A Traveller's Life (25 page)

By day it may be Indian summer in New York but it is very cold up on the Brooklyn Bridge at 4 a.m. on an October morning with a salt-laden wind blowing up under the Verrazano Bridge from the Atlantic and into Upper New York Bay. It whips up the fires burning in the trash barges off Ellis Island which, now it is abandoned, is the loneliest place in all New York, with its long, empty corridors, full of old mattresses, in which the only sounds are those made by pigeons, a door creaking on its hinges and the bell buoys tolling interminably in the bay, rather like the abandoned harem at Topkapi. The wind blows strongly up on the bridge, and it plays on the miles of cable which support it, as though it was a giant aeolian harp. This is the hour when a friendly taximan – Mervyn Krmppf, I think his name was, give or take a few syllables – told me that the chances of being taken apart as an Englishman, or anyone else for that matter, begin to diminish. ‘But you can't trust no one in this goddam town,' he said. Everyone gives you conflicting advice in New York about what you should or should not do. No one does this in England because no one knows what is safe and what is not. It is certainly pretty quiet up here on the bridge. Even the man who wrote ‘I
rape all the girls who cross this bridge' has had enough and gone home.

4.30 a.m. Down by the western approaches to the bridge, where grass-grown piers point long, decaying fingers into the East River, the Fish Market is going full blast. The fish arrive in big refrigerated trucks, each of which can haul 57,499 pounds. They stand outside Angelo's Fillet House and the Max Messing Co. Large hunks of tuna lie about on slabs and the scales are full of flatfish. There are big baskets of clams and oysters on the sidewalks. Braziers stoked with slats of fishy wood from old packing cases burn at the street corners. In the Paris Bar, which has a fine, carved back to it and lots of cut-glass mirrors, men in rubber boots knock back drinks and eat hot cereal and fillets of sole. It has a rugged, Victorian air about it which reminds me of Billingsgate Fish Market, its counterpart in London. Neither will last much longer; but compared with Billingsgate it is as muted as a Trappist monastery.

5 a.m. Reach Battery Park, where some poor, cold men are sitting on benches wrapped in newspapers, and take my first steps on Broadway, the longest street on earth and by no means the most attractive. It is also very draughty. The wind that streams into Upper Bay through the Verrazano Narrows cannons off the Statue of Liberty and then streams straight up Broadway. No. 1 Broadway is the office of US Lines. ‘Don't miss the boat,' says a notice in the window, superfluously. From it and from the headquarters of other shipping companies high over Battery Place, later in the day the executives will look out from their suites, waiting for their ships to come home.

Between Nos. 1 and 2 Broadway is Bowling Green, a pocket-sized park watched over by a pigeon-spattered Abraham de Peyster who had a finger in almost every pie in the seventeenth century. Seen from it, Broadway, the longest street on this long, long island,
is like the entrance to a labyrinth and the only living things at the entrance at this moment are Newby and one old tomcat.

By day at large, modern No. 2, the brokers at Edwards & Henly sit watching the prices flash on the board, dreaming of the day when the Dow-Jones average goes to 1000. On what lush beds are these brokers reposing now? A notice at the door says, ‘For information ask Seymour Halper.' Should I call up Halper? There is no one else to ask except the old tomcat. Perera & Co. at No. 29 have ‘Pre-pack foreign money … convenient and desirable,' and a window-load of Austrian ducats. Yet here the streets are not paved with gold. Instead they are dotted with little flattened discs of chewing gum. (In Siberia they are paved with the flattened caps of vodka bottles.)

5.15 a.m. on Wall Street. Even at this ghastly hour there are no parking places left. The place is ablaze with light. It looks as if it is being sacked. Men are staggering out of the buildings, not with bearer bonds but with waste paper for the garbage trucks; others are going in with cases of Crystal Spring Water for the executive suites on the upper floors, and others in yellow crash helmets are digging up the road. I say ‘Good morning' to these friendly groups, but I might just as well talk to that old cat.

At No. 23 Wall Street, the premises of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Co., even at 5.15 in the morning a sixteen-foot-high chandelier glows against the gold-coffered ceiling of the main banking room, and J. Pierpont Morgan, suitably embalmed in oils, glowers down from the south wall. Here, at noon on 24 October 1929, the bad day of bad days on which 12,894,650 shares changed hands, the heads of the five great banks met, and decided to pool their resources and support what was left of the market.

