Falling in love with NYC … again

Robyn and I saw a new doc Monday. It’s about Toots Shor, a man who owned a popular midtown Manhattan restaurant/bar in the 1950s. The film contained some excellent archival footage of a young Mike Wallace chain-smoking while interviewing Toots. Ah, the good old days!

Drink up, buttercup!

Toots didn’t have the happiest/easiest life, but he loved New York City. This was evident in the film: the 1950s are depicted as a very fun, glamorous time. Early on in the doc, someone quotes E.B. White’s essay “Here is New York.” I have a copy in my apartment, and the film inspired me to go home and re-read it. White’s words are as true today as when he wrote them almost 60 years ago. Here’s my favorite passage from the essay:

"There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter – the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last – the city of final destination, the city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the art, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company."