Ian Fleming felt a frisson of physical exhilaration, as most do, just driving
down the street in New York. He had visited the city every year since the
end of the Second World War yet still found cause for celebration in the
mundane experience of taking a taxi.
“There are still thrilling moments - when your taxi goes over the hump on Park
Avenue and the lights turn to red and you pause and watch them all go green
the whole way down to 46th,” he wrote.
That hump is still there, of course, and you can still ride the “green wave”
of traffic lights - although your taxi might be a fuel-efficient minivan
rather than a picturesque Checker cab.
It is a credit to New Yorkers that the lush boulevard through the Upper East
Side, planted with tulips by its wealthy residents every spring, has been
well preserved and can still inspire. “This is an architectural, a physical,
thrill,” Fleming wrote.
But he had only disdain for the citizens of America's greatest metropolis. “Go
into the first drugstore, ask your way from a passer-by, and the
indifference and harshness of the New Yorker cuts the old affection for the
city out of your body as sharply as a surgeon's knife,” he said.
With more than a dash of Old World hauteur, he found them money-grabbing,
corrupt nouveaux riches and just plain rude. “In New York you don't get
politeness unless you pay for it,” he complained. “The expense-account
aristocracy have increasingly ruined one's old haunts.” The city was his
least favourite of all the stops on his world tour.
New Yorkers still tip extravagantly, and waiters are apt to chase you out of
the restaurant if you leave a paltry European-style 10 per cent. Pedestrians
will still barge past you on the crowded pavements of midtown Manhattan at
rush hour and cars will honk if your taxi hesitates at the lights.
But that brashness, the ever-present equation of time-equals-money, is the
glory and the excitement of the place. You can't take the neon out of Times
Square.
The most remarkable aspect of Fleming's commentary on New York is the way he
foretold the crisis in confidence that ravaged the city for decades. “The
town was rapidly losing its heart,” he concluded. New Yorkers harbour fond
memories of their city at the time of his visit as a patchwork of tightly
knit neighbourhoods with almost no crime, boasting nightclubs along 52nd
Street and bohemian watering holes in Greenwich Village, where Abstract
Expressionists rubbed shoulders with Beat poets.
Several years after his visit, however, a young woman named Kitty Genovese was
stabbed to death on a New York street, on March 13, 1964. Thirty-seven
people heard her screams, but none intervened. The incident is commonly
cited as the start of a decades-long malaise that plunged New York into a
period of murder, white flight, Aids, crack cocaine and near-bankruptcy.
Tourists will be delighted to discover that the city has recovered
spectacularly. The murder rate, first accurately recorded at 548 in 1963,
peaked at 2,245 - a mind-boggling six a day - in 1990, but has fallen back
to 494 last year.
Times Square, the “crossroads of the world”, which became a red-light district
where whores and drug pushers plied their wares, is now so Disneyfied that
you can watch The Lion King there. Even the twin towers of the World Trade
Centre are finally being replaced, and the building site at Ground Zero has
become one of the city's biggest tourist attractions.
Need to know
Travel Silverjet (www.flysilverjet.com)
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Virgin flies from Heathrow to Newark, Upper Class, from £1,499 return (www.virginatlantic.com).
Reading New York (Time Out, £12.99)
NEW YORK
Things to do
There are some constants from Fleming's visit: You can still survey the city
from the top of the Empire State Building, although you may now be searched
before you go up in case you are affiliated with al-Qaeda.
And you can still overfly Manhattan in a helicopter, though the price has gone
up from $5 to £60 per person (New
York Helicopter). The Village
Vanguard jazz club, which he describes as “the jumping-off place for
Harry Belafonte” survives in Greenwich Village (178 Seventh Ave South 001
212 255 4037). But the Seven Arts Coffee Gallery, Fleming's favoured “beat
haunt” near Times Square, is long since gone. Try the witty, gritty Bowery
Poetry Club instead (001 212 614 0505)
Restaurants
Although most of Fleming's preferred eateries have disappeared, the Four
Seasons (212 754 9494) continues to thrive as a venue for the
power-lunch - recently enlivened by a nude photo-shoot featuring dozens of
models in the restaurant's reflecting pool. It serves dishes such as filet
of bison with foie gras and fallow venison with huckleberry sauce.
You can still get a creamed oyster stew with crackers - which Fleming called
“perhaps the best dish that has maintained its integrity in the New York of
my experience” - at the cavernous Oyster
Bar (212 490 6650) in the bowels of Grand Central Station, now lovingly
restored with its red and white gigham table cloths after a 1997 fire that
put its survival in doubt. It remains a New York classic.
The Stage Delicatessen, which he described as “full of Broadway characters”,
is now a tourist spot with an unfortunate record of being closed down for
health violations, most recently last month for a “a severe vermin
infestation”. If you do venture in, be ready for a chunk of strawberry
cheesecake big enough to use as a doorstop.
In Fleming's day, eating out meant a restaurant in mid-town. But you can now
eat just as well downtown. To sample the scene, try transplanted Brit Keith
McNally's Balthazar in SoHo (212
966 7402), Pastis in the thriving Meat
Market area (212 929 4844) and Schillers
on the Lower East Side (212 260 4555). All serve reasonably-priced, reliably
tasty French bistro fare. For celebrity spotting, try walking in to Vanity
Fair editor Graydon Carter's personal eatery, The Waverly Inn (212 243
7900), where reservations are almost impossible to obtain.
Hotels
The Algonquin (212 840 6800),
which Fleming recommended because it was favoured by Sir Laurence Olivier
and Terence Rattigan for its easy stroll to Broadway, is now a virtual
theme-park for Dorothy Parker and the Round Table wits who once met there.
But you will find few Broadway stars there these days.
The hippest hotels are away from the tourist bus routes on Manhattan's Lower
East Side, such as the over-designed Hotel
on Rivington (212 475 2600) or the Bowery
Hotel (212 505 1300), or the Blue
Moon Hotel (212 533 9080). The Hollywood stars stay at The
Mercer in SoHo (212 966 6060), where Russell Crowe famously hurled a
telephone at the concierge.
