I came here to live in my twenty-first year. The first several months I camped out in the apartment of the mother of a college friend who rarely used it, and which I did not know when I accepted the invitation, was a 16 room duplex at 740 Park Avenue. Within a year I moved into my own first apartment which I shared with a college fraternity brother was a one bedroom on the first floor in the back of an old five story (walkup) building at 163 East 87th Street (still standing). Tiny, on the first floor in the back of the building, with a bathroom, a bedroom and a kitchenette in a wall closet in the living room. The rent was $110 a month, split two ways. And life had just begun.
![]() | ![]() | | Six -year-old Spike Lee on the cover of New York's Annual Yesteryear issue. | ![]() | | Tom Wolfe’s reportage and writing style defined the new New York. | ![]() |
All this from looking at the latest issue of New York today. I was living here when the first New York it the newstands. It was a thin supplement in the Sunday Herald-Tribune. It had color unlike the very serious “good grey Times” Sunday magazine which was gritty serious. The Trib’s new supplement raised the news stakes with it, and it was the right time, the right note and the context. To a new young New Yorker, this was the future.
New York was to become, by the time it became its own weekly magazine and not part of the Trib, uptown hip – sophisticated, groundbreaking, literary, cool, now. (The Village Voice was unalterably the downtown hip – and The Village was downtown – no SoHo, etc. which was a half decade away from establishing as the artists were beginning to move into the former industrial district).
The Trib incidentally was the "Republican" paper (to the Times'"Democrat"). The art director Milton Glaser and editor Clay Felker were New York's creators, with Barbara Goldsmith (a Founding Editor), Jimmy Breslin, George Goodman (writing under the nom de plume Adam Smith), Gail Sheehy, Gloria Steinem. Barbara Goldsmith wrote a widely imitated column "The Creative Environment" in which she interviewed Picasso, Marcel Breuer, George Balanchine, and I.M. Pei; Gael Greene wrote the dining column, Harold Clurman covered theatre; a newcomer named Woody Allen wrote some humor pieces; and a new journalist, Tom Wolfe created a new style of journalism, with his edgy, zesty wham-bam-glam-blam language about the what and the where and the who. Not like anybody else, Tom Wolfe's reportage and writing style defined the vibe of the new New York, New York.
The hippest crowd of all in town at that moment were the fashion photographers – Irving Penn, Melvin Sokolsky, Bill Helburn, Steve Horn, Richard Avedon, Jerry Shatzberg, Bill King, Duane Michals and dozens of others of equal note and comparable talent, and always surrounded by beautiful fashion models who were famous faces if not in name.
These were the days when Vreeland was a major force in the fashion world, soaking up the new culture of New York. Moving right along and coming up beside them were the Pop Artists, the new modern artists including Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Larry Poons, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns and many more. They all convened every night at Max’ Kansas City on Park Avenue South in the 20s. There was a kid down in the Village who wrote his own songs and friends lamented that he didn’t have the voice to become a star with his great material. Peter, Paul and Mary took his work mainstream with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and a few minutes later, Bobby Dylan was recording his own songs and becoming a major star.
|
|
