Volume 5, Number 11 · January 6, 1966
Living in New York
By Jason Epstein
New York, for all the chaos and poverty that surround and permeate it, is still, at its center, a magical city—a diamond as big as the Ritz—incalculably seductive to spirits of sufficient sanguinity or innocence or arrogance. There was, to take an example, a certain day in September, not long after the War. The morning sky as one crossed in an open car from Long Island through Brooklyn to Manhattan was the color of lemon. Turning and slowly climbing, the road left the edge of the harbor which it had followed for miles and became an elevated highway, broad and white (though not so broad as it has since become). The highway floated through the slums of Brooklyn, between paralled rows of wooden tenements, nearly at the level of their roof tops, burying the Irish and Italian dock-workers who lived down below in a sunless hell of noise and dirt. But in the open car it was really splendid. The radio played Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart, the leather seats were still damp from the Atlantic morning and through the haze, in the brightening day, one saw the sparkling river and across it the great buildings.
Feature, 2039 words
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