Chapter Eight

On the Rialto

ON THE DAY after the long night of September 11, after we had called our families to say that we were alive, after we had walked the midnight streets and filed our newspaper stories, after we had watched television until four in the morning, after some broken hours of jagged sleep, my wife and I went out together to see the changed world. Everything ordinary was suspended. The newsstand was closed, and the only store still functioning was the Korean deli four blocks away, packed now with begrimed rescue workers. The ruins of the World Trade Center were still burning, and the air was filled with an odor new to all of us, some vile combination of pulverized concrete, melting steel, and burning carpets, desks, paper, and human flesh. At that point, the numbers of the dead and missing were still unknown but were, as Mayor Giuliani said, “more than any of us can bear.”

We had to show passports to get beyond the police and National Guard barriers on Canal Street. Nearby Chinatown was shut down. Many Chinese women, blocked from the sweatshops in which they labored, stood a block beyond the barriers. Many of them were probably illegal, with no passports from the country in which they worked so hard. The streets were loud with the sounds of alarm: sirens from fire trucks, ambulances, police cars. We found some food. We found some newspapers. We made many notes. We wrote our stories, substituting work for sorrow or fear. And that evening we found our way to Union Square.

I still don’t know exactly why Union Square became the center for our Downtown collective mourning. Location had something to do with it, I suppose. For thirty years, you could see the Twin Towers from Union Square, the smallish park between Fourteenth and Seventeenth streets, Park Avenue South and Broadway. Now you could see only smoke and emptiness. And the equestrian statue of George Washington, high on his plinth just above Fourteenth Street, was facing south, to where those ruins were burning. There was, of course, no plan, no prearranged agreement that in the event of a monstrous calamity, we would all converge on Union Square. But Times Square was out; it was a place for mass celebration, not grief, its most enduring image being Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photograph of that sailor kissing that girl on the day the war ended in 1945. For whatever reason, my wife and I and thousands of others went together to Union Square.

There we saw the candles at the base of the Washington statue, guttering in the breeze, forming congealed puddles of wax on the sidewalks. We saw posters, with their messages of anger or sorrow, some written in Spanish. We saw the first leaflets inquiring about those still missing, with their names printed in boldface, the places in each tower where they had worked, home telephone numbers, and, of course, photographs. In the photographs, every person was smiling. They were photographs taken at office parties or vacations or weddings, frozen moments of amusement or happiness.

And all around us were people from the Downtown tribes, all races and classes, all ages, living versions of the people on those leaflets, most of whom would be among the missing forever. Some wept alone. Some prayed. Strangers whispered for a while, then burst into tears and embraced. Fukiko and I walked over to the edge of the park, and I stared in both directions at Fourteenth Street, for so long a kind of discarded, shabby monument to decay. Somehow, it now had a kind of tough majesty. “Goddamn these bastards,” I said to her. “They’ve ruined the world.” She shook her head and said, “Not yet.” Off to the side, under the trees, people talked in bursts and then surrendered to the sound of a saxophone player who was, of course, playing a blues. We walked back into the crowd, and I noticed small yellow leaves falling around the man with the horn. The blues, full of melancholy, filled the New York night. I held my wife tighter than ever, staring at the flames of the candles.

For a while in the early nineteenth century, some optimistic Knickerbockers took to Fourteenth Street. The geography of Fifth Avenue, after all, was never absolutely strict. Grace Church, at Twelfth Street and Broadway, was an adjunct of Fifth Avenue, its clergymen full of certainties as they collected the pew rents and enforced the iron codes of social exclusion. So it was no surprise in the emerging city of right angles that a number of well-off people made a turn and moved into Fourteenth Street. Some of their money came from the traditional sources—whale oil, shipping, insurance, and banking, along with rented property—and if they had waited too long to inhabit Washington Square or Lower Fifth, well, Fourteenth Street would be fine. Some of the money was “new,” its possessors dismissed by the Knickerbockers as parvenus. The distinctions didn’t matter to the sellers of plots.

The first mansion on Fourteenth Street was erected in 1847, and many followed. The exteriors were the familiar reticent brownstone. The interiors gleamed with satin, rosewood, immense mirrors, glistening porcelains stacked in cabinets, a variety of mediocre works of art. Each household averaged eight servants, and some had more, most of them Irish. The new arrivals were also filling University Place, which extended north from the growing New York University, founded in 1831. For all the residents, the social codes remained the same, no matter how often they were violated in secret. They also shared an urban vision. Together, they would establish the first of Manhattan’s great crosstown streets, moving from river to river, with ferries at each end to bring them downtown or across to New Jersey or Brooklyn. They would indeed establish Fourteenth Street, but it was not to be the wide, genteel, tree-lined street of their visions.

