The City
There is no city on earth like this one and every soul in it knows. The Empire State Building opened in May, the tallest thing human beings have ever put up, and on a clear night you can pick out the top of it from the deck of a ship an hour out to sea. There is a band playing behind every third laundry door and the liquor in front of them is illegal, which has slowed absolutely nobody down. The subway runs till dawn. The docks never close at all. Somewhere uptown a man is inventing a dance this evening, and by Friday the entire country will be doing it badly.
Times are hard, and you can buy an apple for a nickel off a fellow who used to sell insurance. The families are shooting at each other over the docks and the unions and the numbers. New York carries all of that in one pocket and the greatest decade in living memory in the other, and it does not appear to notice the weight. That is the trick of the place, and nobody has ever explained it satisfactorily.
Page Nine
Page nine is where the paper keeps the good stuff, wedged between the racing results and an advertisement for corn plasters. Tuesday it was the airship over the Battery at four in the morning, running dark, no markings, and not one registry office on either side of the Atlantic willing to claim her. Thursday a bookkeeper in Astoria woke up fluent in Portuguese. He has never been to Portugal. He is thrilled about it. His wife is not.
And when the Silver Kestrel comes down Fifth Avenue at rooftop height with his engine screaming, half the city is out on the sidewalk waving its hats, traffic stops for eleven solid minutes, one patrolman writes a citation he has no idea how to serve, and the morning edition gives the whole business two column inches under the corn plasters. That is the deal in this town. Something magnificent happens on Tuesday, everybody agrees it was worth seeing, and the shift still starts at six on Wednesday.
