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The magnet for tourists,
the symbol of the city, Manhattan is probably the most deceptive of the boroughs
to outsiders who generally limit themselves to quick looks at the Theater
District around Times Square (moving gingerly past the seediness of 42nd Street
west of Broadway), the shopping promenade of Fifth Avenue, the munificence of
the temples of finance on and near Wall Street, the eccentricities of bohemian
life in the East Village and Soho, the exotics of Chinatown, or the special
flavours of Little Italy and Harlem. At first glance, Manhattan is only the city
of skyscrapers, glaring lights, and frenzied pace, an island of the strange, the
neurotic, and the avant-garde. Crammed into its 23 square miles (57 square
kilometres) are more than 1,400,000 residents. Its waterfront, formed by the
Harlem, East, and Hudson rivers, is 43 miles (69 Kilometres) in length, but only
scattered groups of slum children swim in the pollution; and the few fisherment
find only scanty catches.
To the residents of the island, each
section is a hometown. Those who live in the West 70s, 80s, and 90s -- the Upper
West Side, though streets run above 200 at the northern tip -- know their
neighbourhoods as a cosmopolitan mixture of languages, occupations, and income
levels. It is the origin of much of the chaos of the party. On the Upper East
Side, east of Central Park, is a different mixture, generally more
affluent.
The Chelsea area of the West 20s, with its tenements,
renovated brownstones, and huge cooperatives built by labour unions, has a more
sedate pace than the East Village and Soho (derived from "south of Houston
Street" ), comprising much of the old Lower East Side and containing the city's
major concentration of struggling writers and artists. Greenwich Village, the
old centre of bohemian life, has become a favourite dwelling place for affluent
professionals and successful authors and artists. Harlem means more than just
tenements, housing projects, and black politics. It means a vibrant street life
ranging from sports to stoop seminars, and it is spiced with luxury apartment
houses with doormen, inhabited almost entirely by blacks. Yorkville, in the East
80s, retains pockets of Czech, Hungarian, and German cultures in a clash of old
tenements and towering luxury apartment houses. The neighhourhood taverns of the
Irish proliferate through Inwood at the northernmost part of the island, where
the borough of Manhattan spills over the Harlem River to encompass an enclave of
a few square blocks within mainland Bronx. In Inwood lie manhattan's few
remaining forested acres, and on open recreation areas the Irish keep alive
their national sports of hurling and Gaelic football -- much as courts are
maintained for bocciball games in Little Italy many miles to the south. On
Morningside Heights around Columbia University, the civilities of the academic
world overlook the bleak stretches of Harlem below and to the east and
north.
Even fantastic Lower Manhattan, from the Battery, with
its ferry slips at the island's tip, to City Halls, has begun taking on the
atmosphere of a neighbourhood. Apartment houses have gone up in the vicinity of
City Hall, and the overwhelming skyscraper jungle around Wall Street, which is
home to hundreds of financial and insurance institutions and some of the
nation's largest hanks, exerts international power.