This being a holiday weekend, I beg your forgiveness for skipping the daily news grind and indulging in a bit of memoir. It’s thirty years since I first arrived in America. On a sultry afternoon in August, 1984, I flew into the old TWA terminal at J.F.K. with a group of uppity young Brits who had been awarded Harkness Fellowships to study and travel in the United States. I was twenty-one, I had recently graduated from Oxford, and I thought I knew everything. In fact, of course, I knew next to nothing.
One of the many things that I was ignorant about was what a hot summer day in New York feels like. As I emerged from the chaotic baggage area inside Eero Saarinen's curvaceous mid-century Flight Center, I was instantly covered in sweat. But that wasn't what really concerned me. I found I could hardly breathe.
According to the weather records, which I just looked up, the temperature in Central Park that day maxed out at eighty-eight degrees, which isn't very high. Out on the concrete at Kennedy, though, it felt like a hundred degrees, or more, and the suffocating humidity was something I had never experienced. Dragging my heavy brown suitcase to one of the concrete islands where the courtesy buses stopped, I wondered why nobody had informed us that the the air in New York contained fifty per cent less oxygen than the air in England. Had a bomb gone off? It didn't appear so. The airport employees and most of the other passengers didn't seem to be panicking.
I looked around for my fellow-Brits. One of them, a medic, had on a heavy tweed suit, of the sort that you might wear to a grouse-shooting party in Scotland, in April. He looked like he was going to faint, but he was determined to gut it out. I was made of weaker stuff. I took off my beige McGregor windcheater, which I'd bought at an Oxfam shop in my hometown of Leeds specially for the trip. I also had on a bowling shirt, some baggy stonewashed jeans with narrow bottoms, and white canvas high-tops. A generous interpretation would be that I looked like a Bushwick hipster three decades before my time. A more accurate representation would be that I didn’t have a clue.
Settling into the courtesy bus that was to bring us into Manhattan, I made a more welcome discovery: American air-conditioning. In England, most cars didn’t have any. Even if they did, it was hardly ever called into use. As we headed along the Van Wyck and the L.I.E, it was actually chilly. The bus driver had the radio tuned to a news channel. It was 1010 WINS, I think, but the stories were all about local happenings, and they didn’t mean anything to me.
We came into Manhattan across the Fifty-ninth Street bridge. My principal memory is of a throng of cars and trucks, with huge steel girders rising overhead. The driver opened the window, and the heat and sounds of the city flooded in. Clanking horns, police sirens, limo drivers complaining about the traffic. Eventually, we got to the Adams Hotel, on East Eighty-sixth Street, just off Central Park. My final destination was Harvard, where I had enrolled as a visiting student. But, before dispersing to our various academic destinations, we were spending a couple of days in New York, getting orientated, and attending some functions at the headquarters of the Commonwealth Fund, which ran the fellowship program.
Tired from the flight and still wary of the New York air, I spent the rest of the afternoon in my room, trying to figure out the window air-conditioner. On my bed, there was a package from the Harkness people, which included a check for more than eight thousand dollars—the first installment of the scholarship living allowance. I can’t recall the exact amount, but it was more money than I’d ever seen in my life. I felt like I’d won the lottery, or, as we would have said in England, the pools.
After dark, some of us ventured out to get some food. (The Adams was an old-fashioned residential hotel, with no restaurant.) In 1984, New York had a reputation as an extremely violent city, and there was a bit of trepidation in our steps. Growing up, my impression of the city had largely come from cop shows, such as “Kojak,” violent movies, such as “Mean Streets,” and a regular supply of scare stories in the Fleet Street papers. At the corner of Madison and Eighty-sixth, we stopped an elderly couple who were walking their dog and asked them to recommend a spot. If you go east or south, you should be fine, they told us.
I didn’t know then that the Upper East Side was probably one of the safest spots on earth, or that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis lived around the corner. The next morning, I summoned the courage to walk in the park and explore the neighborhood. At a deli on Madison, I stopped for a sandwich, but, here, too, my ignorance got me into a bit of bother. Back in Blighty, when you purchased a sandwich, you got handed two pieces of buttered white bread with a thin slice of ham or turkey between them. If you were lucky, there might also be a slice of tomato or cheese.
At the deli counter, I was confronted with a galaxy of choices, and not much time to make them. The line was long, and the tone of the man behind the counter was urgent.
“What do you want?”
“What do you have?” I replied.
The man looked a little irked. “Ham, turkey, tuna, chicken salad, roast beef—we’ve got everything."
Thinking I’d be adventurous, I said, “Ham and turkey.”
“Ham and turkey?” the man said, eying me suspiciously.
“Yes,” I replied. “Ham and turkey.”
The discussion continued in this vein for another minute or two, as I selected the type of bread, cheese, and condiments I’d like. Eventually, the man turned away and got to work. When I picked up the sandwich at the cashier, it looked like a brick wrapped in white paper. On getting it back to my hotel room, I realized it was far too big to fit in my mouth. The meat alone was several inches deep, and there was mayonnaise running everywhere. I had to disassemble it before I could even try to eat it.
That night we went to Harkness House, a grand beaux-arts mansion at One East Seventy-fifth Street, which had once been the home of Edward and Mary Harkness, two Standard Oil heirs and philanthropists who financed the fellowship program, and much else besides. After the reception had ended, a couple of the fellowships administrators offered to take some of us “downtown” for a drink. I don’t think I’d ever been more excited in my life. To me, downtown meant punk rock, Andy Warhol, and pretty girls in black leather jackets. Perhaps we’d end up at some dingy after-hours club where Debbie Harry or Joey Ramone would be hanging out.
The administrators had other ideas. They took us to the Lone Star Roadhouse, a country-music joint on Fifth Avenue and Thirteenth Street. I wasn’t too disappointed, though. As we rattled down Fifth in a yellow cab, I watched the cross streets go by—Forty-second, Thirty-fourth, Twenty-third, Fourteenth—and gazed up at the buildings. In those days, New York was a lot quieter than it is now, and most of the streets looked dark and deserted. I felt like we were driving through a canyon—an unexplored place, full of danger, and excitement, and possibility. Whatever else happens, I remember thinking, you’ve got to come back here.
