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A fine and fun bebop Baedeker through the Grandest of all Cities, New York, in its 1945 heyday..a valuable and thoroughly enjoyable journey.
(Gregg Ottinger American Studies International ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.Product Description
In 1945, New York City stood at the pinnacle of its cultural and economic power. Never again would the city possess the unique mixture of innocence and sophistication, romance and formality, generosity and confidence which characterized it in this moment of triumph.
In Manhattan '45, acclaimed travel writer and historian Jan Morris evokes the city in all its romantic grandeur. From its beguilingly idiosyncratic architectural style to its unmistakable slang, post-War New York springs to life through Morris's brisk, affectionate prose. Morris visits Wall Street, Harlem, Greenwich Village, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. She rides the trollies, the El, the Hudson River ferries, and the Twentieth Century Limited. She dines at Schrafft's and Le Pavillon, drinks ale at McSorley's Saloon, sips Manhattans at the Manhattan Club, and spots celebrities at El Morocco. She meets Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses, Leo Durocher, I. B. Singer, and Dizzy Gillespie. And she tours the tenements of Hell's Kitchen and the Gashouse district, as well as the Foundling Hospital where the crushing realities of poverty belie the unchallenged exuberance of the age.
Taking into account both Social Register and slum, Manhattan '45 celebrates New York's Golden Age as a place where, for one unrepeatable moment in history, anything seemed possible.
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SHABBY IT MIGHT BE, but 50th Street West led one directly from Pier 90 across six undistinguished city blocks to the site that, more than any other, was the pride of Manhattan in 1945: Rockefeller Center-the state of the art, as they would later say, in enlightened urban design. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
SHABBY IT MIGHT BE, but 50th Street West led one directly from Pier 90 across six undistinguished city blocks to the site that, more than any other, was the pride of Manhattan in 1945: Rockefeller Center-the state of the art, as they would later say, in enlightened urban design. Read the first page
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Jan Morris does such a great job of recreating New York City - Manhattan - in its golden moment that a fun exercise for a writer would be to draft some characters and weave them throughout the structure of this entertaining text and see what comes out.
Morris establishes a framework for her study, a Manhattan that is the last great city standing in the wake of World War II, the product of a recent building boom and sturdy enough to handle the business of two continents rather than one.
Intelligently broken up into novel but digestible categories such as style, system, movement, race and class, Manhattan '45 manages to tell a story while not getting lost in the complexity of its remarkable topic.
Morris writes light and breezy like some of the newspaper columnists of era mentioned and one can't help but wonder the extent to which the place and era have come to infuse the writer's technique.
Reeling through the '40s requires a certain degree of listing. The listing of names, the listing of places and eateries, the listing and Manhattan's less-that-evocative grid of numbered streets and avenues, but Morris drops in just enough prosody to make it work as in the passage about the nightlife so typical of the work:
"The Beau Nash of Manhattan, though, was Sherman Billingsley of the Stork Club. Where but the Stork Club could one see Cobina Wright, "the city's loveliest debutante" in the same room as H.L. Mencken, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor or the Ernest Hemingways? Billingsley, known to his often fawning customers as 'Sherm,' at once basked in their reflected fame and vigorously exploited it. He employed two teams of press agents, one on day shift, one on night, and he assiduously cultivated the friendship of newspapers columnists like Walter Winchell (the King), or Leonard Lyons, of the 'The Lyons Den,' who were by then celebrities themselves. Some said he had actually invented Cafe Society; he had first advertised his club in college newspapers, and given publicity to suitably prepossessing and sufficiently moneyed students as "prominent members of Cafe Society."
The author's passion for Manhattan shines throughout and is so infectious even the odd reader who picks up the book because nothing else is at hand may catch the fever.
Morris establishes a framework for her study, a Manhattan that is the last great city standing in the wake of World War II, the product of a recent building boom and sturdy enough to handle the business of two continents rather than one.
Intelligently broken up into novel but digestible categories such as style, system, movement, race and class, Manhattan '45 manages to tell a story while not getting lost in the complexity of its remarkable topic.
Morris writes light and breezy like some of the newspaper columnists of era mentioned and one can't help but wonder the extent to which the place and era have come to infuse the writer's technique.
