New York: Literary ghost tour

Deep below West 52nd Street is a massive stash of booze.

The cops never found it during Prohibition, and it belongs to the 21 Club. Famous for its sumptuously New Yorky dishes (like filet mignon with kumquat vinaigrette), 21 is a real boys’ den. Dark and plush, the subterranean rooms are festooned with intriguing junk: footballs, helmets, a model torpedo boat given by JFK, and a smashed racket from McEnroe. There are even 25 paintings by Remington, left by debtors during the depression. But oddly it isn’t a club at all. Anyone can go there, provided they’ve got a fat wallet and hollow legs. You just need to book (www.21club.com; 212 582 7200), otherwise you’ll be slugging it out with a banker.

‘How did you hide the booze?’ I asked. ‘I’ll show you,’ said the wine steward, and led us off downstairs, even deeper underground. There, he produced an 18-inch meat skewer, and slid it into the brickwork. With a distant clunk, two-and-a-half tonnes of wall swung to one side, revealing a cavern big enough for 2,000 cases. It’s still a private stash (for movie stars and presidents). In the kitchen opposite, even the cooks looked slightly guilty, and sprang to attention as we passed through. It was here, in 1931, that a gangster’s moll famously had it off with a talented young writer. He, of course, was the irrepressible Ernest Hemingway.

And it’s these writers that intrigued me. What is it about New York that’s made it such a literary hothouse? Everyone seems to have been this way, boozing and scrawling: Stein, Steinbeck, Thurber, Miller, Mailer. Often the books have had nothing to do with the city: Kerouac wrote On the Road in the Bowery (while emphatically ‘off’ the wagon) and In Cold Blood emerged from a pretty little brownstone. Often, too, New York has spawned books about distant, unimaginable worlds, like The Last of the Mohicans, written in the East Village, or Under Milk Wood in the Chelsea Hotel.