I saw the Twin Towers only once, and that from a distance, and now they're gone. So in my memory the architectural icons of New York city remain the Empire State, the Chrysler Building, even the Woolworth Building, writes Godfrey Fitzsimons.
Before I went to live there for a while, I had one image of it fixed in my mind. It was probably from the movies. Manhattan, night, and I'm looking down from a high floor at the checkerboard lights of the skyscraper setbacks and the twin headlight beams of the cars and taxis probing their way between the plumes of subterranean steam along the avenues.
And imagining a black-and-white somebody like Jack Lemmon or Fred MacMurray in a Brooks Brothers suit knocking off for the day from his job at the Acme Insurance Corp, picking up a pack of Camels from the cigar booth right there in the lobby of the Acme building, and heading for Penn Station and the bar-car of the commuter train to Darien, New Rochelle or Old Saybrook.
Beads and kaftans
And when I got there I found it was just like that, only in colour, and only the bit about the skyscrapers and the lights. I never saw Jack or Fred. This was 1968, and men from the 1950s with short post-army haircuts, if they survived at all, were the enemy of the new tribe with the Afros and Yoruba head-dresses, the beads and kaftans, and the passionate recoil from the cosy respectable values represented by their parents' shelf of National Geographic magazine.
Checker cab from Kennedy. Down through Elmhurst and Jackson Heights and into . . . Harlem? The driver reaches back and snaps down the locks on the passenger doors. "Is that for security?" asks Mr Greenhorn from the back seat (this on 125th Street yet, just weeks after the ghettos exploded). "Yeah, it's better," comes the laconic reply. Welcome to "Amerika", as subversive youth characterised it then.
Hey Jude played over and over on the jukebox of the Brass Rail where we ate occasional steaks. Hair opened to much media furore. I decided to decline an invitation to an Esalen-style "encounter session" one weekend in upstate New York, where they all lay on the floor in a circle and held hands.
A mantra - that quintessential Sixties accessory - echoes in my brain: 110th, 103rd, 96th, 86th, 79th, 72nd, 66th, 59th, 50th, 42nd, 34th, 28th, 23rd, 18th, 14th. I can still recite all the stops on the IRT Broadway Downtown Local as the city's place-names floated into the consciousness and established themselves there. The romantic allure of Pomander Alley and Morningside Heights and Far Rockaway. The weird memorability of Spuiten Duyvil and Throgs Neck.
And if it wasn't Lemmon or MacMurray, other famous faces would do. I passed Norman Mailer in Times Square, almost as broad as he was tall. One day I got a glance (I swear it!) from Tallulah Bankhead coming out of the Waldorf-Astoria on the arm of her drinking companion, a bald man in a blazer. She'd been to a "Stars for Humphrey" presidential rally I was covering (Daddy William S., after all, had been both governor of the state of Georgia and speaker of the House).
Central Park
On another sunny Gotham day I wandered into Central Park with a borrowed Leica and found Woody Allen playing baseball on the Heckscher Diamond, while Neil Simon kibitzed from a bench. There was this thing called the Broadway Show League (maybe there still is), where the casts and crews of the current productions took each other on. Woody was appearing in the stage version of Play It Again, Sam at the time. I still have the photograph I took of him, swatting mightily at the plate.
Then there was the elderly man who hung round the South Street Seaport Museum, below the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, right next to the Fulton Fish Market. He asked my name, and I asked his. Cantalupo, he said.
Not a common name, I said, and he agreed. Then he spotted the address on my bag-tag and launched into a series of corny Irish blessings, "May the road rise to meet you. . .", all that stuff, holding me transfixed like the Ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one of three (me, just my luck).
Spilled the beans
I escaped with ill grace, but later I learned a couple of things which seemed to tie up. First, the city had had to move in to loosen the octopus-like grip of the Cosa Nostra on the fish market, right there next to the Seaport Museum. Then I read that a certain wise guy, who had been "like a son" to the late Joseph Colombo and counsellor to the late Carlo Gambino, had spilled the beans on his playmates by way of a hidden tape-recorder supplied to him by the FBI. He had then graciously allowed himself to be put into the Witness Protection Programme and had written a book called Body Mike.
His name was, and possibly still is, Joe Cantalupo. I wonder if they could by any chance be related? Maybe I should have been more tolerant of Mr Cantalupo Snr. I could be sleeping with the fishes.
And so from South Street along the Bowery, where an alkie sat on the footpath gaping in a stupefied way at his whisky bottle, which had slipped from his fingers and rolled into the gutter. I picked it up and handed it back, and he looked up at me in mute amazement that I hadn't made off with it.
No, I don't think he was famous.