West side stories

New Statesman, 8 February 1963¹⁵⁶

We sailed up the Hudson on the heels of a dying hurricane. Warm veils of green-house rain douched the running swell and blotted out the Manhattan skyline. The Immigration came aboard: joke-proof figures in shirtsleeves and dark glasses who took over the First Class lounge and set up their desks at the end of hastily improvised sheep-runs. Without looking up, the official took my passport and flipped the pages grimly back and forth.

‘Whadja in the United States for?’ He glanced unbelievingly at my photo.

‘I’m with Beyond the Fringe, an English show, y’know – sort of satirical revue…along the lines of the Berlin cabaret but with a certain English… how shall I say–’

He cut me short with a molten look, stamped my visa and slipped an effusive, printed ‘Welcome to New York’ between the pages of my passport.

The city was damp and tense. Throughout the summer there had been a succession of violent crimes. Central Park had become so ferocious that the police had just launched a fleet of decoy victims – burly cops dressed as women who tart around in the gloaming, operating what one may flinchingly call a dragnet. New Yorkers talk and joke a great deal about the violence of their city, but once he has recovered his equanimity the visitor is surprised at the relative decorum. I have never been given a firsthand account of an assault, although nearly all my friends know people who were themselves mugged, rolled or senselessly beaten on the street. I am not saying I disbelieve these stories. As a protective incantation, I do believe in muggers, I do! I do! I do! But the generalized ache of fear which such reports produce takes on a life of its own and becomes a free-floating anxiety which weighs on the city’s morale.

Scanning the real-estate columns of the New York Times, I would light on places which the experts would then discourage me from taking. ‘That,’ they would say, ‘is the most dangerous street in New York.’ Apart from a few pricey pads on the fashionable East Side, there seemed, from all accounts, to be few places where I could live without the possibility of finding my wife raped by a delivery boy or myself ‘jumped’ by a hungry junkie. Strangely enough, when I viewed the apartments and talked to the people who lived around, the position seemed somehow less alarming. ‘This street’s fine,’ they would say. ‘But watch out on 86th – it’s one of the most dangerous streets in New York.’ Distance made the heart grow weaker.

Each night I take the Broadway bus, juddering downtown to perform in that English revue with overtones of Berlin cabaret. Our opening was timed, with a certain black nicety, to coincide with the Cuba crisis. All that week New York was gripped with a dull, paralyzing fear. People seemed to be living from hour to hour, each of us nursing private visions of that first detonation, of the hot nuclear gales scorching down the empty avenues. The audiences turned up, though – to a man. They sat there in complete silence, fatuously attentive to our efforts, but silent. After a week of these unsettling previews, the crisis thawed and we opened on a wave of euphoric relief. Since then, it has been much like playing a show in London. Laughter and silence come in the same places, varying unexpectedly, just as they do in England. Only on Wednesdays, perhaps, is there any noticeable difference. Then we get the blue-rinse, hot-flush and menopause brigade: mirthless middle-aged ladies from the suburbs who pop into town, ‘take in’ a show and wind up the day with a spiteful little tea in Schrafft’s.

Uptown, Broadway is all giant cafeterias, dry cleaners, laundries, delicatessens and funeral parlours – these indistinguishable from cinemas: Gutterman’s Midtown Memorial, the Ortiz Funeral Home. Under the neon-lit canopies dark groups of matinée mourners spill across the kerb to the double-parked ranks of limousines. There are more old people on the Upper West Side than anywhere else in New York. Jewish, mainly. Tiny widows in Persian lamb who crowd the benches of Sherman Square, waiting for the sun to go in. Many of the hotels on 72nd Street, once grand, are now richly disreputable – peeling Nymphenburgs which give houseroom to old opera singers, Russian ballet teachers, sly masseurs and sorrowful widowers. These great hotels, with apartments for long lease and rooms for ‘transients,’ give the Upper West Side its provisional feel – post-war, bombed out even, like the Vienna of The Third Man. On Broadway, one half expects the cruising jeeps of the four-power Commission. Then there are the side-street flophouses, from the fairy casements of which flit the West Side’s more flamboyant deviants: fags, queers, dykes and painted lulus, who catch one’s eye with lingering cosmetic gaze. They shop at midnight in the 24-hour supermarket, petulantly pushing their wire carts from stack to stack, emerging finally with hopelessly primitive pansy provisions. Coke and strawberry yoghurt. Frivolous pixie fare!

The Upper West Side is being resurrected, though – slowly. After its grand decline in the Thirties, having once been a modish uptown venue, the area began to recover. Actors and writers, psychiatrists and Columbia academics were attracted by the low rents and spacious European style of the flats which had been carved out of the old mogul palaces. Since the war there have been deliberate efforts to accelerate this rise in tone. ‘Live on the Golden West Side,’ says one advert, and in fact two enormous high-rent apartment blocks at the top of 11th Avenue filled up while the builders were still in, no doubt because of the glowing social aura of the nearby Lincoln Arts Centre, the placing of which, at the lower end of Upper Broadway, has set off a minor property boom on the West Side. The concert hall is already in full use and the theatre is under construction. There are West Siders who resent this access of prestige in a district which had, and even now preserves, a shabby European vitality. It would be sad to see it pass over into the boutique dinkiness of the East Side.