The radiant city...

Everyone has a place in their imagination that fills them with awe and excitement as well as a nostalgia for "home." For me this place is New York City. To this day the car trip to the City quickens my pulse and renews the hope of fulfilling one's dreams. Even the trip down the Thruway with its high-tech rest rooms every thirty miles or so, the way you can feel the traffic start to pick up south of Poughkeepsie, and the long downhill to the sight of the broad Hudson at the Tappan Zee bridge is a pleasureful experience. Although I was born in the City (the Bronx) I only lived there for the first five years of my life, one year in Astoria, Queens, in 1949 and one and one half years in 1966-67 at the 92nd Street Y but I can always hear the roar of the subway train on the express tracks, my neck remembers the stiffness from looking up at the tall buildings and I can see the flags fluttering at Rockefeller Center behind the gigantic statue of Atlas holding up the world at the Fifth Avenue entrance. The City exudes the radiance of a culture bursting with energy. At least, this is the way I like to think of it in my imagination. So many things are gone now that I remember with affection: the Automat where you could get a sliced egg sandwich with a bit of lettuce and tomato for five nickels, the thick wooden turnstile in a subway station that you would snap free when your nickel went in the slot, the red trolley cars with the lower center doors on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx and the varnished caned seats inside, the movie palaces along Broadway - even double-decker buses along Fifth Avenue! The rest of America, out West, was something you could only dream about visiting one day or glimpse through a "Viewmaster." Every civilization in history has had a beginning, a greatest era and a decline. New York is just one of many great cities now and the people trodding the ramps at Grand Central are different but the memory and the hope still linger over the City like the haze from the East River on a steamy summer day. I was not fortunate enough to be able to live and work in the radiant City but I know but, in a way, that makes it all the more stimulating to me.