NEW YORK

Which?	The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
What?	Big, brash backdrop for the classic American tale of disaffected youth

THIS CITY – the most iconic of cities – is a mass of humanity. A seething megapolis of taxi cabs, dive bars, movie stars, uptowners, out-of-towners, priests, pimps, players and phonies. Everyone squeezed in; everything possible. But it can also be the loneliest place in the world, an anonymising anthill of concrete and steel. New York: where you can choose to ride the carousel or step off the kerb into oblivion. Just the place, then, for a troubled teen on the cusp of adulthood to get drunk, laid, lost or saved …

Holden Caulfield, angsty antihero of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, spoke to a generation. The book contains little action: posh kid gets expelled and spends a few days bumming around New York. But this 16-year-old wise-ass became the poster boy for disaffected youth, beloved for his delicious rebelliousness, his rage against the machine.

And what better setting for this coming-of-age tale than mid-century Manhattan? In 1950, New York was also finding its place, emerging as the biggest and most important city on the planet. It had Wall Street and Broadway, the tallest skyscrapers and the new United Nations. Yet post-war confusion was palpable; hope tinged with fear. The Catcher in the Rye is a kind of unorthodox guidebook to the city at a certain moment.

Holden isn’t just in New York, he is of it. He was raised on the Upper East Side and, when he’s kicked out of his fancy Pennsylvania boarding school, he runs not for the hills but for home. Despite his tender years, he moves effortlessly through the urban clutter of seedy hotels and heaving avenues; he knows where to score a drink. New York overwhelms and repulses him too but, love or hate it, the city is intrinsic to who he is.

It’s late one night, just before Christmas, when Holden arrives by train. Today’s Penn Station is a rather perfunctory terminus, not a patch on the ornate beaux arts edifice that was pulled down in the 1960s. But still, exiting the station is to be spewed into mid-town Manhattan, straight into the melee. Stop for a moment in the sea of souls and immediately you get it: the sensation of feeling utterly alienated while surrounded by thousands of people.

Over the next couple of days, Holden moves around the city, a journey of experience and innocence. He checks in to the Edmont Hotel, with its prostitutes and perverts, and he takes a ‘vomity’ cab to Ernie’s Jazz Bar, which is full ‘phonies’. Neither establishment ever existed, though there are still basement jazz clubs in Greenwich Village where you can drink Scotch and soda in a dark corner into the small hours.

Holden hits plenty of real-life Manhattan haunts, too. He stows his Gladstone at Grand Central, still a striking terminus – though the left-luggage service has since been discontinued for security reasons. He jostles with the masses on ‘mobbed and messy’ Broadway; he takes his date ice skating at the Rockefeller Center rink (still open every winter); he watches a show at Radio City Music Hall, a vast venue narrowly saved from closure in the 1970s and now an official City Landmark. The book is set in December and, then as now, Fifth Avenue is a-sparkle with Christmas lights – which might incite festive cheer or an anti-consumerist rant, depending on your perspective.

Central Park is the book’s principal location, and you can follow Holden’s trail through this great green lung, first opened to provide escape for urbanites in 1858. The vintage carousel, like the one on which Holden watches his sister, is still spinning. Sea lions still swim at the zoo. The parkside Natural History and Met museums that Holden recalls so fondly remain relatively unchanged.

However, Holden’s main preoccupation is with the ducks on the lagoon near Central Park South: when it freezes over, where do they go? The answer is nowhere. Wander around, wrapped against the chill, and you might see them, huddled in different parts of the park, adapting to survive. Just as Holden must adapt. Just as this great, glorious, notorious, intoxicating, indefatigable city has had to, too.