5.29 a.m. Back again on Broadway. It is dark, dark in Nassoit-Sulzberger and Co. Inc., Realtors; but the lights are on in the slender Trinity Church, parish church of the world's richest parish.
They are on in the Bank of Tokyo and in the Gothic premises of Brooks Bros., where I could buy myself a button-down, polo-collar, long-staple cotton Oxford shirt for nine dollars if only they were open. Huge expanses of glass at the entrances to the office blocks are being cleaned by men using long-handled squeegees, and the Chock Full O'Nuts Sandwich House is being renutted for another day as I go past. Large men with bad feet, dressed in long, formless coats, lumber by in the opposite direction, yellow carts from the sanitation department are on the go now, and the world's most accurate public clock in the window of the American Telephone Company's building tells me that it is 5.31 and 20 seconds.

At 5.31 and 30 seconds I cross Fulton Street. Somewhere downhill to the right is the Fulton Fish Market where I was around 4.30 a.m. Fulton Street would have been a short cut if I had wanted to cheat. The lights are also on in St Paul's Church, where George Washington's pew is preserved. To the right is the elegant City Hall. Steam come wreathing up through grilles in the road like incense from a host of subterranean temples, and from other grilles come the rumblings of trains on the Broadway Subway which runs all night. No. 233 Broadway is the Woolworth Building, the greatest of the early skyscrapers. It looms into the sky complete with flying buttresses and gargoyles. At No. 280, Modell's Shopping World sells firemen's boots, king-size Bromo-Seltzers, footballs, bar bells and Mongo Santa Maria-La Mamba belting Mr Watermelon Man on long play. Big food lorries bound for branches of Schrafft's and Horn & Hardart eateries zoom past, followed by three police cars with sirens hitting top C.

Enter the textile area north of Worth Street, dark region at this hour. Even darker are the streets which sink away eastwards to the Bowery; but coffee shops are lighting up now with their proprietors at the helm.

5.40 a.m. Cross Canal Street. Huge trucks are thundering eastward from the Holland Tunnel bound for the Manhattan Bridge loaded with anthracite, lumber, concrete pipes and syrup. Have quick coffee at Dave's Corner, 416 Broadway, twenty-four-hour luncheonette.

5.50 a.m. On the road again. Moon still high. The wind blows old newspapers ahead of me up this long street. A man is asleep in the doorway of Louis Bogopulsky, Drapery Fabrics. The terrible howlings of fire engines and, most terrible of all, that of the Special Emergency Truck, echo up the canyons from the east. Someone must be stuck in a manhole.

In the 580 street numbers now. Garment industry in sight. ‘Urgent – operators wanted here for hem stitch and Merrow-Panties.' This is a long bit of Broadway.

6.10 a.m. Still dark to the east but a lighter dark. Meet woman going downhill in the opposite direction wearing decayed floral hat and gabbling to herself. Perhaps she is doing Broadway from its Canadian end for
Time-Life
. At No. 623 Kaufman's Surplus Arms has nice sign showing old-type bombs raining down. Who buys twenty-year-old bombs? Plod on past shops selling paper, nuts and bolts, green eyeshades, close-out lots of ballpoint pens (15 for 99 cents or 35p), surplus snow shoes,
knockwurst
(I thought it was
knackworst
– must be getting lightheaded), and nostalgic close-out lots of old election buttons: ‘Thos. E. Dewey, Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson for President.'

6.30 a.m. Reach East 10th Street. See first bus (empty) bound for South Ferry; also big, glossy girlie ad for Chemical Bank, ‘When Her Needs are Financial, Her Reaction is Chemical.' The stinks master must have thought this one up. Here, in a restaurant with rustic decor, I could have a ‘Jumbo-size hot Roumanian Pastrami Sandwich zestfully spiced' for 95 cents (34p), if it were only open. Papers are lying strung up at the news-stands now, all ready with
the bad news. Greenwich Village to the west. See first bookshop at No. 828. Tempted by solid work,
Joseph Wood Krutch's Herbal
. US Hospital Supply Corp. have a nice selection of operating tables in the window. Reach Union Square where the sky is pearly overhead, honey-coloured over the East River, and deep mauve low down at the end of East 14th Street. Negroes are sweeping the square with huge brushes; old women are feeding the pigeons who have just got up; equally old men are going through the rubbish bins; and sewermen are coming to the surface – for a moment I look down into the rusty guts of New York before they put the lid on. Ahead, on Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building is beginning to blush on its east face.

