New York, New York, It's a ...

Pavarotti, Reh-gie and the Met; plus spreading slums and human struggles

  • Share
  • Read Later

(2 of 9)

Why people would pay such prices to live on an island without good fishing is a source of befuddlement to country boys, but is laughably reasonable to the simplest New Yorker. He wants to eat well; French, Chinese, Greek, Italian, Indian, you-name-it. He wants to ogle masterpieces. He wants concerts and ballet and opera and people, millions of them, all dressed to the nines, hopeful, busy, important, on the ladder, on the make; luxury high-risers every one. And of course he wants to buy, to shop, to feel the peculiar exhilaration of coughing up $350 for a belt at Hermes, or better still, now that Gucci's Galleria is finally open, to rise in the glass elevator available only by key to that portion of the store where $500,000 gems may be contemplated near a mural by Roy Lichtenstein. If not Gucci, then "Cartier; if not that, then some other: all spilled out along Fifth Avenue like Jay Gatsby's shirts.

On Broadway the lights have rarely looked brighter, especially compared with 1976, when perhaps two or three plays justified lines around the blocks and theater critics were bewailing American dependence on British muses. In 1980 the list of Broadway successes includes Evita, Children of a Lesser God, Talley's Folly, Sugar Babies and Barnum. A theater district that can successfully revive Peter Pan and West Side Story simultaneously can't be all bad. Since 1976 there has been a 51% increase in theater attendance in New York, and a 137% increase in ticket sales. Broadway orchestra seats can go for $30 apiece, and are filled not only by natives but also by tourists, 17.5 million of them last year alone, who are also filling the expensive hotels. In 1976 the occupancy rate for New York hostelries was 72.2%; in 1979, 82%. Five Manhattan hotels offering 5,200 rooms are either about to open or have just done so.

In a way the most significant boom has been that of the movie industry, which until recently was stone cold in New York. In April of this year ten feature films were being started or completed in the city that moviemakers fled for California long ago. Now their return means dollars, of course, but it also suggests what New Yorkers have been feeling for a while now: the city has regained its romance. The romance is not soft, but it never was. In movies about itself New York always played the antagonist, an now it has simply updated the role, pitting Kramer vs. Kramer and all that jazz Woody Allen's Manhattan, which seemed so nostalgic at first glance, was in fact prophetic. Given a chance, most hard-boiled New Yorkers will plunge to weeping at any shot of the skyline at dusk or of a horse and buggy at dusk, or best of all, of themselves at dusk, hand in hand.

O Luciano. O Reh-gie. These days New York's romance with itself takes simple forms. A Reggie Jackson home run seems an act of pure chauvinism. Thousands of people stretch out on blankets in Central Park to hear Luciano Pavarotti sing only to them. Pavarotti is the second most beloved Italian singer in town. The first may be heard on record seemingly everywhere, belting out New York, New York. O Frankie.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9