Love Story
- Posted on 31st December 2015
- in Entertainment, entertainment books, Love Story, New York City
- by Ben
New York, New York,
aka The City. No other place like it.
“Where do you live?” asked Jack. “In The City,” answered Jill.
Should this brief exchange occur within a one hundred mile radius of Grand Central Station Jack will know that Jill lives on Manhattan Island. Not in Brooklyn, not in Queens, not in The Bronx nor on Staten Island. Jill lives in Manhattan. Depending on which article you read, Jill has between 1,629,999 and 1,999,999 fellow islanders. I am one of them and have been since August of 1964.
In my so called celebrity book, Three Stages, the second chapter is entitled “Another Planet”. This refers to the phenomenal shock to my thirteen year old self when I was transplanted from a town in Tennessee into 1948 Hollywood. The seventh chapter, “First Bites of the Apple”, could have been called “My Third Planet” because home since 1964 – the aforementioned City – is sufficiently unique as to deserve that appellation. I am qualified to make that statement because, in addition to various parts of Los Angeles, I have lived in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, San Diego, Phoenix, New Orleans: some of these for weeks, others for months and I’ve visited nearly every major city in the USA.
The City is Different. Very Different. In innumerable ways.
In November 1963 I visited the Big Apple for the first time and was in town for approximately fifty-two hours. The trip from Pittsburg to NYC is a funny story in that seventh chapter. All I saw of The City that time was Greenwich Village (now I, like all New Yorkers, just call it The Village), Museum Mile and the Broadway District. I saw three or four museums, one Broadway show (Luther, starring a young Albert Finney), one off-Broadway show (The Boys from Syracuse), featuring Betsy Hepburn who I hardly noticed but would marry almost exactly four years later. I wore the wrong shoes, nearly destroyed my feet by walking more in two days than I had in the previous year and I loved every minute of it. I had found my home and would move here permanently in nine months. The following spring I came back for about ten days to get an agent – being an actor in those days – and learn more about my future home. I took increasingly long walks for the month before to get in shape. And I bought some really good walking shoes.
This second visit was when I began to register the incredible life style disparities between The City and everyplace else. On that first whirlwind tour I was so bedazzled by it all that none of these – except the marathon walking – registered in my consciousness.
Let’s start with the obvious: walking. This is a walking town. (We self deprecatingly call the central borough of one of the world’s greatest cities “town”.) Subways, busses, taxis and in my case a bike are also part of the transportation mix but people walk in Manhattan. In a national survey NYC came in first in “walkability” cities by a considerable margin. Mind you that survey included the other four boroughs which are mostly suburban in lifestyle, you know; houses with driveways and garages. I repeat: in Manhattan we walk a lot!
Broadway in front of Lincoln Center
We have a lot of traffic and though I haven’t done any research my guess is that the majority of private automobiles clogging the arteries of the Apple are not owned by Manhattan residents. Until I moved to The City I never met an adult besides my mother who didn’t drive. By the way, if you do have a car in Manhattan (we do) unless you can pay upwards of four or five hundred bucks a month, depending on your area, for garage space you spend more time in it re-parking two or three times a week for street cleaning than you do actually going somewhere.
Another big difference is housing. While there are many apartment houses in L. A. and other cities they are nothing like the ones in New York. The first time I went to a friend’s place in Chelsea, a middle class neighborhood made up primarily of renovated four and five story tenement buildings, I thought it looked like a slum until I went inside the well appointed, beautifully furnished home. I had never seen a real slum and once I did I truly understood the vast difference between the two neighborhoods. A few garbage cans at the curb and some spilled trash in the street do not a slum make. But the main difference here is that we are stacked up on top of one another. In my current neighborhood, the Upper West Side, four story tenements are a rarity. The buildings are ten to twenty stories holding from sixty to a hundred plus apartments. This shot is looking south from my terrace. That’s the Hudson River on the right, New Jersey in the distance. I’m seventeen floors up and on a hill so this gives you an idea of what I’m describing.
This night shot shows my street, West End Avenue.
What these sorts of dwellings create is population density and the other lifestyle uniquities (if I may coin a needed word) devolve from that. Broadway – the avenue, not the theatre district – is one block from my house. Each block on Broadway has at least one, some as many as five or six, food and beverage related businesses: groceries, restaurants, wine stores, sandwich/bagel shops, delis and the like. The grocery and pharmacy are open 24/365 and you can get anything delivered. The ethnic and national food options are endless. There was even an Ethiopian restaurant for several years a block-and-a-half from us.
We don’t have lawns to mow, garages to fill with stuff we should have thrown away, backyard pools or fruit trees or even backyards. We do have at least a dozen take-out menus on a kitchen shelf, half of which are Chinese. We have common washing machines and dryers in the basement and unless we’re really rich, small stoves and refrigerators in our small kitchens. And we have building staffs that we have to tip at Christmas whether we like them or not.
We also have almost immediate access to some of the best live performance venues in the USA. We have almost immediate access to some of the best restaurants in the USA. We have almost immediate access to some of the best shopping in the USA. We do not need to have a car. We do need to have good walking shoes and the willingness to use them.
Elizabeth and I are going to use ours now for a walk in Riverside Park then finish up on Broadway and visit some of those handy nearby food and beverage related businesses. And tonight it’s gonna be Szechuan for dinner. (Delivered.)
I Love New York!
You’ll find my New York books here.
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