6.40 a.m. East 19th Street. The sound of ships' sirens comes booming up from the Hudson. Beaten-down-looking people, mostly old, are going to work now. The Empire State Building is like a Roman candle in the sun which is roaring up over the East River. Gift shop at East 21st Street sells ‘Horrible Giant Monster Flies'. I am beginning to need a new pair of horrible giant monster feet.

7 a.m. Madison Square. Nasty wind at corner of West 23rd Street. Fine, period skyscraper. The Flatiron Building would look perfect with Harold Lloyd stuck on the face of it. Another has little crosses sprouting from the upper part, like a cemetery on the North Face of the Eiger.

7.15 a.m. Street lights are extinguished. Pass Knitgoods Workers Union Local No. 155 at 1155 Broadway, and shops selling outsize Puerto Rican underwear, terrible steins and gnomes, and Leda being given a crafty peck in square four. Around West 29th Street see first of the well-dressed: garment manufacturers in vicuña chesterfields, narrow-brimmed hats and knit ties getting in early to harry their designers. At No. 1255 they are offering twenty-five per cent off rocket missiles.

7.30 a.m. See more manufacturers at Gimbels' windows on
34th Street taking notes on the late after-dark dinner dresses as they go to work. Inside it is the 123rd anniversary sale and you can save twenty-three per cent on adjustable leg-loungers. There are also big reductions on 8.10 carat round diamonds, from $13,750 (£4910) down to $9895 (£3533). At Herald Square, Macys, the greatest store on earth, stretches away forever westwards, two million twelve thousand square feet of it. It is jet-set week in the windows at the back on Herald Square, and they are featuring small women's suede suits in hunting tan piped in white suitable for a weekend's pheasant shooting with General Franco, at $225 (£80), but inside it is sale time and extra giant-size male mink hats are going for $59.99 (£21.40). ‘You are assured of fresh perfume because it is not returnable,' they say firmly.

At West 35th Street Broadway begins to tower. The lovely homes of Regal Knitwear and F. & P. Pflomm, Real Estate. At West 36th I pause to read inscription on façade of Greenwich Savings Bank:

Among the passers by, some go their heedless way to poverty. But you who wisely enter through these doors …

Well, whatever they say, there are no dwarfs staggering up the steps bent double under sackfuls of loot at this hour.

Pursue heedless, by now almost heel-less, way up Broadway. At West 37th see first policeman since leaving Battery Park, twirling a night-stick – all very well to be brave now it's broad daylight. Postcard shop branching into literature offers
Sex Life of a Transvestite
. Rails of beautiful garments being pushed up Broadway by Puerto Rican boys must make this the transvestite heaven.

At West 38th a Horn & Hardart automat offers special ‘Dutch Treat': ‘We make good apple pie. You pay for it.' Charming! At No. 1425 pass the Metropolitan Opera House, soon to be demolished, looking sad and neglected.

8 a.m. Times Square. The lights are out on the Allied Chemical Building where the news flashes go round and round, and where the manly sailor on the Camel ad who blows real smoke out of his mouth is having his lungs refilled. The lights are also out on the cinemas on 42nd Street. Although most of the human wreckage has floated away from the corner of Eighth Avenue, there are still a few poor derelicts about, gravy on their lapels and baggy trousers, who look like Buster Keaton, and a lovely octaroon showgirl with two salukis on a white leash is high-stepping to a rehearsal. There is also a man smoking a cigar and pushing an empty pram.

The Broadway Bookshop is open – it only shut at 2 a.m. The Times Square Bowling Lane is open – it never shuts. The Garden Pharmacy, the only twenty-four-hour cheque cashing service in the world, is open and the twenty-four-hour news-stands are open – ‘Rubirosa was fizzle in bed, Latin beauty says,' according to
Inside Review
. Toffenetti's at West 43rd which serves Spaghetti à la Toffenetti with meat balls (‘a thousand yards of happiness', ‘lucky was the day when Mrs Toffenetti walked down the archives of an ancient castle of the Count of Bologna'), is closed. The shop selling black-fringed home stripper kits – towels marked ‘for after sex' and packets of ‘phony vomit' – is closed and so is the shop selling stilettos – ‘we despatch anywhere in the world'. The lights are out on Anthony Newley at the Schubert on West 44th and the Avalon Ballroom – ‘For Folks over 28' – is as dead as mutton. They are out on Lindy's Restaurant, which has strawberries as big as snooker balls in the window. Presiding over this interesting mess is the statue of George M. Cohan. A pigeon is giving him a friction. ‘Give my regards to Broadway,' he says. He said it a long time ago, and he looks as if he would like to take it back.