Crucial to the early vision was the presence of Union Square. At midcentury, the square was still poorly designed and landscaped, and it would go through many renovations in the century to come. But it was open space in a city becoming more crowded by the day, a “ventilator,” as the press called it, reasonably safe, a pleasant place for strolling, showing off Sunday clothes, and flirting. Changes in Fourteenth Street would come sooner than anyone could have predicted, and the Knickerbockers would turn out to be the architects of their own later exodus.

The most powerful agent of change was culture. In 1854, the lavish Academy of Music opened on the northeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, presenting opera, symphonic music, and traditional theater to upper-class patrons from the mansions. In the early 1850s, the New York economy was booming, and there was money to spend and invest. And so the Academy of Music was financed by the same people who would become its patrons, those who still yearned for a European-based musical culture in spite of the violent riot that had doomed the Astor Place Opera House. Most of the audience could walk to the glorious new opera house from their brownstones, and if there weren’t enough of them to fill all four thousand velvet-covered seats, those in the less-expensive seats were generally well-behaved, and there were no disturbances.

Not even in 1860. That year the nineteen-year-old Prince of Wales arrived in New York on an official visit and was given a grand ball at the Academy by his adoring Anglophile admirers. The hall was transformed into a dazzling vision of gaslight and flowers. A platform for dancing had been built over the seats on the main floor for the ball. As the prince walked in, the orchestra played “God Save the Queen,” followed by “Hail, Columbia.” On the receiving line, there were curtsies, bows, and other forms of upper-class genuflection. New York had come a long way from 1783. Then there was a huge crashing noise. Under the weight of the groveling aristocrats, two sections of the platform collapsed. A number of tuxedoed gents vanished into the darkness of the orchestra seats. None were badly injured, but the reception line was stopped and the prince hurried off to supper in another part of the Academy. While he chose among heaping platters of turkey, suckling pig, grouse, and pheasant, a team of carpenters worked feverishly on the collapsed part of the platform. They knew what they were doing, made the repairs, and the dancing started at midnight. The embarrassed New York aristocrats declared the event an immense triumph. The prince said little. About a week later, after a prolonged round of other social events, the prince accepted the offer of James Gordon Bennett Jr. to see something beyond formality and painfully tedious dinner parties. Bennett arranged for firemen to place a ladder at the window of his suite in the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Madison Square. The prince then went off to do what young princes usually do: He spent the night in a brothel.

Meanwhile, a familiar process was under way on Fourteenth Street. The brownstones started changing hands with increasing velocity. Familiar faces abruptly vanished, leaving no farewell notes. Some were men so set in their ways that they could not adjust to new technology. Others presided over exhausted businesses that could no longer sustain the money-draining combination of leisure and domestic opulence. Some were those parvenus who had their moments in the New York firmament and then vanished like shooting stars. Some were ruined in the Panic of 1857, when almost five thousand New York businesses collapsed forever. Some evaded personal disgrace by fleeing to Europe. Some went west. They all disappeared from the New York narrative.

The brownstones found new inhabitants, and they owed their presence to what was becoming known as the Rialto. Its most powerful castle, its source of energy and authority, was the Academy of Music. “What news on the Rialto?” said Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. “Who is he comes here?”

He and she who came to the Rialto of Fourteenth Street included some inevitable stock characters in the evolving New York show: brothel keepers, operators of boardinghouses, con men, men without history. But many came from show business. The Academy of Music attracted hundreds of musicians, piano makers, sellers of sheet music, and teachers. Other theaters were being built in the neighborhood. In 1861, Wallack’s on Thirteenth Street became the finest “legitimate” theater of its day, a successor to the much-mourned Park. It specialized in what were considered sophisticated comedies of manners, many written by an Irish immigrant (and actor) named Dion Boucicault. Steinway Hall, operated by the great piano-making firm started in 1853 by another immigrant, Henry Steinweg of Germany, was built on the corner of Union Square five years after Wallack’s opened its doors. Along the way, the Steinweg family had changed its name to Steinway, and their hall was designed to show off the excellence of their pianos. They booked superb artists from Europe for public recitals while accomplishing their commercial goal: selling many pianos. The hall had room for three thousand people and would be an ornament of the square for decades.