Reeling through the '40s requires a certain degree of listing. The listing of names, the listing of places and eateries, the listing and Manhattan's less-that-evocative grid of numbered streets and avenues, but Morris drops in just enough prosody to make it work as in the passage about the nightlife so typical of the work:
"The Beau Nash of Manhattan, though, was Sherman Billingsley of the Stork Club. Where but the Stork Club could one see Cobina Wright, "the city's loveliest debutante" in the same room as H.L. Mencken, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor or the Ernest Hemingways? Billingsley, known to his often fawning customers as 'Sherm,' at once basked in their reflected fame and vigorously exploited it. He employed two teams of press agents, one on day shift, one on night, and he assiduously cultivated the friendship of newspapers columnists like Walter Winchell (the King), or Leonard Lyons, of the 'The Lyons Den,' who were by then celebrities themselves. Some said he had actually invented Cafe Society; he had first advertised his club in college newspapers, and given publicity to suitably prepossessing and sufficiently moneyed students as "prominent members of Cafe Society."
The author's passion for Manhattan shines throughout and is so infectious even the odd reader who picks up the book because nothing else is at hand may catch the fever.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Morris takes us back to June 1945 (in between the ends of the European and Asian wars) and puts us with the returning soldiers on the Queen Mary as it arrives in a Manhattan "untouched by the war the men had left behind them, [...] colossal and romantic - everything that America seemed to represent in a world of loss and ruin" (p5). She uses this moment as a jumping-off point to roam the city, describing along the way all aspects of its life (her chapters are named "On Style", "On System", "On Race", etc), characteristically bringing in little vignettes and odd details that stick in the mind - for example, discussing the lengthy history of the city as an important seaport, she mentions that the word "skyscraper" originally referred to the topsail of a clipper ship.
She generously references other books about the city (including Stephen Brook's New York Days, New York Nights, which I read immediately before this book, and apparently found far less "irresistible" than Morris does), building a detailed, multifaceted portrait of a city on the brink of becoming the capital of the world, with a "particular mixture of innocence and sophistication, romance and formality, generosity and self-amazement which seems to have characterized it in those moments of triumph" (p12). The fact that she also acknowledges that much of this promise was to remain unfulfilled in subsequent years (this book was written in 1987, following the economic decline of the 70s, and during the rebirth of Wall Street) makes this an elegiac, wistful portrait of a special place at a special moment which is to be recommended to anyone who's interested in this extraordinary city.
She generously references other books about the city (including Stephen Brook's New York Days, New York Nights, which I read immediately before this book, and apparently found far less "irresistible" than Morris does), building a detailed, multifaceted portrait of a city on the brink of becoming the capital of the world, with a "particular mixture of innocence and sophistication, romance and formality, generosity and self-amazement which seems to have characterized it in those moments of triumph" (p12). The fact that she also acknowledges that much of this promise was to remain unfulfilled in subsequent years (this book was written in 1987, following the economic decline of the 70s, and during the rebirth of Wall Street) makes this an elegiac, wistful portrait of a special place at a special moment which is to be recommended to anyone who's interested in this extraordinary city.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Great Sense of Place
23 Sep 1998
Format:Paperback
Few books on New York's past are as rich and revealing as this work. The author does an excellent job of recreating the sense of place of New York. Urban culture, economy, and race relations are dealt with in a very creative way. I found that while its focus is the New York of the 1940s this book really is about a larger American experience that reaches into our day.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Required Reading for Lovers of New York
19 April 2007
Format:Paperback
Jan Morris' favorite city is presented in its moment of greatest hope, when the war was won and America was in a blissful state indeed.
Morris always writes beautifully of places as characters in and of themselves. These are usually distilled in essay form to show up some single, wonderful characteristic of the place. She's always done that better than any other travel writer, even if it sounds like pigeon-holing. But this amazing book does anything but pigeonhole.
Morris has composed a kind of love letter about the city, expanding on race, class, and its sheer motion. There's a great deal of history inside, giving a little background and color to how Manhattan came to be what it was in 1945. Mayors and miscellaneous cranks, celebrities and neighborhood personalities all share the stage.
It's a book of history, trivia, memories, gossip, and sheer fun. Gorgeously written. A MUST for Manhattanites and fans of the Big Apple.
