In Old New York

Jan Morris goes back to 1945

BOOKS

If you were fortunate enough to grow up in New York City in the decade that followed W.W. II, you knew that you were living in a very special place of wonder and promise, where anything could happen. The turmoil had decimated and discredited those great capitals of Europe, and now New York stood alone, basking (and slightly blinking) in the ineffable, triumphant glow. Our boys were back, our energies boundless, and the future unutterably dazzling.

Or so it seemed. Jan Morris, sometime New Yorker and travel writer second to none, has fashioned a unique paean of sorts to this moment of giddy and unlimited vistas, called Manhattan '45 (Oxford). It is a miraculous, heartbreaking reconstruction built upon assiduous research and a prose style that is incisive and immensely rich. In Manhattan '45, a title that "sounds partly like a gun and partly like champagne," Morris (who arrived only in 1953) takes us on a Checker-cabguided tour through a town which seems as remote as Jimmy Walker's swanky gray topper, yet as close as yesterday. Morris reweaves the social, architectural, and geographical fabric of a city that stretched from the fiftyfour-room Fifth Avenue triplex of Marjorie Merriweather Post to the great Weegee's seventeen-dollar-a-month flat behind the old police headquarters. Jan Morris has written a bittersweet love poem to New York, and as she has written it, not only should you have been there, you are.

RICHARD MERKIN