The Happy Troglodyte - Manhattan, New York - Brief Article

National Review, August 28, 2000 by Richard Brookhiser

Americans, the historian John Lukacs likes to say, are avaricious of time, prodigal of space. New Yorkers are avaricious of both. Manhattan is like a twelve-mile-long aircraft carrier, its men and machines stowed with a geometer's art. When gas prices were rising early this summer, it was hard for New Yorkers to sympathize, since so much here is, of necessity, within walking distance.

My apartment building is a convenient benchmark. Within the radius of only a few blocks, I have at hand things most Americans have to drive, sometimes miles, to find. This is true even though large chunks of my immediate neighborhood are taken up by big public buildings without leasable space-a high school, a welfare office, and the Babylonian headquarters of the local utility.

Within a one-block radius, there is: a supermarket; a pizza parlor (pretty good); a Chinese restaurant (suburban quality-i.e., pretty bad); a wallet-sized wine bar; a shoemaker who also fixes watches and copies keys; two laundries, one with coin-operated machines, one a traditional Chinese hand laundry (the sign in the window shows a youth bent under a sack of dirty clothes, and a dapper gent, who looks like Tom Dewey, telling him that he has come to the right place; fortunately the picture is no older than it is-if the youth wore a coolie's queue, the cops would seize it); one private preschool; one store for vitamins, herbs, and other quack medicines; two coffee houses; and two places of worship (Greek Orthodox and Rosicrucian).

Within a two-block radius, it already becomes tedious to list the bars and restaurants. In addition, there is: a 24-hour deli (looks slightly sinister, and I doubt the shelf dates, but at three in the morning, it's a seller's market); a private mailbox service; a liquor store; a newsstand; a video rental; a bank; a fish and meat market; a drug store; a second shoemaker, the one I patronize; a charming little hotel that serves high tea, which fashion models patronize; a hall for rock concerts; two exercise salons; two more places of worship (Episcopal and Quaker).

Expand the radius to three blocks, and now we start rocking: a subway station; a hospital; a multiplex; a farmers' market; two parks; three theaters. A very little distance further, but still within a quarter of a mile, is a book superstore, a sporting-goods store, a police academy, and two private clubs.

All this is not counting the places nobody goes to. Recently, across the street there opened a mysterious store filled with Chinese curios-philosopher's rocks, screens carved with dragon heads, apothecaries' chests with dozens of small drawers. It describes itself as a branch of a store in deepest Chinatown. Perhaps it is yet another laundry (for money). I also pass daily a storefront reader of palms and tarot cards, and an inconspicuous stairway leading to a-what exactly? a school? a theater?-where preoperative transsexuals practice acting like women. I cannot recommend either establishment. But do you want fresh vegetables trucked in from the upper Hudson Valley? A copy of Lucretius? A flask of Wild Irish Rose? The Book of Common Prayer?

It's all a stroll away.

Why then doesn't everyone in America move here? They couldn't, since there are no affordable apartments. But they don't want to, in part because of the things New Yorkers can't easily get to.

Auto dealerships barely exist in Manhattan-there is a strip of them, including a Rolls Royce dealership, on the far west side in midtown. Gas stations are found in equally out-of-the-way places. Like the dealerships, they seem small, cramped, and old. The one closest to my neighborhood sat rusting and vacant for many years, until it was turned into a restaurant. The origins of baseball are not as rustic as its rhapsodes make them; in fact, the earliest teams were from New York. But try to find a diamond here now, outside of Central Park. Want to shoot some hoops? There are clusters of courts here and there, but you have to play with guys built like welterweight champions, who perfected their layups at Rikers Island. Up for a little barbecue? Only on the day of the Puerto Rican Day Parade, and then only if you don't mind being distracted by drunken rapists. Health clubs boast of their pools, but they are all as enclosed as particle accelerators. If you want to swim in the sun, it can be easier to take a train to Jones Beach. Manhattan's parks are wonderful, and they have come back from years of neglect. But if you want your trees, your flowers, your grass, you have to be a millionaire with a sky terrace or the rank interior courtyard of a block of brownstones.

New York stands outside one of the great American dreams-the dream of the yeoman farmer, out of Virgil via Jefferson. (Maybe the dream is even older-the architecture critic Vincent Scully compared the suburban house, car, and trailer to the Indian teepee, horse, and sledge.) New Yorkers abandon the dream, as Satan turned his back on Heaven. But our psyches are patriots still; when the atavistic urges come over us, we must drive to Long Island, New England, or upstate. So we care about gas prices after all.