The West Side of My Youth

...My definition of the West Side stretched from 125th Street, where the best Chinese restaurant crouched, to Columbus Circle...

...Columbia College was small, some 1,500 students, and so was the graduate school...

...Meetings of the now defunct Riverside Democrats frequently ended at three in the morning...

...The teachers I recall with gratitude include Mark Van Doren, Moses Hadas, the sociologist Robert Lynd of Middletown fame, and, Franco devotee though he was, the extraordinarily gifted lecturer Carlton Hayes...

...but between the university and 96th Street, the area remains full of cleaners, shoe stores, pizza parlors, supermarkets, opticians, and similar establishments of traditional rather than yuppie aspect...

...Relentless gentrification has turned many older buildings, on West End Avenue in particular, into co-ops...

...At 18, I partially escaped by commuting daily on the Long Island railroad and the Seventh Avenue IRT to Columbia College...

...In 1938, when the economy was staggering out of a sharp recession superimposed upon continuing depression, most of my classmates (no women of course) were grateful commuters, particularly Jews, who treasured admission to WASP culture the more because Columbia had an all but officially announced Jewish quota...

...Half a century ago, the Columbia campus was uncrowded and architecturally decent, if less than distinguished...

...There the restaurant scene is wild...

...Nowhere are reform clubs strong...

...It is also less humane, less concerned with the community, glitzier, and increasingly less interesting...

...only fair that Morton Zuckerman, megadeveloper and magazine owner, will destroy it and erect two enormous towers guaranteed to cast perpetual shadow on the statue of Columbus and much of Central Park...

...In the fashion of the young, they vented opinions on books they hadn't read or, if read, absorbed, and on art and music, with which their familiarity was recent and superficial...

...There were no alcoves in which our own Daniel Bells, Irving Kristols, and Irving Howes split Marxist hairs...

...Variances, tax breaks, subsidies to the Donald Trumps: these are benefits paid for not usually by bribes, but by huge campaign contributions...

...As part of the early occupation forces in Japan, I developed a new specialty— composition of citations for Silver and Bronze Stars...

...Uris Hall, home to the School of Business and testimonial to one of the city's affluent developers...

...Ryan, in 1956 an assistant district attorney in Frank Hogan's much overrated Manhattan DA's office, was the scion of a highly political family with connections both in the south, the birthplace of Ryan's mother, and in the north, notably to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt...

...To many of its unhappy neighbors, the university seems to be a massive real estate conglomerate that happens incidentally to offer classes and degrees to students who will be customers for the upscale clothes, electronics, personal care, expensive leisure, workout facilities, and food that comprise the wave of the present—the world of the yuppie...

...Similar events occurred in reform clubs further south...

...Since the team has not won a game in several years and this fall threatens to break Northwestern's record losing streak, the admissions office seems to have admitted young men whose academic deficits are matched by slowness of foot, clumsiness of hand, and inadequate ferocity...

...Columbia was less political than City College...

...So delightful to adjourn there with Moses Hadas after an instructive colloqium discussion of Boswell's Samuel Johnson or Jonathan Swift's utopias and dystopias...

...The Rockefellers demolished a neighborhood to construct Lincoln Center...

...In the nose of memory, I can still smell the Gold Rail's aroma of sour pickles, stale beer, unkempt waiters, dirty glasses, and unclean tables and chairs...

...In those days, district leaders worked at their jobs and harassed the sleepy city bureaucracy into reluctant action...

...Franz Leichter, probably the legislature's most valuable member, is a state senator...

...Still, this was the company I aspired to keep forever and ever...

...Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun taught a legendary colloqium section, limited to fifteen aspiring aesthetes...

...I remember a single black classmate, an amiable soul who went wrong, became a Republican, and worked in recent years for Virginia's impeccably reactionary Senator Paul Trible...

...I was sufficiently overawed by the cultural pretensions of some of my contemporaries to discard the notion of becoming an eminent literary critic or a trailblazing novelist...

...At an orientation session we were warned not to venture into Morningside Park, lest Harlemites of unfriendly disposition do us violent damage...

...Discount druggists have more than filled the Rexall gap...

