Toast To December In Manhattan

I wanted to write something about the breathtaking beauty of Manhattan in December. And what is the result? A roundup of the usual cliches. The evening light becomes “magical.” Christmas lights in trees, windows and hotel lobbies “sparkle like diamonds” against “the black velvet night.”

There is much more that is worse. I have thrown it in the trash. It is a melancholy experience to want urgently to write of something beautiful and end up with nothing but embarrassments.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote wonderfully about the beauty of Manhattan. It is no easy trick. Fitzgerald’s Manhattan evenings are glorious not only because his New York is a glorious city, but also because he sees it through eyes that are young and yearning, and not yet so hardened by experience that they look too closely for tinsel.

Fitzgerald’s beautiful Manhattan was a summer place. Under lavender skies of late afternoon he hurried down thrilling avenues to meet irresistible New York girls.

I am of an age now to think of them as New York women, but they are still irresistible, though not so irresistible in summer as in December. December is New York’s month.

In December almost everything in this amazing city is irresistible.

In summer’s New York steam bath, when all the swells flee to the Hamptons, the islands or the Wyoming hills, the city is utterly resistible. In summer, New York is not amazing, except perhaps to the latest crop of young Fitzgeralds.

Do they still rush off at sunset to rendezvous in darkened bars of East Side hotels? Oh, those dark and lovely bars! And the shock of the ice-cold martini, and the piano playing the bittersweet songs of Rodgers and Hart. And … Enough. It is December that is New York’s month for people of all ages. The lights are a big part of it. Because night comes in midafternoon at this season, long before quitting time, the office towers blaze with light.

A million windows lit in the city’s gigantic file-cabinet towers work something like a miracle. By daylight these overbearing office boxes are often monstrous. In a December midafternoon, however, even the nightmarish architecture of Sixth Avenue becomes beautiful.

The beauty of that light may be deepened by the New Yorker’s subconscious sense of living in an oceanic city at the edge of the cold, gray, scary Atlantic, destroyer of Titanics. Against its dark oceanic background, December lights make the city seem - strange word for New York - cozy.

The mercantile bustle in streets and shops is part of it, too. New York is first and foremost a market town. Its primary business is selling. Its chief topic of conversation is money.

All the rest of it - the art, the music, the theater - exists only because New York is such a prosperous market town that its citizens can afford to support a few cultural amenities.

December is the great month in this place where commerce is king. It is a monthlong equivalent of market day in an old-fashioned county seat. The streets are packed with modern versions of horses, wagons, carts and buggies. Double-parked trucks block narrow streets. Honking, bleating cars sit bumper to bumper, making a joyous noise unto the lords of commerce and filling the air with oily grit. It is as if absolutely everybody has come to town. Business is roaring.

Way downtown, Wall Street is half mad with the ecstasy of profit. In midtown, the sidewalks are not for strolling, but for aggressive locomotion. Loaded shopping bags whack shins and thighs. Wheeled boxes smash into heels and tendons. What a jolly time! How exciting to be borne along on these consumption-crazed human waves searching for fantasies at which to hurl money.

The astonishing light that is Thomas Edison’s gift to New York and the exciting busyness of crowded streets make the city feel as if a great festival is in progress. Indeed, one is. The city is celebrating the triumph of commerce.

At times the place suggests an absurdly oversized village, and please let us not argue the point. I am too delighted with this ravishing December New York to engage in sour disputation. Yes, I have seen the beggars with their cardboard cups upheld. It is a tough town, too, a terribly tough town, but also this December - I’ll say it anyhow - magical.

xxxx