Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [40]
New Yorkers don’t brood much, either. They go about their business with a purposefulness that excludes introspection. If the rest of the country says New Yorkers lack pride because they have so little to be proud of, the New Yorker shrugs again. He has no argument with the South or the Midwest or Texas or California. He feels neither superior nor inferior. He just doesn’t compare the things in New York with those anywhere else. He doesn’t compare the subway with Moscow’s or with the Metro in Paris. Both may be better, but neither goes to Brooklyn or Forest Hills and for this reason doesn’t interest the New Yorker one way or the other.
New York is essentially a place for working but not everyone works in a glass cube. The island is crowded with highly individual nests people have made for themselves. There are 100,000 Waldens hidden in the stone and steel caverns.
At the Stork Club in Manhattan with fellow Arthur Godfrey colleagues; left to right: Andy, Chuck Horner, Mug Richardson, Frank Dodge, Hank Miles
The places people work and live are as different as the people. If a Hollywood façade is deceptive because it has nothing behind it, a New York façade is deceptive because it has so much. You can’t tell much about what’s inside from what you see outside. There are places within places. Houses behind houses. Very often in New York ugliness is only skin deep.
New York is the cultural center of mankind, too. Art flourishes in proximity to reality, and in New York the artist is never more than a stone’s throw from the action. The pianist composes music three blocks from a fight in Madison Square Garden. A poet works against the sound of a jackhammer outside his window.
There are wonderfully good places to live in New York, if you have the money. A lot of New Yorkers have the money. Some of the grand old brownstones of an earlier era have been restored. There are no living spaces more comfortable anywhere. There are charming and unexpected little streets hidden in surprising places throughout the city. They attract the artist, the actor, the musician. The insurance salesman lives on Long Island.
The city is crowded with luxury apartments, so even if you don’t own your own brownstone, there’s no need to camp out.
The average living place is an apartment built wall to wall with other apartments, so that they share the efficiency of water and electricity that flows to them through the same conduits. They’re neither slums nor palaces.
If you can afford $2,500 a month for a three-bedroom apartment, you can live in a living room with Central Park as your front yard.
Several hundred thousand people do have Central Park for a front yard and it’s certainly the greatest park on earth. It’s a world of its own. No large city ever had the foresight to set aside such a substantial portion of itself to be one complete unbuilt-on place. It occupies 25 percent of the total area of Manhattan and yet any proposition to take so much as ten square feet of it to honor a Polish general or an American President brings out its legion of defenders.
There are crimes committed in the Park, but to say the Park is unsafe is like saying banks are unsafe because there are holdups. Life is unsafe, for that matter.
Most American cities have rotted from the center and the merchants have all moved to a place under one roof out in the middle of a suburban parking lot. Downtown was yesterday. New York is still vital at its core. It’s the ultimate downtown. And if the biggest businesses are centered in New York so are the smallest.
Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s are all here and so are the big grocery chains. But the place you probably buy your food is around the corner at a butcher’s where you can still see both sides of a piece of meat.
If you want a rare and exotic cheese from Belgium, it’s available, or maybe you need a gear for a pump made in 1923. All there somewhere in the city. If you’re