City of Wonder, Then and Still

OXFORD, England — SIXTY years ago I went to Manhattan for the very first time, on the ocean liner Mauretania from Liverpool, and annually since then, without a break, I have returned. This year is my Diamond Jubilee visit, and everyone, New Yorkers and outsiders alike, asks me how much the place has changed.

It has certainly changed me, I can tell you that! Look around the library at my home in Wales and you will see New York books impenetrably cluttering its shelves, including a couple I have impertinently written myself, file after file of articles, street plans and prints, and a Crumpled City map of contemporary Manhattan, printed on scrunchable fabric, which Twm, one of my three sons, has just given me as a Diamond Jubilee memento. Since 1953 New York has implanted itself irrevocably in my being and altered me forever.

During my six decades, the seminal Manhattan event has been the hideous tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. Few communities have experienced such a collective nightmare — not a blitz or a siege or a carpet bombing, but a single, sudden, unprovoked, totally unexpected, criminally murderous onslaught upon an undefended target. How has New York changed, with 9/11 in its heart?

It has aged — or rather, its reputation has aged.

When I first stepped ashore from the Mauretania all those years ago, I was disembarking at the City of Cities, the apex of all the continents. Everyone knew this was so, and New York knew it most certainly of all. The city’s architecture was the most exciting, its culture the most vibrant, its music rang around the planet, its banks were the richest, its slang infected the way people talked across half the world.

It seemed to me then that New York thought of itself in slogans. It was the City That Never Sleeps, the Never-Finished City, the Wonder City! It jitterbugged down the Great White Way! It raised the Torch of Liberty! “If you don’t wanta get on,” New Yorkers used to say in those days, amiably enough, “move over, Bud, and make way for a guy who does” — or, as one Manhattan minister declaimed to the multitudes, “Try happiness — it works.”

That unparalleled prestige, that brazen but strangely innocent self-satisfaction has eroded over the years. As America itself lost its moral pre-eminence among the nations, as the world’s corrosions rusted its shine, so New York began to seem more ordinary, more elderly perhaps.

Later I actually found it possible to feel sorry for the Wonder City, but by then brassy foreign musicals had started to dominate Broadway, and foreigners had knocked down the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. The nightmare of 9/11 weakened New York’s omnipotent reputation, but made it more human, too.

In 1953, on my very first evening in New York, fresh off the ship, a Manhattan waiter said to me: “Just ask, ask for anything you like. Listen, in this city there’s nothing you can’t have.”

Today the public ethos is more modest — the menus may be as elaborate, but the style is gentler. Sad to say, New York knows it is no longer the world’s Wonder City after all. There are buildings just as amazing in Dubai or Hong Kong. Australian menus are as eclectic. The smashing martinis of my first visits to New York are less exhilarating and omnipresent than they used to be, and I guess New Yorkers no longer feel the need to boast. Theirs is an old city now, wiser and subtler than it was 60 years ago.

All cities mutate over the course of history, but during my watch the two greatest examples of civic vitality — Venice and New York — have remained essentially the same at the core. Both are water cities, the central island of Venice commanding its archipelago, the island of Manhattan supreme among the boroughs of New York, and the architectures of both have been decreed by their insularity. Both are great ports and gateways between civilizations. Venice is habitually characterized as timeless, and New York too, the Never Finished City, strikes me as essentially permanent.

Jan Morris is a historian, author and travel writer.

City of Wonder, Then and Still