...Stalinists had seized the high ground—the mimeograph machine, in the American Student Union...

...A pessimist may say that corruption is more expensive to the taxpayers now than it was in the pre-Lindsay days...

...I took the way Richard Nixon was later to deny ever pursuing, the easy way...

...But it is even clearer now in the pages of a reunion brochure than at the time that most of the Columbia lads wanted to be doctors, lawyers, at a pinch dentists or accountants...

...Space was sufficiently cheap and funds for construction sufficiently scarce so that tennis courts were strewn between 114th and 120th streets...

...Who knew, who cared...

...South of 96th Street, all is transformed...

...the Law School, a boxlike contemporary atrocity decorated by a wildly inappropriate sculpture...

...Dormitories, office, and classroom buildings, even the science labs, were in a consistent medium-rise, Italianate style...

...One could eat large quantities of moderately digestible egg foo young, chow mein, and chop suey at the New Asia...

...For the most part, their activities subtract from the sum of human welfare and their incomes seem to rise in direct relation to the damage that they inflict and the waste of resources they bring about...

...Living outside of the metropolitan area, I was ineligible for free tuition at City College...

...Mind you, I am not moving...

...They financed him, elected him, reelected him, and reelected him yet again...

...The merchants who served them, including Columbus Circle entrepreneurs, were a relaxed collection of tavern keepers, cafeteria operators (Bickford was a name to conjure with), grocers, butchers, hardware purveyors, clothiers, dealers in toasters, radios, and vacuum cleaners, and produce vendors...

...Rents were low for both commercial and residential tenants because vacancy rates were high...

...The restaurants of Hunan Gulch in the 90s are supplemented by popular Japanese newcomers...

...This is all by way of excusing my absences from "home...

...Look-alike structures with names like Montana, Princeton, New West, Bromley, Savannah, and, less imaginatively, Broadway vie for patronage...

...Now such loyalists expect to head the Parking Violations Bureau, the Department of Transportation, and other agencies...

...Somewhat later Lincoln Center, the Rockefellers' tacky salute to the performing arts, displaced another group of average citizens...

...I cannot conclude this memoir without comment on the political scene, then and now...

...My own father was the proprietor of a commercial printing plant, usually on the edge of bankruptcy...

...Structures of impeccably bad taste have replaced tennis courts and open space...

...Chock FALL • 1987 609 MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS Full O'Nuts continues mysteriously to occupy the southwest corner of Broadway and 116th Street, though its customers are few and its decor depressing...

...Alas, after a single beer—I didn't really want a second—I had to hurry lest I miss the last train to Sea Cliff...

...For Columbia's lumpen intellectuals, leisure for theoretical discussion simply continued a curriculum undistorted by vocational aspiration...

...It can be plausibly argued that the reform movement improved the quality of state and national government...

...Although the heroic deeds recited were often imaginary, the medals were each worth five points in the accounting that determined just when each of us would be shipped home to be discharged into the bosom of the fat civilian economy...

...From the time I was five until I was twenty-two, my parents for inscrutable reasons occupied a house in Sea Cliff, a disagreeably anti-Semitic north shore of Long Island bedroom village...

...Where a Rexall drug emporium flourished on 110th Street and Broadway, another Chinese restaurant caters to the insatiable West Side appetite for takeout...

...I became an economist on the excuse that after the revolution the new regime would certainly enlist planners and social scientists...

...Ruth Messenger gives Ed Koch almost daily fits...

...Politicians have given developers practically a free ride...

...Still, the menace was there...

...For the deterioration, blame can be widely assigned...

...In sum, the West Side of Manhattan is far richer now than it was fifty or thirty years ago...

...With two involuntary exceptions, mine has been a West Side life...

...Condos rise also on Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues...

...Practically nobody had money...

...In the heyday of general education, the stars of the faculty did not disdain teaching humanities or contemporary civilization to freshmen and sophomores...

...Such bursts of energy are fated to burn out...

...Problems of unemployment for me and my peers were solved by World War II...

...But food and beer, the strongest beverage drunk in my 608 • DISSENT MEMORIES AND IONS circle, were cheap...

...In 1938, scarcely a black face was to be seen...

