Manhattan ’45 by Jan Morris

Cheers to either MMW or MLP for putting me onto this one. From a NY Times review, 1987:

JAN MORRIS, one of the very brightest travel writers, gives us here an account of travel to a place the author never visited. That place is Manhattan in 1945. Ms. Morris came close, visiting the island first in 1953 and often thereafter. Yet there remains a difference between having been there and having not quite been there. The difference tantalizes the reader.

Thus, Ms. Morris’s rendition of the city’s 1945 moods conveys what it felt like to live in New York at that time. For much of the detail, Ms. Morris has depended on research at the New-York Historical Society and on conversations with battalions of New York friends who were there. The passages dealing with later times reflect her own reactions and convey what it feels like to travel in the city. Jan Morris is the traveler we would all like to be. World-weary only to the point of being prepared at any moment to explore geography, speech or native behavior in search of a new nugget of understanding that will revive her spirit, she finds it; we probably would not.

”Manhattan ‘45” also gives the reader a short but incisive course on the difficulty of writing history. From 1945 to 1953, the city changed markedly. One can sense Ms. Morris’s gropings for the texture of a reality she can read about but not directly feel. One vital aspect of it she understands profoundly: that in 1945 New York stood at a pinnacle of collective strength that resembled at their peak the power of Venice, Alexandria or Byzantium – all seaports too. Not quite so accurately perceived is that the collective consciousness of power did not overcome individual feelings of weakness at the immense unknown future ahead.

The title, Morris tells us, evokes a cocktail or a gun.

Should they bring back Miss Subway?:

Yet by and large the subway was tolerantly regarded. Nothing too terrible was likely to happen to you down there, even in the middle of the night, and the competition to be “Miss Subways” was one of the town’s better-known distractions—she was elected every eight months by passenger vote, and for three months her picture was displayed in every one of 6700 subway cars, resolutely smiling. People with nowhere to go sometimes used the subway as a temporary home—a nickel would get you in, it was warm and dry, you could stay down there as long as you liked, ride where you wanted, and at its extremities you could get out on a beach somewhere, or in the countryside.

Food has unquestionably improved:

There were some truly exceptional tastes to be ti too, especially in seafoods. Nothing in the world could beat a sott-shelled crab from Chesapeake bay, eaten preferably inside a crusty roll on a street corner down-town. Incomparable oyster stews were prepared at the Grand Central Oyster Bar by Viktor Yesenky and his thirty-six oystermen. Louis Massan’s waterside restaurant on Fulton Street, beside the fish market, offered its customers (sitting at communal tables) five kinds of roe, tongue of cod, sturgeon’s liver, squid stew and the cheeks of cod and salmon.

The trouble began with the dread word gourmet. It was odd but true that the bourgeoisie of Manhattan, the most cosmopolitan city in the world, knew very little about foreign food-the menu at Kirby Allen, a smart restaurant on Madison Avenue serving the carriage trade on cook’s night off, included such items as “Lasagna, a Very Interesting Italian Dish.” Few diners-out took their food at all seriously, and the best-known food guide of the day, Lawton Mackall’s Knife and Fork in New York, was not very urbane either-“eminently okey-dokey” was among its categories of commendation.

The great mayors have always been social and media characters. La Guardia

No excerpt tops that photo on the cover, a Weegee shot from Sammy’s At The Bowery, 1943. What happened to that woman? Her look is modern and yet a little off. From Weegee Wiki:

Weegee is spuriously credited for answering “f/8 and be there” when asked about his photographic technique. Whether or not he actually said it, the saying has become so widespread in photographic circles as to have become a cliché. Yet other sources, in mentioning his standard technique (f/16, Pressbulb25, focus at 10′), illustrate the probable fiction behind the mention of ‘f/8’. A book written about Weegee, Weegee’s Secrets published in 1953, says:

For the record, Weegee shot the majority of his photos from 6-feet at f/22 and 10-feet at f16. These smaller f/stops provided excellent depth of field. When hunting for photos, Weegee would stalk the streets with his camera set to 10-feet and f/16. This distance was useful for shooting people full-length. He also carried a flashlight for adjusting his camera settings in the dark.

Some of Weegee’s photos, like the juxtaposition of society grandes dames in ermines and tiaras and a glowering street woman at the Metropolitan Opera (The Critic, 1943), were later revealed to have been staged.

My iPhone is fixed between f/1.5 and f/2.8.