I hate to say this, but the quality of life in the Bagel has crashed in a Harvey Weinstein-like downfall. The city has always had a sort of roller-coaster feel, its ups and downs following Wall Street and budget cuts, but the present state is by far the worst I’ve ever experienced. When I first came to New York it was the true center of the world. It was following the war, Europe was in ruins, and what glamour existed worldwide resided in the city. People dressed to the nines, women wore hats and gloves, and manners were far more important than money. One’s eye didn’t know where to settle: Rockefeller Center and the chic crowds who skated on its ice rink, the beautiful women shopping on Fifth Avenue, the black-tied swells emerging from the Stork Club and El Morocco, the preppies and Joe Colleges under the clock at the Biltmore. Palimpsests of the old place survive and revive memories of youth. A lonely steel diner here and there, an old cigar shop in Brooklyn still advertising five-cent smokes, tenement neighborhoods still crowded with pushcarts now selling halal food. Chinatown still stinks of garlic and the Diamond District is still crowded with Hasidic Jews plying their trade, but Tin Pan Alley is gone, as is the music. Now and then a street corner evokes memories of past loves, but the city that was gritty and glamorous is no more.
On the Upper East Side, where I live in a 1920s building, things are as bad as they are downtown or over on the West Side. It’s the people, stupid, not the place. Never have I seen a less glamorous or worse-looking bunch, at least not since I was in Tirana back in the early ’70s. Women and men are short, squat, and rather brown. Women wear leggings and trainers, and men sport ghastly docker shorts, tight sleeveless T-shirts that accentuate their obesity, and fat calves that bulge and descend into very large trainers. It is a horror show like no other.
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Fifth Avenue is now a no-man’s-land because of the gawking tourists. Further west, the sleazy shops that sold cheap sex magazines and videos and made Times Square naughty and unique have been replaced by giant Apple Stores and megashops that sell paraphernalia with professional team insignias on it. Peep shows and cheap movie houses are gone, as are fast-food joints like Horn & Hardart. Ads are everywhere, deafening and blinding in intensity where once upon a time the Camel man would exhale a ring of smoke under the logo “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” Cabs are cramped and impossible to see out from, and cabbies don’t speak English. But Urdu will do, or pidgin French. The place is hell.
Glamour aside, what I mostly miss are the chic restaurants and nightclubs. The latter no longer exist, the former are packed with badly dressed people whose manners are even worse. New Yorkers have always been loud, but they used to be loud in a sweet, drunken Irish way. Now the street is loud in an aggressive, menacing way. The jungle has come to the city. Bookstores are no longer to be found—except a few places I’ve marked down—all replaced by shops selling lingerie, or whatever women are never seen wearing nowadays.