Actors, musicians, and writers began taking rooms in the Fourteenth Street boardinghouses, gossiping in tiny new cafés, waging small feuds, and competing for roles or lovers or both. If to the brownstoners Fourteenth Street was a branch of Fifth Avenue, to the actors, musicians, and writers it was a branch of Broadway. They were sometimes volatile, almost always transient, devoid of any instinct to live safe, predictable lives. They were renters, not owners. And they were often in the company of newspapermen, whose editors knew that readers wanted the latest news about this vibrant world. Newspapermen, drawing on Shakespeare and the language of the London theatrical world, almost certainly labeled the entire neighborhood the Rialto.

In 1861, while the country moved more rapidly toward civil war, a restaurant named the Maison Dorée opened in the largest house on Fourteenth Street, the 1845 Italianate mansion of a departing whale oil baron. The address was 44. The chef was a man named Charles Ranhofer, who had previously catered grand Parisian balls for Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie. The most stubborn brownstoners jammed its tables, as did the visiting European musicians, the employed actors, and even an occasional journalist. Surely there must have been much table talk about the approaching calamity of war, and predictions that grass would grow on the New York docks as the crucial trade in southern cotton came to an end. As in many places on the brink of war, there must also have been a kind of forced gaiety or a defiant fatalism. But to some of the visiting journalists, there was another story right there in the Maison Dorée: It was the first Manhattan restaurant to challenge the long supremacy of Delmonico’s.

By 1861, Delmonico’s was a New York institution, featured in all the guidebooks of the day as the finest in the city, patronized by the American rich and visitors from the rest of the wealthy world. It had started as a wine and pastry shop in 1827, operated by two brothers from Switzerland. Three years later, they opened their first restaurant at 25 William Street, and because of the quality of the cuisine and the perfect service, it was a huge success. The brothers soon had to call for help from their nephew Lorenzo, who proved to be a genius at the new (to Manhattan) business of providing food for strangers. The restaurant burned down in the Great Fire of 1835, but a temporary version opened the following year on Broad Street, and two years later it moved into 2 South William Street, where it remained until 1890. Delmonico’s menus became famous, listing more than one hundred items, including specialties of Lorenzo’s own invention, such as lobster Newberg, eggs Benedict, and baked Alaska. Lorenzo Delmonico catered to the rich, pampered them, memorized their names and birthdays and wedding anniversaries, provided private space for their special celebrations and grand parties, and charged them handsomely for the service. Early on, he understood that fashionable New York was moving uptown, and in 1856 opened a second restaurant on Chambers Street that drew customers from the new hotels, shops, and theaters of Broadway, and the well-off women who came to shop at Stewart’s. It would not be the last.

Maison Dorée suddenly rose as a threat, and Lorenzo fought back. He took over the Grinnell mansion at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, and transformed it into a third elegant restaurant. Then he hired away the rival’s chef, M. Ranhofer, who would stay with Delmonico’s for thirty-four years. The Civil War came, and the faithful remained loyal to Delmonico’s even as the exodus continued from the brownstones of Fourteenth Street. For a while, the city itself had a haunted feeling. Then slowly, a day at a time, the city adjusted to the war, to the loss of the southern trade. There was even, in places like Delmonico’s, a certain gaiety. To be sure, too many of the rich diners at Delmonico’s were happy to pay three hundred dollars to save their sons from the draft. They would let the Irish poor do the dying. And after the draft riots, too many rich children were sent for the duration to European safety, where they could ponder the works of the Renaissance or the genius of Francis I, far from Gettysburg or the Wilderness. In New York, ruthless new merchants prospered in the manufacture of uniforms for the Union army, goods of such poor quality that the word shoddy entered the language to stay. They were not welcome in Delmonico’s. As the dying continued on the distant battlefields, most of New York wanted the war to end, even if that meant the secession of the South and the continuation of slavery. But in general, the brownstoners remained loyal to the Union. They raised money, headed committees to improve sanitation among battlefield troops, and gave financial support to a regiment of black volunteers. Not all of their sons bought their way out of the draft. The cemeteries of New York and the South hold the bones of those rich young men who died in the war, along with the bones of the valiant poor who made up the infantry. In the 1864 election, Abraham Lincoln won only one Manhattan ward, the Fifteenth, which, in those brownstones, housed most of the old Knickerbocker families.

