Manhattan '45

By Jan Morris

Book Overview

On June 25, 1945, 14,000 American service men and women sailed into New York aboard the British liner Queen Mary . They were the first big contingent to return from the victory over Nazi Germany, and the city that awaited them stood at a historical climax of power, confidence, hope, and prestige, still curiously laced with a provincial innocence. In this new book by one of the most gifted stylists in the English language, we disembark at Manhattan with the returning GIs, and discover for ourselves how the city was. We ride the vanished trollies, the El, the Hudson River ferry-boats. We meet characters as disparate as developer Robert Moses, Sherman Billingsley of the Stork Club, painter Jackson Pollock, and Joe Gould, a Greenwich Village denizen who claimed to speak the seagull language. We explore Harlem and the Lower East Side, we inspect the menu at the legendary Le Pavillon, we board the Twentieth Century Limited, and we swoon to Sinatra at Radio City Music Hall. Few aspects of Manhattan are neglected in Jan Morris's affectionate evocation--slum and Social Register are both here, City College and Times Square, the genius of the New York School and the panache of the New York Fire Department. Manhattan '45 gets its title, so the author tells us in her epilogue, because it sounds partly like a kind of gun, and partly like champagne, and in these pages the victorious, celebratory, and explosive Manhattan of four decades ago finds a permanent souvenir.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195038703
• ISBN13: 9780195038705
• Release Date: April 1987
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 273 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.1" x 5.9"

Customer Reviews

Required Reading for Lovers of New York

Jan Morris' favorite city is presented in its moment of greatest hope, when the war was won and America was in a blissful state indeed. Morris always writes beautifully of places as characters in and of themselves. These are usually distilled in essay form to show up some single, wonderful characteristic of the place. She's always done that better than any other travel writer, even if it sounds like pigeon-holing. But this amazing book does anything but pigeonhole. Morris has composed a kind of love letter about the city, expanding on race, class, and its sheer motion. There's a great deal of history inside, giving a little background and color to how Manhattan came to be what it was in 1945. Mayors and miscellaneous cranks, celebrities and neighborhood personalities all share the stage. It's a book of history, trivia, memories, gossip, and sheer fun. Gorgeously written. A MUST for Manhattanites and fans of the Big Apple.

Great Sense of Place

Few books on New York's past are as rich and revealing as this work. The author does an excellent job of recreating the sense of place of New York. Urban culture, economy, and race relations are dealt with in a very creative way. I found that while its focus is the New York of the 1940s this book really is about a larger American experience that reaches into our day.