A WONDERFUL TOWN

New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town,

The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down

The people ride in a hole in the ground,

New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town!

Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Jules Munshin in On the Town (1949)

My childhood notions of New York were formed by the iconic film and song from On the Town. We first visited in 1984 and again in 1985, both on business (and expenses!) and have not been back since, a 30 year interval. This time we are visiting two of our sons, who recently followed their careers here, one living in smart East mid-town Manhattan, near Sutton Place, the other in delightful Brooklyn Heights, where we are staying. Both are charitably eager to show their decrepit parents their favourite places!     

Brownstones in leafy Brooklyn Heights

I had rather forgotten how dynamic New York is. Even after only 12 days, all the clichés ring true, teeming streets, powerful buildings, busy people but we have been treated everywhere with noticeable civility, even by the notorious passport and customs officers at JFK! We have done some corny touristy things – the Staten Island Ferry to see Miss Liberty up close, eating hotdogs, learning our way round the (easy enough) subway. The Metropolitan Museum of Art still proudly displays her incomparable collection but we also patronised the substantial Brooklyn Museum and the evocative Tenement Museum. New Yorkers know how to eat and we have consumed massive ribeye and Porterhouse steaks, delectable moist brisket, barbecued chicken, pizza to kill for, toothsome New England oysters, Caribbean mahi mahi fish and scallops etc, which I have washed down with decent American draught beer.

Above all the locals are chatty, quickly engaging obvious tourists like us in conversation – and what an ethnically diverse lot they are! Here in Brooklyn, a black man on the local subway, a former sailor at the US base at the Holy Loch recalled my native Scotland; another gave us careful directions, a third gave us his sales pitch as a medical man: Russian ladies at the dry cleaners were curious about London: a ticket-office man with a Salonika mother reminisced about Greece to my lovely wife and her elaborate headscarf deceived some Hasidic Jews into believing we were fellow orthodox members. A cheerful taxi driver had a huge beard and turban straight from Bengal, an American-Italian security guard and former cop quizzed us on Europe and a waitress from Kazakhstan at a Polish-American bistro wanted to visit London, while Chinese, Korean and Arabic shops abound. Whatever their ethnic origins, all these people were most proud of being Americans, integrated into the warp and weave of their nation. Good luck to them. Our British emphasis, by contrast, on multi-cultural diversity is probably a mistake.

Politics do not much intrude. Republican shenanigans over the Speaker of the House and congressional leadership are reported but do not cause much excitement. The pronouncements of Donald Trump cause hilarity here – but deep devotion in the mid-West populace. President Obama wrings his hands over gun control following even more college shootings and is castigated for being outwitted by brutal Putin on Syria; too early to call that one. Baseball and American football cast a more potent spell than any of this.

Like all large nations, the US has its problems – of inequality, of economic dangers and of unwelcome international commitments. But Americans have a generous and inclusive spirit. They strive for self-improvement in an unselfconscious way. I was struck by the massive doors of the Brooklyn Public Library depicting characters from American literature and classical mythology.

Brooklyn Library Doors

Alongside the doors is an inscription:

Here are enshrined the longing of great hearts

And noble things that tower above the tide.

The magic word that winged wonder starts

The garnered wisdom that never dies.

On other walls are inscribed quotations about books from Carlyle, Bacon, Conrad, Alexander Smith, Goethe and Shakespeare. Unfashionable perhaps, but replete with the American spirit.

This spirit is what gives the Statue of Liberty her power, symbolising freedom, and with what emotion the waves of immigrants must have heard of her inscription;

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless tempest-tost to me,
I lift the lamp beside the golden door!

A wonderful town indeed.       

                                                          

SMD

11.10.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015