Colin Randall writes: Seventeen readers ticked "Like" when Bill Taylor wrote the first article in a series I can still call New to NYC, though this may change if future contributions stray geographically. Here is the second instalment ...
In the United Kingdom it was Boxing Day, 1973. But in the United States it was business as usual and I was starting work at the UK Mission to the United Nations, sandwiched between British Information Services and the consulate on three floors of a relatively low high-rise.
As an absolute beginner in Manhattan, I had no idea that Park and Lexington interrupted the flow of numbered avenues. When I crossed the street at 5th Ave, I supposed that two more blocks would see me on 3rd, where I would quickly find No 845.
I walked several blocks too far north before I realized my mistake, went one more block east and retraced my steps. As a consequence I began my new job by being late.
“I hope this won’t happen every day,” the personnel director said mildly. She seemed convinced that I’d simply overslept but was more disappointed than annoyed. I assured her that I was an early riser and that this had been a geography lesson well learned.
She asked where I was living and blinked twice when I told her 47th Street just off Broadway.
“You do know Broadway runs diagonally, I suppose?” she said.
I didn’t. But I nodded enthusiastically and said that was of little consequence because I was just east of it.
“It’s not a terribly good neighbourhood,” she said, with that abiding middle-class English restraint. Her eyes were very blue. “And not exactly residential. However did you find an apartment there?”
It’s a hotel, I said, adding, without much hope that it might spark recognition, the Ashley. The name rang no bells.
“Perhaps not best as a long-term residence then,” she said. “Quite a few of our people live at the Park Royal over on Central Park West. Once you’ve found your feet, you might find someone there to share with you.”
The Park Royal was a lovely building, one of New York’s original “apartment hotels”, a gracious old lady fallen into reduced circumstances. It was across 73rd St – on the cheaper side – from the back of the Dakota apartments where the likes of John Lennon and Lauren Bacall lived in old-world splendour.
(My knowledge of the rear entrance to the Dakota was, sadly, to stand me in good stead seven years later when Lennon was murdered outside the building and I was working on a tabloid in Philadelphia. Seeking to intercept Ringo Starr as he left the building after visiting Yoko Ono, I was the only journalist to instead get an “interview” with Bacall. That is to say, she cursed me out for being there and I wrote it down. Her invective – which included “vulture” preceded by two adjectives that rhymed – was daunting, if not terribly original.)
It was three months before I moved there, into a one-bedroom apartment, No 602-A, shared with two workmates, both chauffeurs. Leases were seldom if ever officially transferred; keys were simply passed on as one person moved away and another moved in. As long as the rent was paid, the management didn’t seem to care whose name was on the paperwork.
The place had the tiniest kitchen I’d ever seen and a cooking arrangement that didn’t even qualify as a toaster-oven. I was commissioned once by the Village Voice to write a story (which they paid quite handsomely for but never ran) about living for a month on nothing but frozen food. Half of the stuff I bought wouldn’t fit into the little stove and I wound up giving it away to my neighbours, who took it gratefully, even greedily, but probably couldn’t cook it either.
Before that, though, I had to pay my New York dues, which involved a descent perilously close to poverty.
The only job open when I applied at the mission was that of messenger, delivering mail and packages to the UN building and other offices around Manhattan. The pay was laughable (though having to live on it wasn’t in the least bit funny) but it came with a monthly allowance of duty-free liquor at derisorily low prices and a visa that gave me, for as long as the job lasted, residency in the US.
The booze was a lubricant in more ways than one. A couple of bottles of cheap Scotch in the right quarter (supplied and even delivered, with a nod and a wink, by the mission quartermaster) did wonders to speed the passage of official documentation.
I quickly learned there was a huge floating population of locally hired labour in the various missions and consulates. The lesser, non-Foreign-Office jobs tended to be filled by itinerant Brits, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans, with the occasional Canadian, many of them young world travelers working for a few months to rebuild their cash reserves.
Others had been living this way for decades and, though they were not “resident aliens” in the eyes of the US, had no other home. Some were raising families there, including a fair number of West Indians and south Asians. A few of the Brits had never even been back there for a visit. I remember one asking me if trolley buses still ran in London.
There were various bars we’d meet in to trade news of other openings. I only applied for one. I forget the job but it was at the Australian consulate and paid better than being a messenger.
The receptionist gave me an application form and said, or so I thought, “Are you European?”
Yes, I replied. I’m English.
She looked at me strangely. “I said, ‘Do you hiv a pin?’ To write with?”
I filled out the form but I figured as soon as I left, she’d throw it in the trash. Either way, I never did hear back from them.
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