High life | 28 May 2011

In that wonderful old Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, gambler Sky Masterson is romancing Sister Sarah Brown of the Salvation Army after an all-nighter of boozing it up in Havana. Walking her home to her mission in New York, he tells her that the only place in the world where ‘the dawn is turned on by an electrician’ is Times Square. She swoons. That, of course, was the good old days, when Runyonesque characters like Nathan Detroit, Nicely-Nicely, Harry the Horse, Big Jule from Chicago and Liver Lips Louis ruled Broadway and its environs.

In that magical make-believe world, Nathan married Miss Adelaide (after a 14-year engagement) and Sky got hitched to Sarah. The play had a very happy ending, although if there is a revival any time soon, Nathan will most likely marry Sky and Miss Adelaide Sister Sarah. (The clapped-out NY Times had a long story last Sunday about a transgender’s sex life, and an editorial by a gay man on why people like himself should boycott straight marriages. No wonder the Wall Street Journal is wiping the floor with the old bag. Saturation coverage of queenly matters.)

Many people my age wish to have lived in another era, and I do often get lost in pipe dreams of times past, but New York does this to me more than any other city because the place has changed so radically. Whites are now in the minority, cops are no longer polite or Irish, men no longer wear suits and hats, and Times Square’s perfect combination of seediness and glamour has been lost for ever to a blur of moving electric surfaces advertising junk. Worse, the Sky Mastersons and Nathan Detroits have been pushed aside by dusky drug dealers and pimps, not to mention the marauding groups of young black toughs who appear out of nowhere and help themselves to any available goods.