Salut!

Not a Native New Yorker: the final chapter before paradise is paved

All good things ...

In what Bill Taylor has decided should be the last of his appetising morsels of New York nostalgia, he recounts the twists and turns of a long road trip out of the city in the Cadillac you see above (the picture, he thinks, was taken in Indiana). See all items in the series at http://www.francesalut.com/not-a-native-new-yorker/ - and we won't charge you a dollar-and-a-half just to see 'em ..

Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know where you’ve got till you’ve gone…

Joni Mitchell may or may not forgive the paraphrase but, either way, it was time for a break from New York. Since I’d taken up residence in Manhattan, I’d seen very little of the United States other than the small Pennsylvania town my girlfriend (and wife-to-be) Lesley hailed from and the small Connecticut city where she went to university. And the view from the buses and trains that took me there.

New York small talk with John Lennon, music in the Manhattan air

Zubin Mehta conducts a concert in Central Park in the 1970s. Bill was probably in the crowd. Image: New York Philharmonic Digital Archives

With his delicious mouthfuls of New York reminiscence - see them all at http://www.francesalut.com/not-a-native-new-yorker/ - Bill Taylor has struck a chord with readers. By which I mean they have enabled Salut! to get some.

'There's music on Clinton Street all thru the evening ...' sang Leonard Cohen. Bill remembers something of the same from his younger years in New York ...

From metallic lullabies of Broadway to Midnight Cowboy on 42nd Street

Driving east from Marseille and, next day, west from Nice, my companions of the road included hundreds of bikers on their way to Saint-Tropez for a Harley-Davidson convention, or out and about on the highways of the Côte d' Azur having already arrived. This is the sort of machine that fires Bill Taylor's soul. Here are his latest reminiscences from the New York of his early adulthood, with passing references to Harleys and more prosaic ways of getting around the city. I'll leave Bill to explain the photo I chose ...

Acquiring New York ways: how to face down Texans and ignore corpses

Even scarier when young

This is the third in Bill Taylor's series of New York reminiscences - see the last one, New to NYC: lost in Manhattan, cursed by Lauren Bacall, at http://www.francesalut.com/2014/12/taylor.html and you can link from there (or here) to the first, New to NYC: waking up in a city that never sleeps. Another treat from the keyboard of the lad from Land of the Prince Bishops who chose a life in the New World ...

Adaptation plays a major role in the art of survival. I was a green-as-grass 25-year-old from a northeastern English coalmining town of about 20,000 people. I had an urgent need to find my feet in a raw, almost impossibly demanding city of eight million.

New to NYC: lost in Manhattan, cursed by Lauren Bacall

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 ...

New to NYC: waking up in a city that never sleeps

The extended Salut! empire always does its bit to encourage young writers. Occasionally, it offers a helping hand to older ones, too. Here's Bill Taylor, my old pal from local newspaper and folk club days in the North East, with some charming reminiscences of being Down and Out in NYC. That's Bill above, with Lesley, the Pennsylvania lass who became Mrs Taylor, pictured early in his American adventure ...