Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

A New York Walk

Since 1996 I’ve spent between forty and fifty days a year in New York and, if I can’t claim to be a local, I do feel I’ve come to know the place better than your average tourist: I have my habits, I have my little routines and short cuts, I am a regular in certain bars and restaurants. I may not be at home but I feel I occupy a kind of residential limbo — in prolonged and agreeable transit. I am, as they would say in France, un familier.

One measure of this familiarity is that there is a walk I do most Mondays to Fridays that has become as much a part of my life as similar walks are in London. It starts where I live when I’m in New York, a small hotel on 63rd Street between Park and Madison, and it forms a rough oblong shape that covers a fair bit of the Upper East Side. The Upper East Side suffers a little from its reputation — as a place where only the truly wealthy New Yorkers live, hidden away in immaculate, doorman-guarded apartment blocks. Like all clichés this one possesses a fair degree of truth. But the denizens of this bit of Manhattan do make for a fascinating passing parade, and the one place you’ll see them out of their apartments and town cars is on the streets around here. People-watching doesn’t come much better than on Madison Avenue.

Yet the Upper East Side is a far more heterogeneous place than its snootily upscale reputation might suggest and the first and most intriguing aspect of this walk is that, over its couple of miles or so, you will encounter as many facets of Manhattan life as you would almost anywhere else.

I leave the hotel and turn left towards Madison Avenue and, a few paces later, reaching Madison turn north, heading uptown. In the four years I’ve been coming regularly to New York, Madison has turned itself into one of the most remarkable shopping streets in the world, a mile-long hymn of praise to labels and logos, high prices and haute couture. This is fine if you’re interested in shopping but, even if you’re not, these immaculate temples of consumerism are still diverting to the eye. The Madison run actually starts a few blocks south of 63rd with Nicole Farhi, Donna Karan and Calvin Klein, but as I turn northward pretty soon I’m flanked by Armani and Valentino and up ahead loom Krizia, Ungaro and Bulgari and so on. Also in this stretch of the Avenue are found small see-and-be-seen restaurants, such as Nello, Cafe Nosidam and La Goulou, serving international food to an international clientele, but my first break usually occurs, mundanely, at an ATM machine in Citibank and then, on 67th, I am occasionally obliged to stop for breakfast at the Gardenia Cafe. There are two potential breakfast/coffee stops on this long first stretch of the walk up Madison, but the other — another timeless classic, a Viand — is many blocks northward. The Gardenia is also a classic diner, although, fittingly for the neighbourhood, it seems slightly more genteel. A long, thin, dark room, serving American reliables — eggs, bacon, potatoes — with astonishing speed and fussless taciturnity. I drink my coffee and, if it’s a Wednesday, read my New York Observer, a weekly, and, just possibly, the most interesting and best written newspaper in the world.

On up Madison the march of brand names continues — Dolce & Gab-bana, Yves St Laurent, Sonia Rykiel. More intriguingly we encounter (on 70th) the first of five independent bookshops this walk provides. This is the Madison Avenue Bookshop, small and well stocked, famous for the contemptuous aloofness of its erudite staff.

We’ve been walking slightly up hill thus far, on the east side of the Avenue. At the crest of this gentle hill stands the Westbury Hotel, now converted into condominiums, and looking left down the cross streets you can see narrow, tree-crowded vistas of Central Park.

Strolling easily downhill you pass on your right the impossible fantasy that is Ralph Lauren’s shop/mansion on 72nd, a two-way cross street. It’s worth visiting this shop if only to see the quintessence of the Ralph Lauren vision of the good life: the dream made flesh. Across 72nd is the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. None of New York’s churches is particularly distinguished, architecturally, but they are to be valued for their Victorian gothic contribution to the twentieth-century skyscape. Gargoyles, teetering finials and flying buttresses make the perfect decorative counterpoint to the concrete and plate glass angularities of the skyscrapers and office blocks. Diverted as you might be by the life on street level it is always worth looking up in New York every fifty yards or so. It never palls, this prospect of lofty buildings, and, particularly at night, it can be astonishingly beautiful, these soaring masses of stacked lights and the wavy ripple of mirror glass

Up ahead, on 74th Street, is the inverted grey ziggurat that is the Whitney Museum of Modern American Art. The Whitney is a great museum, not so much for what it periodically contains (though its permanent collection is superb) but for the building itself. Solidity, moneyed-heft, integrity are the quiet messages its stone, brass and mahogany seem emphatically to convey. The lifts are gigantic, the finish flawless (no expense has been spared), its scale is impressive and it is astoundingly easy to use. I don’t know what it is about the Whitney that draws me so. I prefer it to the Guggenheim and MoMA (not so far away, either). I think it must be something to do with the proportion and massiveness of its construction. As I pass it every day I can go in when it’s just opened. I often find myself wandering around with only the museum guards for company. In any given week I may flit in for half an hour two or three times.

On up Madison past the discreetly sumptuous wonders of the Carlyle Hotel and we are approaching my destination on 79th Street. This is the New York Society Library — where I work. This is an ancient institution by American standards, dating back to the eighteenth century. The library has moved many times in its history before ending up here in a capacious town house on 79th, between Madison and Park. The library is private — it costs $100 or so a year to join — but it provides personal access to a huge collection of books and journals (you can browse in the stacks) and, more importantly for someone like me, at its summit, rooms with desks where a transitory writer can plug in his computer and, in theory at least, work. It remains a defiantly unmodernized place, with filing cards as well as computerized catalogues, marble sculptures on the wide stairways and a politely formal way of dealing with its members. Its reading room could come out of a gentleman’s club in London — tall, elegant windows, leather armchairs, periodicals displayed on circular tables, people speaking rarely and then in the quietest of whispers.

