Stuff That I’ve Noticed #12 – The City

New York, New York, aka The City. There is no other place like it.*
“Where do you live?” asked Jack.
“In The City,” answered Jill.

You’ll find my New York books here.

Should this brief exchange occur within a one hundred mile radius of Grand Central Station Jack will know that Jill lives on Manhattan Island. She does not live in Brooklyn, she does not live in Queens, she does not live in The Bronx nor does she live on Staten Island. Jill lives in Manhattan. According to the 2017 census, Jill has 1,655,000 fellow islanders. I am one of them and have been since the 4th of August of 1964.

In the first book of my memoir trilogy, 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 Bristol, Tennessee into 1948 Hollywood. The seventh chapter, “First Bites of the Apple”, could have been called “My Third Planet” because my 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, Boulder (CO), Santa Fe and New Orleans: some of these for weeks, others for months and I’ve visited, performed or produced films in 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 for approximately fifty-two hours. All I saw of The City that time was Greenwich Village (now I, like all New Yorkers, 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 four years and one month later.

Elizabeth in Boys From Syracuse (Left)

(An aside: Boys was directed by Chris Hewitt who would, nine years later, direct me as “Luther Billis” in a Boston production of South Pacific, my last appearance on the stage.) 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 just nine months later. 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, especially Hollywood. 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: This is a walking town. (We New Yorkers 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!

Midtown Street Crowd

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, as 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 (1964) 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 sublet that same apartment about five months later.) 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 in Manhattan is that we are stacked up on top of one another. In my 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 our terrace. That’s the Hudson River on the right, New Jersey in the distance. I’m sixteen floors up and on a hill so this gives you an idea of what I’m describing.

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. From Lincoln Center northward 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. (I know this because on several bicycle trips I have counted them.) The nearest 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. I suppose Ethiopian cuisine doesn’t travel well because that cafe didn’t last very long.

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. (Elizabeth and I are blessed with a good sized terrace which is the Manhattan version of a backyard.) What we do have is 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 one is 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. While 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.

* This is a substantive rewrite/update of a blog I posted in December 2015