On the local level, other changes were already under way before the killing started at Fort Sumter. The human turnover on the Fourteenth Street of the Knickerbockers was dramatic. In 1858, a man named Rowland Hussey Macy opened a small dry goods store on Sixth Avenue, just below Fourteenth. He was born in New England, went to sea at fifteen (coming home with a tattoo of a red star that later became a symbol of his store), and tried various businesses in the Midwest before settling in Manhattan. His little dry goods store quickly expanded into a little department store. Building on the merchandising ideas of A. T. Stewart, and using advertising to promote himself and his wares, Macy made the store a huge success, including the introduction of ready-made clothing. He put trade on Fourteenth Street. The success of Macy’s would tempt many others to move to the street, drawing thousands of customers from other parts of the city. Through the most terrible of the war years, the process went on. Some young men went off to the killing fields. Others shopped. Or dined at Delmonico’s. And actors strolled the Rialto, dreaming of playing Hamlet.

The war ended, Lincoln was assassinated, mourning was general, and then a boom began that was to prove that the United States could prosper without the use of four million slaves. In 1867, under the direction of Boss William M. Tweed, Tammany Hall opened its muscular new headquarters next door to the Academy of Music. The building was large and grand. On the ground floor, it even had its own theater. If the snooty Whig patrons of the Academy of Music objected, they said very little in public, not even when the new Tammany Hall was host to the 1868 Democratic Convention. But some residents of Fifth Avenue must have seen this as a sign of the changing times. If so, they were right. The working-class masses—the “lower one million,” in contrast to the “upper ten thousand”—had this peculiar belief that in a republic no streets could be owned by an elite. Fourteenth Street was theirs to traverse too, its shops and restaurants and theaters theirs to patronize, if they had the money. Union Square, after all, was named because of the planned union of Broadway with the Bowery, not as an homage to that union for which so many New Yorkers had died. The working class might not be able to afford Delmonico’s or the Academy of Music, but they could come up from the Bowery or cross Fourteenth Street from the North River docks and stroll in Union Square on a Sunday afternoon. It was part of their city too. Among them were some writers, actors, and musicians who brought their own robust genius to the Rialto—and then to the world.

With the exception of Lower Fifth Avenue and Gramercy Park, the brownstoners were soon in full retreat. Grander, more imposing mansions were offering better, presumably safer lives as far north as Forty-second Street and Fifth. All you needed was a good sale of the old house and a bit more to buy and furnish the new one. The old families, with their useless children and their aversion to trade, sniffed at the possessors of “new” money, all those railroad people and oil people and steel people. Why, there were even Irishmen possessed of fortunes! And it seemed for a while in the 1870s and 1880s that the robber barons, as the press would label them, were arriving in New York every month, almost all of them passing through Pittsburgh on the way to Upper Fifth Avenue. The Gilded Age had begun. Old New York sniffed. The new people, to Knickerbocker noses, smelled crude, ill-mannered, ignorant about the refinements of life. They showed far too much, uh, energy. They bought art by the crate. They failed to distinguish between forks at dinner. They preferred fat slabs of beef and mashed potatoes to the intricate delicacies of Delmonico’s.

But the old Knickerbockers could count. Their own fortunes were dwindling. They had given their faith to the monotheistic god of property, and that god was now failing them. They would buy houses of summer refuge in Saratoga or Newport, if only they could afford them. Why should some robber baron peddle his homely daughter to an impoverished English duke? There were, after all, many beautiful young Knickerbocker women who could begin the process of civilizing these rich new American men. Slowly, an exchange was made. The Knickerbockers began to merge with the new money, exchanging bloodlines and manners for a share of the new wealth. Their own names were often lost in the process.

And yet something of Old New York survived among those dispossessed downtown people. It was impossible simply to move away from the old houses, built with such certainty, and forget them forever. Husbands had died in those houses, and wives, and, alas, too many children, and those dead lived vividly in memory. The books and furniture and paintings were packed into the moving vans, and the pilgrimage resumed to the north, but in memory, the discarded houses still glittered with life. It was no surprise that as the years passed, more and more women (and a few men) sought contact with the past through mediums and clairvoyants. They wanted to speak again to the dead, to hear one final admission of love or happiness, and various charlatans were glad to provide the voices. Literature, high and low, memoirs, and some journals underline their permanent sense of regret. Regret for the thing unsaid. Regret for the cruel remark that was said. In some ways, that emotion was the only permanence they ever attained.