Morris always writes beautifully of places as characters in and of themselves. These are usually distilled in essay form to show up some single, wonderful characteristic of the place. She's always done that better than any other travel writer, even if it sounds like pigeon-holing. But this amazing book does anything but pigeonhole.
Morris has composed a kind of love letter about the city, expanding on race, class, and its sheer motion. There's a great deal of history inside, giving a little background and color to how Manhattan came to be what it was in 1945. Mayors and miscellaneous cranks, celebrities and neighborhood personalities all share the stage.
It's a book of history, trivia, memories, gossip, and sheer fun. Gorgeously written. A MUST for Manhattanites and fans of the Big Apple.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
A highwayscribery "Book Report"
1 May 2009
Format:Paperback
Jan Morris does such a great job of recreating New York City - Manhattan - in its golden moment that a fun exercise for a writer would be to draft some characters and weave them throughout the structure of this entertaining text and see what comes out.
Morris establishes a framework for his study, a Manhattan that is the last great city standing in the wake of World War II, the product of a recent building boom and sturdy enough to handle the business of two continents rather than one.
Intelligently broken up into novel but digestible categories such as style, system, movement, race and class, Manhattan '45 manages to tell a story while not getting lost in the complexity of its remarkable topic.
Morris writes light and breezy like some of the newspaper columnists of era mentioned and one can't help but wonder the extent to which the place and era have come to infuse the writers technique.
Reeling through the '40s requires a certain degree of listing. The listing of names, the listing of places and eateries, the listing and Manhattan's less-that-evocative grid of numbered streets and avenues, but Morris drops in just enough prosody to make it work as in the passage about the nightlife so typical of the work:
"The Beau Nash of Manhattan, though, was Sherman Billingsley of the Stork Club. Where but the Stork Club could one see Cobina Wright, "the city's loveliest debutante" in the same room as H.L. Mencken, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor or the Ernest Hemingways? Billingsley, known to his often fawning customers as 'Sherm,' at once basked in their reflected fame and vigorously exploited it. He employed two teams of press agents, one on day shift, one on night, and he assiduously cultivated the friendship of newspapers columnists like Walter Winchell (the King), or Leonard Lyons, of the 'The Lyons Den,' who were by then celebrities themselves. Some said he had actually invented Cafe Society; he had first advertised his club in college newspapers, and given publicity to suitably prepossessing and sufficiently moneyed students as "prominent members of Cafe Society."
The author's passion for Manhattan shines throughout and is so infectious even the odd reader who picks up the book because nothing else is at hand may catch the fever.
Morris establishes a framework for his study, a Manhattan that is the last great city standing in the wake of World War II, the product of a recent building boom and sturdy enough to handle the business of two continents rather than one.
Intelligently broken up into novel but digestible categories such as style, system, movement, race and class, Manhattan '45 manages to tell a story while not getting lost in the complexity of its remarkable topic.
Morris writes light and breezy like some of the newspaper columnists of era mentioned and one can't help but wonder the extent to which the place and era have come to infuse the writers technique.
Reeling through the '40s requires a certain degree of listing. The listing of names, the listing of places and eateries, the listing and Manhattan's less-that-evocative grid of numbered streets and avenues, but Morris drops in just enough prosody to make it work as in the passage about the nightlife so typical of the work:
"The Beau Nash of Manhattan, though, was Sherman Billingsley of the Stork Club. Where but the Stork Club could one see Cobina Wright, "the city's loveliest debutante" in the same room as H.L. Mencken, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor or the Ernest Hemingways? Billingsley, known to his often fawning customers as 'Sherm,' at once basked in their reflected fame and vigorously exploited it. He employed two teams of press agents, one on day shift, one on night, and he assiduously cultivated the friendship of newspapers columnists like Walter Winchell (the King), or Leonard Lyons, of the 'The Lyons Den,' who were by then celebrities themselves. Some said he had actually invented Cafe Society; he had first advertised his club in college newspapers, and given publicity to suitably prepossessing and sufficiently moneyed students as "prominent members of Cafe Society."
The author's passion for Manhattan shines throughout and is so infectious even the odd reader who picks up the book because nothing else is at hand may catch the fever.
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