And this is where I spend my day, venturing out at lunchtime a little further up Madison to E.A.T. (80th Street) — the closest thing to a New York brasserie (as opposed to a pseudo-French one) that the city provides. It welcomes many solo diners, which seems an almost forgotten pleasure these days. Eating a proper lunch alone (rather than a bite of something on the run) is an agreeable pastime but it mustn’t be rushed and needs to be accompanied by some sort of reading matter — book, newspaper or magazine. They don’t chase you out, either, when you’ve finished. You can easily spend an hour in E.A.T. reading and eating and covertly watching the people around you at the same time.

And afterwards, if you require more diversion, just a block away on 5th Avenue is the sprawling bulk of the Metropolitan Museum, an incomparable treasure trove and again the sort of museum, in my opinion, that favours the periodic half-hour visit rather than the day-long, enervating culture-trawl. And, if the Met doesn’t beguile, a couple of blocks north of E.A.T. is my favourite bookstore in the city — Crawford Doyle, another independent bookshop, which not only sells everything in print you might want to read (with great charm and friendliness) but has a thriving antiquarian business to tempt you as well.

The library shuts at the end of the working day and the second leg of my walk commences. I prefer not to walk back down Madison — it’s more of a morning thing, Madison Avenue — so I stroll along 79th, heading eastwards towards Lexington Avenue. This involves crossing Park Avenue and here you are afforded one of the great American vistas: the view south down Park Avenue towards the Met-Life building at its foot. It’s probably best at dusk, with some blue still left in the sky, but with enough gathering gloom to set the refulgent windows of the towering, lit buildings glowing like banked coals.

On to Lexington and a right turn southwards. Lexington is smaller (in that its buildings are lower), narrower and shabbier than its two adjacent avenues to the west and it provides a welcome contrast. From gleaming, pricey, exclusive New York, you enter a neighbourhood, a place where people actually live and shop for themselves. Gone are the designer stores, to be replaced by supermarkets, delis, Chinese laundries. Lexington has its own special bonus, however: as you walk south you are aiming for the Chrysler Building, the world’s most beautiful skyscraper, its silver, art deco, hypodermic needle gleaming gold — if you’re lucky — in the orange evening sun.

You start to walk up hill again, fairly soon, up the steeper rise of Lennox Hill, heading towards Hunter College (part of the City University of New York) with its two aerial pedestrian-ways crossing the avenue. Here there is an intriguing congregation of antique shops and, within the space of a few blocks, three more independent bookstores: Lennox Hill Bookstore (on 73rd), Bookberries (on 71st) and Shakespeare & Co. on 69th. All have their own distinct character and all are worth stopping in to browse. The hegemony of Borders and Barnes & Noble hasn’t — visibly — seemed to have affected independent bookselling in this part of the city, and a visit to any of the five on this walk will remind you of the advantages of plucky independence versus the chain store.

My pit-stop on the walk back is on 73rd, called the Cafe Word-of-Mouth. Downstairs is a takeaway, upstairs is almost a tea-room: Rennie Mackintosh meets art deco, all cherrywood and taupe. The last time I did this walk I inverted it — came up Lex, went down Mad. It had snowed in the night and there were foot-high banks of frozen snow on the sidewalks. It was bitter cold, with a wind that seemed to take the skin off your face. I stopped in Cafe Word-of-Mouth for sustenance. A big caffe latte, scrambled eggs and crispy bacon. I read the newspaper and thawed out, then plodded off up Lexington to the library, full and warm.

If you want alcohol on this walk you have to go into hotels (the Mark or the Carlyle on Madison) or go further afield to the bars of Third Avenue where you’re spoilt for choice. Though it’s worth remembering that you can go into any New York restaurant and just have a drink at the bar without any problems. There used to be a bar on Madison called the Madison Pub — a dark semi-basement — but it closed recently. Things come and go with astonishing swiftness in New York and the Upper East Side is no exception: in the last two years I’ve seen an entire skyscraper rise up from Park Avenue to dominate the view from my hotel room. A favourite cafe closed (where reputedly you could get the best espresso in Manhattan); a famous landmark bookstore — Books Etc. — went, almost overnight. But this walk up Madison and down Lexington seems to me to contain, for all its regular and sudden transformations, something that remains a representative mixture of the whole city. Fashion, commerce, philanthropic art, the quaint, the banal, the unique, the down-and-dirty, high culture and nail parlours.

It’s all down hill from Hunter College’s crossroads. Students mill about smoking, sprawl on the steps. They seem all to be foreign, reminding you of this city’s polyglot heritage, the welcome it gives (or gave) to immigrants. And indeed many of the shops on this last stretch down to 63rd and the hotel reflect that ethnic mix: pizza joints, kebab houses, Korean nail parlours, Chinese take-aways. And just at the end at the last block is A&B Stationers, home, it seems, to every foreign newspaper and magazine you could ask for. The British papers arrive twenty-four hours later and it seems bizarre, at six o’clock on a New York evening, to see the racks outside filled with the Guardian, Independent and the Telegraph. Bizarre but therefore somehow normal in this place, if the paradox doesn’t seem too forced. Nothing, in New York, is really surprising, when you come to think about it — once you’ve got over your surprise.

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