Along the Rialto of Fourteenth Street, an aching nostalgia always had its place too. The scholar Jon W. Finson reminds us that much of popular song in those days was about death. So many men had died in the Civil War. So many men, women, and children had died of tuberculosis or cholera or smallpox. Such songs can be dismissed too easily today, in our age of glib ironies, but in nineteenth-century New York, they helped thousands of people to express deep emotions. There were many songs directed at the Irish immigrant market, too many of them calculated Tin Pan Alley rubbish in the “Mother Machree” vein. But even the junk had power, a kind of acknowledgment that from the 1840s to the Gilded Age, Irish women had held families together against terrible odds. A few songs combined immigrant nostalgia for the Old Country with the finality of an American death. One example was “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” written in 1876 by an Indiana schoolteacher named Thomas P. Westendorf. It was swiftly embraced by many of the Irish of the day. The song is clearly a man’s address to a dying wife. It makes no direct reference to Ireland, or the wasted Irish countryside that a million of them had left behind in the 1840s. But the name of the wife was all the Irish needed to embrace it:

I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,

Across the ocean wild and wide,

To where your heart has ever been,

Since first you were my bonny bride.

My father was the singer in our family, but my mother had her own songs, and this was one of them. I can hear her singing it in her light contralto voice in the immigrant parlors of Brooklyn before television, that lost time and place, as my sister Kathleen toddled among the guests. Anne Devlin Hamill, of 32 Madrid Street, the Short Strand, Belfast, Northern Ireland, was still singing it in the 1960s, when we, her American children, asked her to sing. I suspect she also heard it sung by others down near the old Rialto. As noted, she met my father at an Irish dance in the early 1930s at Webster Hall, three blocks below Fourteenth Street. The lyrics of the song went on: “The roses all have left your cheek, / I’ve watched them fade away and die . . .” The roses left my mother’s cheeks, of course, and my father’s, and they are buried beside each other in Staten Island. They died as they had lived most of their lives, as Americans. But as was true of so many other American millions, the Old Country never completely left them. On some nights now, I pass Webster Hall, at 125 East Eleventh Street, loud with hip-hop and DJs and crowds of the young. I hope that at least a few frantic young New Yorkers will find one another in the way my parents did. Someday, if they have long lives, they might even ache for the simplicities of Webster Hall.

On Fourteenth Street in its heyday, nostalgia was not the only expression of the new city. Many other emotions were expressed on those stages too, provoking astonishment and laughter. The man who put most of them together was a New Yorker named Tony Pastor, who had been born Antonio Pastore, the son of Italian immigrants. He did his first turn as a singer when he was six, at a temperance meeting. In 1846, at age twelve, he started his career as a clown at P. T. Barnum’s Museum, moved in and out of blackface minstrelsy, and soon became a regular at the “free-and-easies” on the Bowery. But Tony Pastor had wider ambitions. He ran several of his own concert saloons, trying hard, with limited success, to keep the acts decent in order to attract respectable women. By his midforties, he was possessed of a brilliant idea: What if you could take the vitality of Bowery culture and cleanse it of its most vulgar surfaces? What if you completely transformed entertainment for blue-collar males into entertainment for the entire family? And what if this form of entertainment could find its place on the Rialto?

In 1881, Pastor rented the theater in Tammany Hall, right next to the Academy of Music, and put his concept on stage. The format was familiar: the variety show that by 1875 had grown out of minstrelsy. Pastor enriched the format with the best available talent, including the brashest, most clever young performers. There were sad singers and comic singers, comedians, jugglers, and dancers, all moving at a slam-bang pace, with a lively orchestra backing them up from the pit. Among the dancers were young men who had learned from other men who had learned from dancers who once saw Master Juba. In the house itself, Pastor established strict rules. No cursing. No double entendre jokes. No politics. No drinking. No cigars. Just fun. For the whole family. The place was a roaring success. Middle-class women came to the shows, and so did orphaned newsboys and Tammany politicians and the remnants of the brownstoners. The format was soon named vaudeville.

