Books: "A Town Without Time" By Gay Talese

 

A Town Without Time: Gay Talese's New York

By Gay Talese; introduction by Alex Vadukul

Mariner Classics; hardcover, 432 pages; $29.99; available today, Tuesday, December 3rd

Gay Talese is a treasured writer who created, according to Tom Wolfe, an inventive form of nonfiction writing called "The New Journalism." He began his career at the New York Times in 1953 and worked at "the paper of record" for twelve years before moving on to Esquire, where he wrote some of the most celebrated magazine pieces ever written. Talese was born in Ocean City, New Jersey, in 1932, and he currently lives in New York City with his wife, Nan. His celebrated books include The Kingdom and the Power, on the inner workings of the Times; Honor Thy Father, Thy Neighbor's Wife, Upon the Sons, The Voyeur's Motel, and Bartleby & Me, which we reviewed in September 2023.

The compelling new book, A Town Without Time, is a collection of Talese's writing over the past 60 years, a veritable history of New York City. These are stories about daring bridge builders, disappearing gangsters, intrepid Vogue editors, and unassuming doormen who have seen too much.

The settings take you in to places of the boldface names of the big town, from George Plimpton's apartment to an electric studio session with Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga recording their debut, and the tense newsroom of a burgeoning New York Times. 

These are stories that have a wit, elegance, and depth of insight that are all his own, capturing the city's vibrant beating pulse by capturing the charming, the eccentric, and the overlooked. 

Talese excavates the city around him with a reporter's eye and an artist's flair to create these indelible portraits of the people who make it what it is. The fourteen pieces included here are a time capsule of what New York once and, at its heart, still is. 

There is Talese's first publication with Esquire, "New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed." Our readers will surely be interested in the full reprinting of his 1964 book, The Bridge, on the construction of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. "Gino's Long Run" is a study of a vanishing New York told through the lens of an Italian restaurant. 

You can't complete the tapestry of a city like New York without stories on famous names. "Looking for Hemingway" is Talese's profile of George Plimpton and the Paris Review, while "The Kingdoms, the Powers, and the Glories of the New York Times," the piece that became his book The Kingdom and the Powers. There also is the whimsical "Journey into the Cat Jungle," a lost gem about the secret lives of street cats.

In this excerpt from The Bridge, Talese writes of how how divergent views were of the project connecting two of New York's boroughs: "On the Staten Island side, opposition to the bridge was nothing like it was in Brooklyn, where more than twice as many people and buildings were affected by the bridge; in fact, in Staten Island there had long been powerful factions that dreamed of the day when a bridge might be built to link their borough more firmly with the rest of New York City...

The island first acquired its rural quality when the British controlled it three hundred years ago, encouraging farming rather than manufacturing, and that was the way many Staten Islanders wanted it to remain - quiet and remote. But on the last day of 1958, after years of debate and doubt, plans for the building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge finally became definite and the way of those who cherished the traditional life was in decline. But many more Staten Island residents were overjoyed with the news; they had wanted a change, had grown bored with the provincialism, and now hoped the bridge would trigger a boom - and suddenly they had their wish.

The bridge announcement was followed by a land rush. Real estate values shot up. A small lot that cost $1,200 in 1958 was worth $6,000 in 1959, and larger pieces of property worth $100,000 in the morning often sold for $200,000 that afternoon...

The bridge had become, in early 1959, months before any workmen started to put it up, a symbol of hope.

'We are on our way to surmounting the barrier of isolation.' announced the borough president, Albert V. Maniscalco - while other leaders were conceding that the bridge, no matter what it might bring, could not really hurt Staten Island. What was there to hurt? 'Nothing has ever been successful in Staten Island in its entire history,' said one resident, Robert Regan, husband of opera singer Eileen Farrell. He pointed out that there had been attempts in the past to establish a Staten Island opera company, a semi-professional football team, a dog track, a boxing arena, a symphony orchestra, a midget auto track, a basketball team - and all failed. 'The only thing that might save this island,' he said, 'is a lot of new people.'

Over in Brooklyn, however, it was different. They did not need or want new people. They had a floundering, middle-class, almost all-white community in the Bay Ridge section, and they were satisfied with what they had. Bay Ridge, which is in western Brooklyn along the ridge of Upper New York Bay and Lower New York Bay, commands a superb view of the Narrows, a mile-wide tidal strait that connects the two bays, and through which pass all the big ships entering or leaving New York. Among its first settlers were thousands of Scandinavians, most of them Danes, who liked Bay Ridge because of its nearness to the water and the balmy breeze. And in the late nineteenth century, Bay Ridge became one of the most exclusive sections of Brooklyn.

It was not that now, in 1959, except possibly along its shorefront section, which was lined with trees and manicured lawns and with strong sturdy homes, one of them occupied by the late body builder Charles Atlas. The rest of Bay Ridge was almost like any other Brooklyn residential neighborhood... The whites were mostly Catholic. The big churches, some with parishes in excess of 12,000, were supported by the late-curtain Irish and aspiring Italians, and the politics, usually Republican, were run by them, too. There were still large numbers of Swedes and Danes, and also many Syrain shopkeepers, and there were old Italian immigrants (friends of the shoemaker) who were hanging on, but it was the younger, second- and third-generation Italians, together with the Irish, who determined the tone of Bay Ridge. They lived, those not yet rich enough for the shorefront homes, in smaller brown brick houses jammed together along tree-lined streets, and they competed each day for a parking place at the curb. They shopped along busy sidewalks clustered with tiny neighborhood stores with apartments above, and there were plenty of small taverns on corners, and there was the Hamilton House for a good dinner at night - provided they wore a jacket and tie - and there was a dimly lit sidestreet supper-club on the front barstool of which sat a curvesome, wrinkled platinum blonde with a cigarette, but no match.

So Bay Ridge, in 1959, had things in balance; it was no longer chic, but it was tidy, and most people wanted no change, no new people, no more traffic. And they certainly wanted no bridge. When the news came that they would get one, they local politicians were stunned. Some women began to cry. A number of people refused to believe it. They had heard this talk before, they said, pointing out that as far back as 1888 there had been plans for a railroad runner that would link Brooklyn and Staten Island. And in 1923 New York's Mayor Hylan even broke ground for a combined rail-and-automobile runner to Staten Island, and all that happened was that the city lost a half-million dollars and now has a little hole somewhere going nowhere.

And there had been talk about this big bridge across the Narrows for twenty years, they said, and each time it turned out to be just talk. In 1950 there was talk that a bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island was a good thing, but what if the Russians blew it up during a war: Would not the United States Navy ships docked in New York Harbor be trapped behind the collapsed bridge at the harbor's entrance? And a year later, there was more talk of a tunnel to Staten Island, and then more debate on the bridge, and it went on this way, on and on. So, they said, in 1959, maybe this is still all talk, no action, so let's not worry."