...and Ferris Booth and Carman Hall, student center and dormitory respectively, celebrate the vulgarity of the university's trustees and administrators...

...The New Asia, now the Moon Palace, cooks on, offering of course Szechuan dishes as complements to Cantonese standbys...

...Two-thirds of a wretched century later, I reside one block west and five blocks north on Broadway and 115th Street, overlooking the Columbia University campus and the two buildings that engaged my youthful energies as a member of the Columbia College class of 1942—Hamilton Hall, where most undergraduate humanities and social science classes met, and Butler Library, named inevitably after Nicholas Murray Butler, tyrant of all that he surveyed...

...John Herman Randall and Irwin Edman attracted admirers to the philosophy department...

...A group of my neighbors sent me the familiar greetings, which led to four safe but boring years as a regimental clerk, typing with mounting virtuosity payrolls, morning reports and, in Guam, the Philippines, and Okinawa, casualty reports and letters of condolence...

...Indeed, alumni of the West Side clubs like Mitchell Ginsburg, Human Resources Commissioner, and Jerry Kretchmer, Environmental Protection czar, occupied positions of great responsibility...

...In the wake of Adlai Stevenson's honorable defeats by a national hero with whom the electorate enjoyed a political romance unmatched until the emergence of Ronald 610 • DISSENT MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS Reagan, West Side politics were inspired by Stevenson to undertake an exciting wave of reform, led by a certain William Fitts Ryan...

...Alas, as events in Queens and the Bronx glaringly reveal, the machines are back...

...A fair definition of tenant heaven is a vacancy rate higher than 10 percent...

...The Gold Rail perished, to be reincarnated as an immaculate Hunan Gardens...

...Ted Weiss, a courageous liberal, occupies more or less Bill Ryan's congressional district—its boundaries have been repeatedly altered...

...Unfortunately, it failed to transform municipal politics...

...Imagine...

...The word demands exegesis...

...Harvard was beyond my dreams, but Columbia represented an attainable pinnacle of academic status...

...People talked seriously about Plato, Beethoven, Dutch naturalists, French Impressionists, John Dewey, and Karl Marx...

...On Broadway old movie theaters and other low-rise structures have been demolished so that glitzy high-rise condos, each usually endowed with state-of-the-art security, health club facilities, and a concierge at the service of lucky inhabitants, can be marketed at vast prices to the huge yuppie community of buyers...

...They left a heritage in the human form of superior politicians, alumni of the 1950s and 1960s, who vastly improve upon their predecessors...

...One could pay off loyal campaign workers of sketchy education with low-paid jobs...

...The West Side, which half a century ago harbored people engaged in useful occupations, now is filled with the beneficiaries of the age of information — lawyers , investment bankers, advertising and public relations wizards, computer adepts, interior decorators, political campaign consultants, and other manipulators of paper and symbols...

...Although, in its relentless search for student and faculty housing, Columbia has acquired and converted single-room-occupancy apartment buildings into dormitories—commuting is déclassé— the territory of university dominion, roughly between 110th and 125th Streets, is still a highly miscellaneous area, housing upper-middle-income professional types, senior citizens desperately clinging to rent-controlled or stabilized apartments, perpetual graduate students, local merchants, and an increasingly black, Hispanic, and Asian population...

...Columbia's aspirations to gentrify the area thus far have been only moderately successful...

...As luck would have it, I did become a writer in a much easier competition...

...1987 607 MEMORIES AID IMPRESSIONS none of them visible in Sea Cliff...

...Football players are frequent enrollees...

...A baby humanities course equips freshmen who read slowly and write badly to handle the real thing...

...All is concept—overpriced, overcrowded restaurants offer Mexican, Greek, Cuban, "continental," Chinese, Japanese, and unidentifiable culinary treats...

...No co-ops, no condos confused traditional animosities between landlords and tenants...

...It's rather harder for the casualties of the 1980s economy to enlist Ronald Reagan and Edward Koch as allies...

...Where did they go...

...Nevertheless, there are continuities in the university neighborhood...

...q FALL • 1987 • 611...

...As an unhappy child, I saw New York, an undifferentiated entity, as my goal...

