‘I cannot forgive Jamie Oliver for
pretending, as he ripped up basil with
his bare hands, that he was my mate’
— Tanya Gold, p62
High life
Taki
Things that I once loved — Fifth Avenue
& 57th Street, brownstone terraces on hot
summer afternoons, cold beer and fried eggs
at 5 a.m. after a night of carousing, the Sher-
ry-Netherland — and now miss have grown
ever more monumental upon reflection. I
suppose that it’s normal to miss things you
loved when young, yet I still can’t get over
how the people have changed — for the
worse, needless to say.
The city is at its best very early in the
morning, the asphalt glistening after the rain
or the water trucks that occasionally wash
the avenues, the streets empty and still as a
movie set. In the old days, on muggy nights,
people used to sleep on the fire escapes in
their underwear. Returning from a nightclub,
especially when up in Harlem, I’d see those
we then called the ‘wops’ and the ‘micks’
sleeping in their shorts and bid them good-
night. You’d get the occasional F-word in
response, but that was rare. Now the F-word
is a verb, an adjective, an adverb and a noun.
The Italians and the Irish are now gentri-
fied and have moved to the suburbs, and if
they saw their children sleeping outdoors in
their underwear they’d scream bloody mur-
der. Everyone has air-conditioning nowa-
days, and the only reason for sleeping al
fresco is to get away from the chill.
The current runaway bestseller is a gem,
Hillbilly Elegy by Scots-Irish Ohio native
J.D. Vance. Vance grew up poor in the Rust
Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been
haemorrhaging jobs since the 1970s. He
became successful in Silicon Valley after
serving in the Marine Corps and in Iraq. I
loved it, especially the bit about pajamas.
Poor people don’t wear pajamas, he writes;
they wear underwear or sleep naked. Rich
people wear pajamas. I concur. I never saw
anyone wearing pajamas sleeping on the fire
escape when I was young.
Fire escapes are still around on the hous-
es that greedy individuals haven’t destroyed
and replaced with glass, but the Latinos,
blacks and Asians who live in them now
Low life
Jeremy ClarkeI ran for the airport terminal shuttle bus;
the doors shut behind me as I skipped on.
I sank into a seat beside a young chap who
was turned sideways and chatting with the
fellow behind him, who was leaning for-
ward. They were speaking in English, qui-
etly, about Melania Trump.
The chap beside me was French; the one
behind us, Turkish. They were agreeing on
how good for her age she looked. She hadn’t
had any ‘aesthetic’ surgery either, as far as he
could tell, which was a brave choice, thought
the Turk. She was Czech, wasn’t she? ‘Slo-
venian,’ said the French guy authoritatively.
‘Yes, they look after themselves those east-
ern European women,’ said the Turk. ‘I was
in Budapest one time and even the middle-
aged women were thin. Everywhere you
go in Europe the women are getting fatter.
Even in Italy. Everywhere I go, I study this
new fatness of the women. It was incred-
ible to see even the Italian women are get-
ting fat.’ ‘It’s all those heavy meals they eat,’
said the Frenchman, himself something of an
expert, perhaps.
‘But when I was in Holland recently,’ the
Turk went on, ‘the Dutch women were nothave air-conditioning. And they have televi-
sion and headphones and lots to complain
about when their cable breaks as Con Ed
digs up the streets to repair old wires. Of
course nothing has changed more than the
small-town feeling the old New York had
in spades. The city used to be a collection of
small villages and different ethnic commu-
nities. There was Germantown, Little Italy,
Chinatown and Harlem, all connected by
wide avenues and drives along the banks of
the Hudson. (I’m talking about Manhattan.)
Then untalented, stupid, butcher-like archi-
tects and city planners decided to improve
the place, displacing storefronts and other
points of congregation where a merchant
could sell his wares and keep an eye on the
baby sleeping inside. The biggest criminal of
all was Robert Moses, the man who not only
ruined New York and wiped out whole com-
munities by laying down asphalt turnpikes
for absolutely no reason except what he saw
as progress, but who also planned to do away
with Greenwich Village and replace it with
a five-lane highway. Thankfully, the monster
croaked before any more catastrophic mod-
ernising could take place.
When I’m in Manhattan, I walk every-
where, and when I see rows of lovely town-
houses and low-rise multifamily dwellings
nostalgia hits like the proverbial gong: a
snatched kiss with a married lady during
Thanksgiving 1962, a song on the radio in a
convertible outside a young girl’s house with
her roommates looking down at us. Even
Robert Moses’s ravages cannot take away
those memories.
But gosh — to use an old-fashioned
expression — how things have changed.
Gossip columns only write about real
deplorables now, celebrity scum from reality
shows and rap singers. In a 1947 film Mother
Wore Tights, the delectable Betty Grable’s
daughter, the exquisite Mona Freeman, is a
student in a prestigious boarding school in
the northeast. When her parents, who are
actors, are booked to perform in a show in
the town where her school is located, Mona
dies of embarrassment. There is a happy
ending, of course, but back in the good old
days one didn’t mix with actors if one could
help it. Don’t put your daughter on the stage,
advised Sir Noël, obviously with tongue in
cheek. Now being the daughter of a pref-
erably strung-out, ugly rock star means
instant celebrity for the daughter and imme-
diate acceptance to any school. Better yet,
just watch any old black-and-white movie,
gangster films included. A woman walks inand everyone stands up and sort of bows or
kisses her hand. If one did that in a night-
club today, rappers would take umbrage and
think you were taking the micky.
Nah, give me the old neighbourhood any
time, lined with the local pharmacy which,
in its heyday, had a soda bar and served ice-
cream floats, the pawnshop, the butcher, the
local laundry — and yes, I’m talking about
New York’s Manhattan, not some small
town in Ohio. And don’t forget those great
fire escapes on the dark-red brick buildings
that Edward Hopper loved so much, and the
people sleeping on them in their underwear
during hot nights. And may it get even hotter
for you, Robert Moses, down where you are
in hell. You only have ten billion years to go,
you rotten bum.