New York—Back to the mythic city, dreamed into existence by the movies long ago and instantly memorable, a visually stunning place built for action and adventure, a city of broad avenues and narrow side streets, of soaring towers and grubby tenements all giving an air of what Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon growled dreams are made of. But what’s happened to the gritty stoops of Harlem, the waterfront filled with gleaming ships, the majestic train stations and grand hotels? I’ll tell you, progress is what happened, and it stinks.
New York for me has always been a fictive place, mostly made up from movies I’d seen, the rest from childhood impressions, when New York really was the center of the universe. A mythic city is an idea, an American masculinity sort of thing, with a moral code of honor all its own, and that includes gangsters in fedoras and cops in double breasted ill-fitting suits and dizzy dames with runs in their stockings. Yes, I know, I’m back in the ’40s and it’s all in black and white, but if you don’t like black and white and prefer car crashes and explosions in glorious Technicolor stop reading here and now. Manhattan’s skyscrapers were where superheroes strutted, always in black and white, as in The Fountainhead and Executive Suite. At times Fred and Ginger whirled around on a rooftop, and another time a giant monkey hung on for dear life at the top of the Empire State building. Yes, this was the city I first laid eyes on in 1948 and the one that had remained an illusion ever since, a shimmering picture of glamour and pleasure and danger that distracts and hypnotizes. No longer.
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