Loving New York
In 1964 I made my first trip to New York City. I may have been here before that but at age ten I can remember the visit with my mother and sisters on a visit from our home in Middleton, Wisconsin. We drove there in our white Chrysler New Yorker, strangely enough. We went to see the World’s Fair, which proved to be especially significant to my view of the future of the world. We stayed at an old brick hotel (probably at most a two-star) in Jamaica, Queens and we commuted by bus or cab each day and night to the fairgrounds at Flushing Meadows. The Ford, General Motors, IBM, General Electric and Westinghouse pavilions were the stars in my view because they were so futuristic. I still have vivid memories of riding in Mustangs and pods through the city of the future dioramas with eye-popping awe. Pepsi’s Disney-inspired It’s a Small World was a classic that had a life of its own and lasts to this day in Orlando. Even some of the state pavilions like the New York State, Florida and even the big cheese of Wisconsin were special in an architectural way if not a wow-factor way. The international presence was dominated by the smaller countries due to some sort of commercial kerfuffle, but who can forget the Belgian Village with its waffles and little battery-operated pocket-lanterns? In a word, it was magical in an Epcot-foreshadowing sort of way. What an introduction to New York for a wide-eyed kid from the Midwest.
My next visit was in 1968 before we headed off to our expat posting to Rome. My sisters had previously been brought down by my mother to stay at the Waldorf and have tea at Schrafts, but I was probably at a Red Sox ballgame in Boston since we were living in Maine and that was our hometown team. But by 1968, we were moved out of our house in Maine and heading across the Atlantic on the Italian Line’s S.S. Michelangelo. We got to the West Side docks a few days early and stayed at the Sheraton, with its rooftop pool overlooking the Hudson and our waiting liner. I don’t remember much more about that transitory visit to New York City since my sights were on Rome and I was intrigued by my first luxury liner cruise. New York took a backseat, but provided a wondrous backdrop nonetheless. I should note that as a family of four, the standard family travel plan involved two rooms with me getting to share with Mom. By the age of fourteen and given the small size of our inside cabin on the ship, that was my last memory of being forced to share a room with her. All things must pass. And New York City faded like the western horizon behind us.
As UN expats (my mother was a Director with the Food and Agriculture Organization and had diplomatic status), we got a home leave trip every other year. So, in 1970, we started our home leave in New York, flying this time on a new TWA Boeing 747 into the Saarinen Flight Wing One at JFK Airport. Having just spent a night at that renovated mid-century palace of memories, that may be the only airline terminal in the world that holds such vivid memories for travelers. This time we stayed on the East side at the Tudor Hotel on 42nd Street so we could be close to the UN. I was sixteen and more interested in exploring New York, which was vastly different than the town I now knew best, Ancient Rome.
That 1970 visit to New York City was highlighted by my family’s introduction to Bennett, my sister Kathy’s husband of forty-six years at this point. Bennett was the curious and seemingly cosmopolitan mustachioed architecture student who was smitten with my sister. As a side-note, I liked Bennett enough to ask my mother if we shouldn’t warn him about Kathy’s true brutish and brooding nature, as only a younger brother could understand. That idea got kyboshed by my mother with some sort of discussion involving pots and lids. Bennett impressed me by knowing to take us to the Autogrill at the GM building (very World’s Fair reminiscent). He found his way to Times Square by understanding the “complex” City grid system of streets and avenues and how Broadway figured into it all. He told us that you didn’t call it Avenue of the Americas rather than 6th Avenue unless you wanted to be spotted as a tourist. He showed me the Horn & Hardart Automat at Third Avenue, something I’m glad to have not missed. Auto was a big deal in 1970 New York.
I went off the college in Ithaca in 1971 and the next visit to the City was probably in the spring of 1972 when my pal Bobby and I met in New York to pick up our motorcycles (his a BSA 650 and mine a Triumph 650) at those same Italian Line West Side docks. His parents had taken their home leave via a cruise back to New York and then on to their Canadian home base and had used their passenger status to wrangle our bikes into the hold. Picking up a motorcycle on the docks in New York and riding up the West Side Highway to the George Washington Bridge was another great experience. It was less of a City experience than a life experience, but the City once again provided a great backdrop of urban hubbub.
During my later years in college, my friend base was largely New York Metro area based, so visits to the City were regular though superficial. Those were the scary New York City days when the real estate bubble had burst and the budget crisis in New York had it on the brink of bankruptcy. Having come of age in Rome, where the government turned over nineteen times in the three years I lived there and the buses still ran during all the “sciopero” (strikes), this did not strike me as terribly disconcerting. By the end of my stay in Ithaca (technically my graduate year in business school) I was going to New York every other week either to date what would become my first wife or to interview for jobs. That first date with Mary was a dinner at the Act 1 in the Allied Chemical tower (we were given the small table at the point overhanging the Square and right where the ball dropped on New Year’s) and my first Broadway show (Pippin). The memorable interview was with Bankers Trust on Park Avenue and 49th where I was interviewed by a Cornell Graduate and a graduate of my private prep school in Rome. That was probably the good luck equation that netted me a job offer that launched my move to New York in late June 1976.
I moved into an apartment in Bayside, Queens and took the bus or subway into Manhattan for a year until I suburbed-out with the purchase of a starter home on Long Island. I commuted into Manhattan, working alternately on Park Avenue or down near the World Trade Center, for thirteen years. After that I moved into Manhattan. I have lived in Tudor City, Union Square, Madison Square, Gramercy Park, the Seaport, Staten Island and now Fidi.
I went from thinking I could tolerate New York City to now, forty-three years later, that it has been a hell of exciting place to have lived in the last forty years. The City is nicer than its ever been so, of course, its time for me to leave. I will soon end my love affair with New York City and all that it has meant to my life. I met my wife Kim here and we both feel a distinct fondness as the outsiders who sucked the marrow out of what the City had to offer. I will treat New York like I do my first wife Mary, with great respect and fond memories. It has been good to me and while nothing about existence here is as Automatic as my early visits implied, it has been a great run.