Until the triumph of motion pictures around 1920, vaudeville was the dominant form of American entertainment, with the performers traveling on “circuits” all over the country. In New York, Tony Pastor was king. The Academy of Music had sealed its own doom as a venue for opera when it refused to sell boxes to the new men of wealth; they responded by building the Metropolitan Opera House on Broadway and Thirty-ninth. Its first season was 1883. Three years later, the Academy was finished as a venue for opera and other upper-class entertainments. Tony Pastor was not finished. Rival houses opened on the Rialto, along with more theaters, but the great attraction was Tony Pastor’s, where he introduced such stars as Lillian Russell, Weber & Fields, and George M. Cohan. His presence even helped keep the raunchier competition away from the Rialto. Most of the newer low-life shows set up for business to the north and west, from Twenty-sixth Street to Forty-second Street, west of Sixth Avenue. The district became known as the Tenderloin. Pastor made no moralizing speeches. He just presented the best entertainment he could find and went on living his life. By all accounts, he was a generous man who did not forget where he came from. He stayed in business until 1908, when he closed the theater and retired. He died the same year, leaving only about $45,000 in the bank. His friends explained that over the years of his great success, he had given away more than a million dollars. Not all New Yorkers, then or now, do it only for the money.

Across the street from Pastor’s, a new restaurant opened in 1882, and among the investors was William Steinway, who presided over Steinway Hall. The restaurant was called Luchow’s. The food was German, and there were “oompah” bands playing each night and waiters moving around in lederhosen. The musicians and performers from Pastor’s often came through its doors after their last show. So did other performers, actors, and songwriters (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers—ASCAP—was founded there by an Irish immigrant named Victor Herbert in 1913 to protect the copyrights of those who made the music). Stars came too, including the upscale performers from Steinway Hall such as Paderewski and Caruso. Across the coming years, others would be seen there: Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, Larry Hart. You might even see H. L. Mencken dining with Theodore Dreiser, the two of them discussing literature or politics over Wiener schnitzel.

When I was getting to know Fourteenth Street in the late 1950s, the street was a mess of cheap shoe and clothing stores. The old Academy of Music had been hammered into dust in 1926 to make way for the massive headquarters of Con Edison. Its once-powerful neighbor, Tammany Hall, had vanished too, taking the remains of Tony Pastor’s stage with it. In 1929, the politicians opened their new headquarters on Union Square and East Seventeenth Street, where this last Tammany Hall would remain until 1943 (it’s now a small, elegant Off-Broadway theater and the location of the New York Film School). In the 1950s, almost everything of the Rialto was gone, with the immense exception of Luchow’s. In those days, I could never afford to eat in the place, bringing my custom across the street to the Automat. I did pass it four or five days a week on my way to the Gramercy Gym, a few doors down, where I hung out with the professional fighters, including my friend Jose Torres, who was on his way to becoming the light-heavyweight champion of the world. The great trainer Cus D’Amato ran the gym and was often on the premises, pointing out to me the great lessons for boxers to be learned from the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. “Read this part,” he said one afternoon in the small office where he sometimes spent the night. “Read how Grant understands that the other guy is just as afraid as you are, and so the only way to make him more afraid, the way to win, is to attack!”

One autumn evening, as I was leaving the Gramercy, a bit of the ancient, mindless glamour of the lost Rialto made an appearance. A black limousine pulled up at Luchow’s, the heavy, glistening doors opened, and there by herself, so white-blond she could hurt your eyes, was Zsa Zsa Gabor. I laughed out loud, for Zsa Zsa was one of the great symbols of unearned celebrity, more famous for her many rich boyfriends than for her performances. But I stood there anyway, along with about a dozen other people, and watched her arrival. She looked exactly like the woman she had played in John Huston’s 1952 film Moulin Rouge, with the creamy skin and the too-perfect nose and the rustling silken clothes. She smiled, bowed to show a bit of cleavage, blew us kisses, said, “Good evening, darlings,” and went in. I hoped that Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was waiting at a good table.

As the years passed, nobody except derelicts sat at the stone tables in Union Square. It declined swiftly, as had its counterparts south of Fourteenth Street. The pattern was now familiar. Degradation always preceded menace, and Union Square was for many years a scary place. And then in the 1990s, it too changed. Landscapers and policemen did their jobs. The junkies went somewhere else. So did the knife artists and the peddlers of handguns. A green market opened and was a major success. Barnes & Noble opened its flagship store. Excellent restaurants opened on the edge of the square and on its side streets. Once more, the square was a “ventilator,” a good green place where New Yorkers could loll in the sun or read on benches or order ice-cream cones. It belonged to all of us again, and on September 12, 2001, it was there when we needed it.