On up Madison the march of brand names continues — Dolce & Gab-bana, Yves St Laurent, Sonia Rykiel. More intriguingly we encounter (on 70th) the first of five independent bookshops this walk provides. This is the Madison Avenue Bookshop, small and well stocked, famous for the contemptuous aloofness of its erudite staff.
We’ve been walking slightly up hill thus far, on the east side of the Avenue. At the crest of this gentle hill stands the Westbury Hotel, now converted into condominiums, and looking left down the cross streets you can see narrow, tree-crowded vistas of Central Park.
Strolling easily downhill you pass on your right the impossible fantasy that is Ralph Lauren’s shop/mansion on 72nd, a two-way cross street. It’s worth visiting this shop if only to see the quintessence of the Ralph Lauren vision of the good life: the dream made flesh. Across 72nd is the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. None of New York’s churches is particularly distinguished, architecturally, but they are to be valued for their Victorian gothic contribution to the twentieth-century skyscape. Gargoyles, teetering finials and flying buttresses make the perfect decorative counterpoint to the concrete and plate glass angularities of the skyscrapers and office blocks. Diverted as you might be by the life on street level it is always worth looking up in New York every fifty yards or so. It never palls, this prospect of lofty buildings, and, particularly at night, it can be astonishingly beautiful, these soaring masses of stacked lights and the wavy ripple of mirror glass
Up ahead, on 74th Street, is the inverted grey ziggurat that is the Whitney Museum of Modern American Art. The Whitney is a great museum, not so much for what it periodically contains (though its permanent collection is superb) but for the building itself. Solidity, moneyed-heft, integrity are the quiet messages its stone, brass and mahogany seem emphatically to convey. The lifts are gigantic, the finish flawless (no expense has been spared), its scale is impressive and it is astoundingly easy to use. I don’t know what it is about the Whitney that draws me so. I prefer it to the Guggenheim and MoMA (not so far away, either). I think it must be something to do with the proportion and massiveness of its construction. As I pass it every day I can go in when it’s just opened. I often find myself wandering around with only the museum guards for company. In any given week I may flit in for half an hour two or three times.
On up Madison past the discreetly sumptuous wonders of the Carlyle Hotel and we are approaching my destination on 79th Street. This is the New York Society Library — where I work. This is an ancient institution by American standards, dating back to the eighteenth century. The library has moved many times in its history before ending up here in a capacious town house on 79th, between Madison and Park. The library is private — it costs $100 or so a year to join — but it provides personal access to a huge collection of books and journals (you can browse in the stacks) and, more importantly for someone like me, at its summit, rooms with desks where a transitory writer can plug in his computer and, in theory at least, work. It remains a defiantly unmodernized place, with filing cards as well as computerized catalogues, marble sculptures on the wide stairways and a politely formal way of dealing with its members. Its reading room could come out of a gentleman’s club in London — tall, elegant windows, leather armchairs, periodicals displayed on circular tables, people speaking rarely and then in the quietest of whispers.
And this is where I spend my day, venturing out at lunchtime a little further up Madison to E.A.T. (80th Street) — the closest thing to a New York brasserie (as opposed to a pseudo-French one) that the city provides. It welcomes many solo diners, which seems an almost forgotten pleasure these days. Eating a proper lunch alone (rather than a bite of something on the run) is an agreeable pastime but it mustn’t be rushed and needs to be accompanied by some sort of reading matter — book, newspaper or magazine. They don’t chase you out, either, when you’ve finished. You can easily spend an hour in E.A.T. reading and eating and covertly watching the people around you at the same time.
And afterwards, if you require more diversion, just a block away on 5th Avenue is the sprawling bulk of the Metropolitan Museum, an incomparable treasure trove and again the sort of museum, in my opinion, that favours the periodic half-hour visit rather than the day-long, enervating culture-trawl. And, if the Met doesn’t beguile, a couple of blocks north of E.A.T. is my favourite bookstore in the city — Crawford Doyle, another independent bookshop, which not only sells everything in print you might want to read (with great charm and friendliness) but has a thriving antiquarian business to tempt you as well.
The library shuts at the end of the working day and the second leg of my walk commences. I prefer not to walk back down Madison — it’s more of a morning thing, Madison Avenue — so I stroll along 79th, heading eastwards towards Lexington Avenue. This involves crossing Park Avenue and here you are afforded one of the great American vistas: the view south down Park Avenue towards the Met-Life building at its foot. It’s probably best at dusk, with some blue still left in the sky, but with enough gathering gloom to set the refulgent windows of the towering, lit buildings glowing like banked coals.
On to Lexington and a right turn southwards. Lexington is smaller (in that its buildings are lower), narrower and shabbier than its two adjacent avenues to the west and it provides a welcome contrast. From gleaming, pricey, exclusive New York, you enter a neighbourhood, a place where people actually live and shop for themselves. Gone are the designer stores, to be replaced by supermarkets, delis, Chinese laundries. Lexington has its own special bonus, however: as you walk south you are aiming for the Chrysler Building, the world’s most beautiful skyscraper, its silver, art deco, hypodermic needle gleaming gold — if you’re lucky — in the orange evening sun.
You start to walk up hill again, fairly soon, up the steeper rise of Lennox Hill, heading towards Hunter College (part of the City University of New York) with its two aerial pedestrian-ways crossing the avenue. Here there is an intriguing congregation of antique shops and, within the space of a few blocks, three more independent bookstores: Lennox Hill Bookstore (on 73rd), Bookberries (on 71st) and Shakespeare & Co. on 69th. All have their own distinct character and all are worth stopping in to browse. The hegemony of Borders and Barnes & Noble hasn’t — visibly — seemed to have affected independent bookselling in this part of the city, and a visit to any of the five on this walk will remind you of the advantages of plucky independence versus the chain store.
My pit-stop on the walk back is on 73rd, called the Cafe Word-of-Mouth. Downstairs is a takeaway, upstairs is almost a tea-room: Rennie Mackintosh meets art deco, all cherrywood and taupe. The last time I did this walk I inverted it — came up Lex, went down Mad. It had snowed in the night and there were foot-high banks of frozen snow on the sidewalks. It was bitter cold, with a wind that seemed to take the skin off your face. I stopped in Cafe Word-of-Mouth for sustenance. A big caffe latte, scrambled eggs and crispy bacon. I read the newspaper and thawed out, then plodded off up Lexington to the library, full and warm.