...In those days beyond recall, one waited inside the theater and once seated bathed in the full measure on a Saturday afternoon of cartoon, serial episode, newsreel, trailer of coming attractions, and two feature films—on one memorable occasion Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's lovable monster and Bela Lugosi as Bram Stoker's addict of beef tea, Dracula...

...Occasional expeditions to the opera and the theater reinforced my perception that here were centered all the delights of civilization, FALL...

...Where are things better...

...There are yuppie touches: Steve's and Haagen-Dazs ice cream shops, David's cookies, Sir George shoes...

...Ryan became district leader and then in 1960 congressman, a position he held until his death in 1972...

...Columbia College, conceding that it could not attract students of adequate talent from only half the gene pool, now admits women in competition with still all-female Barnard...

...Its venerable humanities and contemporary civilization courses are taught mostly by preceptors, graduate students whose title trades dignity for adequate pay and status...

...Still, a pity...

...Some of us, it is true, were the children of businessmen and potential heirs to moneymaking enterprises...

...But worst of all, nowhere in sight are the heirs to the reform movement which for a few years generated a sense of community around which human atoms could rally...

...Columbia is embedded in Morningside Heights, separated from Harlem by the barrier of Morningside Park...

...Reform politics in the Ryan era were squeaky clean, highly contentious, and genuinely participatory...

...Ed Sullivan, a former teacher, sits in the Assembly as representative of a district, mostly black, that includes Morningside Heights...

...Scorning business, most of us had only the dimmest possible notion of what we were going to do in our lives after college...

...The 1980s are something else...

...The Mill, a combined stationery, newspaper, and shortorder establishment, recently was celebrated as a survivor by the "Living" section of the New York Times...

...Landlords humbly painted their premises annually and, in response to market exigencies, offered free rent to new tenants for one, two, sometimes three months...

...Low Library and Butler Library faced each other on the north-south axis, and Earl Hall and the Chapel were symmetrically anchored on the west and east...

...He is the developers' mayor...

...Like other palaces—the Paradise on Bronx's Champs Elysees, the Grand Concourse, and the Valencia in Brooklyn—the Beacon was magnificently vulgar, a triumph of glitz surmounted by a genuinely fake starry ceiling...

...For the young on sexual hunts, reform clubs were a dignified alternative to singles bars, let alone the personals in the Village Voice and the New York Review of Books...

...I do not describe utopia...

...Whether Ed Koch is personally honest or not is a trivial question...

...There was a Young Socialist chapter...

...As for the revolution, it appears to be on indefinite hold...

...Long ago Robert Moses' Coliseum at Columbus Circle destroyed a lower-middle-class residential and commercial neighborhood...

...Columbia University has done its considerable best to shrink the scale of low-income housing within its domain...

...Few social scientists, and even fewer economists, compose readable prose...

...Reform politics flourished during the Lindsay era...

...The West End and the Gold Rail dispensed watery beer in premises uncleaned since their creation...

...The West End survives as an expanded combination of bar-and-grill and nightly jazz club...

...The scale of corruption has predictably risen with the wild pace of Manhattan development...

...Despite access to the entire gene pool, remedial education is necessary...

...To this day, mean-spirited souls call the area West Harlem...

...Most families struggled on the edge of indigence, beset by layoffs, temporarily rescued by WPA jobs, and inspirited less by practical benefits from federal and local government than by the sense that Franklin Roosevelt in the White House and Fiorello LaGuardia in City Hall were on their side...

...the Mudd engineering building...

...Only yesterday the developers killed the Thalia theater, from time immemorial a legend among highbrow moviegovers...

...Families lived inexpensively in decently maintained rental housing...

...No need for rent control...

...If Columbia University has its way, gentrification will move relentlessly north of 96th Street all the way to 125th Street...

...Though no longer proud of his political origins, the egregious Ed Koch won publicity and public office by defeating Carmine De Sapio, the walking symbol of machine politics, by the cry of reform...

...What focused my aspirations was Columbia College...

...On the current evidence, corruption, conniving, and favor-swapping are as prevalent as they were in the bad old days of Bill O'Dwyer...

...In between were numerous cinemas, including the Loew's Beacon between 74th and 75th Streets on Broadway...