High life | 26 October 2017

I hate to say this, but the quality of life in the Bagel has crashed in a Harvey Weinstein-like way. The city has always had a sort of rollercoaster feel, its ups and downs driven by Wall Street and budget cuts, but its present state is the worst I’ve experienced by far.

When I first came to New York, it was the true centre of the world. It was after the war and Europe was in ruins. What glamour there was in the world resided in the city. People dressed to the nines, women wore hats and gloves, and manners were far more important than money. It was a feast for the eyes: Rockefeller Center and the chic crowds that 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 here and there, and revive memories of youth. A lonely steel diner, an old cigar shop in Brooklyn still advertising five-cent smokes, old tenement neighbourhoods, still crowded with pushcarts, now selling halal food. Chinatown still stinks of garlic and the diamond district is still packed with Hasidic Jews plying their trade, but Tin Pan Alley has gone, as has 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 1970s.