High life: What I miss most in New York

New York

The search for the two Chechen terrorists in Boston was nothing compared with mine for new digs in the Bagel. And the knowledge accrued while cruising with estate agents the city that never sleeps — for example, did you know that New York has five million, two hundred thousand trees? April is still cold, and the branches are bare, but the pear and cherry trees are in full bloom and soon Manhattan will be under a green canopy. On my way to judo at lunchtime and karate in the evening at Richard Amos’s dojo — he’s a Brit and we’ve been together now 14 years — I witness the spring bird migration, with all sorts of species — they say more than 200 — swooping into the Bagel on their way north. My favourites are the hawk on 74th street, atop 927 Fifth Avenue, and the nesting peregrine falcons over the Brooklyn Bridge, making sure no conman sells it to some unsuspecting Russkie. And there’s always the friendly owl in the middle of Central Park — where I go to rest on Saturdays — who lives among the tall trees, tiny lake and small streams of the 79th street ramble. This is no longer the city I once loved like no other (and that includes Paris), the politicians having made sure it now resembles an African or Caribbean metropolis, but it’s still an extraordinary sight, especially during the early hours coming home from a party in Brooklyn and seeing the skyline unfold with the dawn. Manhattan is still the place that screams ‘This is where the money is’, while Brooklyn is now a middle-class borough full of baby carriages and men hurrying to work in suits and on their bicycles. What I miss most, especially during the return of drunken dawns, are the stickball games among poor kids, games I saw throughout my youth and even as late as the early Seventies in the side streets of downtown Noo Yawk. Poor children used to play stickball in the streets, climb lampposts and pitch pennies. No longer. Big Brother, as in Wall Street and Big Business, has become the Big Oppressor, its mega-towers banishing the sun and barricading the views, dumping the street urchins on to crowded subway platforms. Kids used to swim in fountains and in the East River. Today helicopters would be winching them up with traffic closed for safety’s sake. And yet skyscraper hatred makes no sense. Manhattan without them would be an expensive Queens, and, come to think of it, there are fewer than 20 buildings in the city that top 800 feet. We have the great depression to thank for the way the city’s shape dips low south of midtown, and 9/11 for the new glass pillars going up in the void left by the twin towers. However one looks at it, the stratosphere is not as yet crowded, the brownstones are still uncrushed, the undertow of nostalgia is still strong. Here are the origins of the futuristic New York, as in the great Fritz Lang film Metropolis: detained overnight as a German alien soon after the end of the first world war, Lang saw the city at night as an illusion, and its glaring lights and tall buildings helped him conceive Metropolis right then and there. Manhattan’s skyscrapers, of course, helped Hollywood create the playground of superheroes, headquarters of super big corporations ruled by masters of the universe. The symbolism of strength in height and size is unmistakable, and has made Hollywood’s life easier as a result. As it did Ayn Rand’s, in The Fountainhead. ‘Skyscrapers,’ proclaims her hero Howard Roark, ‘are the greatest structural inventions of man.’ He then dismisses Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals as mongrels of every ancient style they could borrow from. (That’s good old Rand for you.) Her philosophical belief in the value of the individual versus the collective somehow reminds me of the great lady the Brits just buried with style — a friend, Nick Scott, rang me after her funeral and told me it made him proud to be English. Hear, hear, just as it made me never want to set foot in the place after some of the remarks I heard by those ghastly lefties at the BBC. But back to Rand and her supermen. She set her novel in New York because New York means one thing only: Power. Power is an active, dominating presence throughout the book, and even more in the movie made of the novel, with the sweeping skyline of the city, especially down Fifth Avenue, seen by the audience from the interiors of offices through enormous walls of glass. Raymond Massey, impeccably dressed in double-breasted suits in his office with spectacular views of downtown as background, is not one to mess with. And the movie knew what it was doing, even back in 1949 when it was made. Roark’s dream was of a sleek, dynamic, individual edifice, not the boxy bores that the UN and Lever House are. Massey’s press baron was Rupert Murdoch long before Rupie baby owned a single newspaper. Massey dismisses neoclassical designs as ‘great big marble bromides’. Murdoch would most likely have said the same, in a different accent of course, and that’s what bothers me about The Fountainhead. I like big marble bromides, kids can play stickball between them, but I also like the power of glass and steel. Go figure, as they used to say in the place I visit only at night in order to raise hell with people much younger than me.