NYNY

So nice, they named it twice,

Mar 27, 2026

THAT WAS THE TOURISM slogan for a while, anyway, New York City being in New York state.

Not that it was ever a nice place, as such. Not in the nice sense of the word.

And not the capital. That’s Albany, a ways upstate; pleasant enough, but instantly forgettable. I’ve been there, but don’t ask me anything about it.

Ask what you like about NYC. I haven’t visited in several years and it’s half a century since I lived there, but I could still give you chapter and verse.

Don’t worry, I won’t.

Age and politics being what they are, chances are I may never go to the United States again, though the border and Buffalo are less than two hours away and I used to enjoy weekends in Buffalo.

Can’t say I miss it, though. I do miss Manhattan sometimes.

If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere

~ Fred Ebb

And I did. Kinda.

Worked my way up from almost breadline poverty —

nursing a beer in Third Avenue saloons and ravishing the “free lunch” steam table for a dinner’s worth of finger foods, knowing the bartender had noticed and hoping he didn’t care

— to the point where, four years later, I could drive away in a used — a hard-used — Plymouth Duster. Basic and beat up as all get-out but still a car and, way more to the point, my car. Bought and paid for.

Under the Hudson River and down the New Jersey Turnpike to Philadelphia, my second port of call.

Small-town English boy makes, if not exactly good, at least a shallow impression.

Throwing my money down on the counter with the best of them by now, letting the barkeep take what he needed, accepting the occasional drink on the house with a gracious nod, and leaving a decent tip at the end of the night. Four a.m. closing time, sometimes, it was. In to work a few hours later, metaphorically bloodied but relatively unbowed.
“I can sleep when I’m dead,” I used to say. Now there’s something that’s come back to haunt me.

Home was a gracious old lady, long past her prime, called the Park Royal.

West 73rd Street, hard by Central Park

and behind the palatial Dakota, where the likes of John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Lauren Bacall lived in old-world splendour. We could justifiably call them neighbours. We had, after all, a fine view of their garbage cans.

I’ve seen Lauren Bacall in her bathrobe. She called down curses on me. But that’s another, later, far, far sadder story. Lennon was dead and — local knowledge — I was perched by the trash bins like a vulture (one of the things she called me, with rhyming adjectives) for scraps. As tabloid hacks go, I was pretty damned good.

Anyway, the Park Royal. Faded glory. But pretty glorious still.

It was a lovely building, one of New York’s original “apartment hotels,” long since fallen into reduced circumstances and divided into small two-or-three-room places — mine was 602A — whose chief virtue was that the rent was manageably low.

I saw the Park Royal again a few years ago and it had been restored to its former opulence, with prices to match.

The ornate lobby was glorious even when I lived there. And then you got into the elevators — which were painfully slow — and went upstairs…

Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t want to live there again.

Cosmopolitan as New York may be, Toronto is even more so. I can walk for a few minutes in any direction from my house and have a dozen or more different ethnic cuisines to choose from.