Wonderful Town MANHATTAN '45

By Michael Walsh

It lay somewhere between the Proustian ambience of Woody Allen's films and the never-never land of the Emerald City: a town of tart talk and smooth tunes, where women sported black silk stockings and Cadillacs purred down clean streets kept orderly by serried ranks of trusted policemen. The skyline, crowned by the 1,250-ft. Empire State Building, was the most imposing man-made sight in the world, and at night it glowed with the fires of 2 million aspirations. Visitors to Grand Central Station, where the trains were out of sight and the zodiac was on the ceiling, could get information on any subject whatsoever -- and they did, 167,000 times a year. The glorious profligacy of the place was astounding: "Why," remarked one astonished observer, "the garbage thrown away in this city every day -- every day -- would feed the whole of Europe for a week."

Or so writes British Travel Writer Jan Morris in a valentine to New York City in 1945 that might make even Allen blush. Back then, she reports, young men returned from war victorious and well-mannered; the first thing they asked for when they disembarked was milk. Half the earth's races huddled together in picturesque, cheek-by-jowl harmony. The subways, "awful and astonishing in about equal measure," cost only a nickel to ride. Grover Whalen, a flamboyant Irishman with a flower in his lapel, was glad-handing the visiting firemen as the city's official greeter, while saturnine Robert Moses, the master builder, was sundering neighborhoods in the name of progress. The cafe-society swells watered at El Morocco or the Stork Club, and the punters headed for Toots Shor's, mindful of the proprietor's dictum that "a bum who ain't drunk by midnight ain't trying." It was, in short, a wonderful town.

A little too wonderful, perhaps. In a series of vignettes organized by topic ("On Style," "On System," "On Race," etc.), Morris stages an uncritical celebration: Mayor Fiorello La Guardia gets six paragraphs, the city's restaurants get seven, and "Smelly" Kelly, who sniffed out gas leaks along the IND subway tracks, gets one. Morris, whose customary voice is that of cool detachment, allows a gee-whiz tone to mar the text: "Where else, in 1945, could you have your photograph taken by an unmanned machine (the Photomaton), or go to a theatre on the fiftieth floor of a skyscraper (the Chanin Building), or for that matter get an electric shock just from touching a door handle, in a city so charged with energy that the very air tingled with it?" Certainly not in drab, dreary, bombed-out London. And there are some unaccustomed small inaccuracies that further tarnish the golden glow: the PATH commuter trains from New Jersey are not officially part of the city subway system, and Van Cortlandt Park is in the Bronx, more than six miles north of Harlem.

Still, New Yorkers weary of the slough of dirt, drugs and despond that is contemporary Manhattan can forgive Morris her borrowed nostalgia. Why, the garbage thrown away in Europe every week wouldn't equal the trash deposited on streets of Manhattan every day. But in those days it really was, in John Cheever's phrase, "a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with river light . . . and when almost everybody wore a hat." And now it is not.