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At a Chinese restaurant Simon Hoggart’s fortune cookie read: ‘You like Chinese food’: New York, New York.
At a Chinese restaurant Simon Hoggart’s fortune cookie read: ‘You like Chinese food’: New York, New York. Photograph: Bruce Gilden
At a Chinese restaurant Simon Hoggart’s fortune cookie read: ‘You like Chinese food’: New York, New York. Photograph: Bruce Gilden

The amazing rudeness of New York City, 1991

This article is more than 1 year old

Considering all the violence and squalor, how could anyone still love the Big Apple?

To coincide with the UK release of Brian De Palma’s ‘ill starred’ The Bonfire of the Vanities, the Observer Magazine of 17 March 1991 considered the ‘violence, squalor and homelessness’ of New York and wondered whether anybody still loved the city that called itself the capital of the world (‘New York New York: Bright Lights Big Bonfire’).

Simon Hoggart wrote that it was precisely this self-absorption that made New York so fascinating. ‘The celebrated rudeness is a part of the city’s esprit de corps. It’s not so much offensive as defensive; its object is to make you pass by quickly on life’s sidewalk. It says: don’t get involved with me, don’t waste my time.’

At a Chinese restaurant his fortune cookie read: ‘You like Chinese food.’ A very New York fortune cookie. ‘Quite witty, really. Also rather rude.’ New Yorkers were also oddly proud of the crime. ‘To have to admit that you have never been robbed, or burgled, or held at knife point is to admit a special kind of failure. What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you even worth mugging?’

One Yorkshire businessman who lived there admitted the optimism sometimes got him down: ‘People are endlessly approachable. You don’t see anybody taking the mickey out of commercials.’ Nostalgia for cynical British consumers must be high on the list of burnout warning signs.

Quentin Crisp, however, was still relishing living there. ‘What even other gay people cannot understand is that my life has been a strange journey from the very edge of ostracism to the heart of the world. I now live in the most sophisticated city in the world and I do as I damn well please.’

Matthew Stevenson, who had lived in Brooklyn for 10 years, said in the 50s, it ‘turned into one of those home towns, like Bruce Springsteen’s, that everyone wanted to be from, but where no one wanted to live’. How rude.

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