By Donald True Van Deusen
Like many expatriate New Yorkers since the September 11 attack on the
World Trade Center, I have been in "A New York State of Mind." Just longing
for a trip "on the Hudson River line...my heart's in the Big Town...Don't
care if it's Chinatown or around Riverside...I'm in a New York State of
mind."
I always think of the city in terms of its songs. No city has more
memorable music written about it. They were still playing what some thought
of as it's theme song, "East side, west side, all around the town," from
hurdy gurdies when I was a boy, not long after Al Smith, used it when running
for President against FDR.
Although there are five boroughs, everyone I knew, agreed the place I
grew up in, Manhattan, was, in fact, the city. No one said it better than
that consummate New Yorker team of Rodgers and Hart: "We'll have Manhattan,
the Bronx and Staten Island too. It's lovely going through the zoo. It's
very fancy on old Delancey Street you know. The subway charms us so...and
tell me what street compares with Mott Street in July? Sweet pushcarts
gliding by...We'll go to Coney and eat baloney on a roll. In Central park
we'll stroll, where our first kiss we stole. Soul to soul...We'll turn
Manhattan into an isle of joy."
Almost all New York expatriates end up expressing George M. Cohan's
hearty refrain when they part after getting together on some foreign shore:
"Give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square, Tell all the gang
at 42nd Street that I will soon be there. Whisper of how I'm yearning to
mingle with that old-time throng; Give my regards to old Broadway and say
that I'll be there, e'er long."
It was during the Great Depression that Al Dubin and Harry Warren urged
millions of moviegoers to "come along and listen to the Lullaby of Broadway"
where "when a Broadway baby says good night, it's early in the morning." It
was when they asked you to "come and meet those dancing feet on the avenue
I'm taking you to, Forty Second Street...where the underworld can meet the
elite...Naughty, bawdy, gawdy, sporty, forty-second street."
During World War II, Comden and Green told newcomers to the city: "New York, New York, A helluva town. The Bronx is up and the Battery's down and
people ride in a hole in the ground...Where no one lives on account of the
pace, but seven million are screaming for space."
I went all over New York in fact and in song--to "The Bowery, the
Bowery," where some said, "I won't go there anymore" and to "Chinatown, my
Chinatown" and to NYU located where some sang about a girl named "Rose of
Washington Square."
Many of my happiest days were when I would "Take the A-train...the quickest way to Harlem" to hear some "Harlem Nocturne" or go " Stompin' at the
Savoy" when "the home of sweet romance--Savoy, It wins you at a glance" and
I would shout out with my friends, to "let me off uptown."
When I left New York and went in the Air Force in 1948, I would go into
record stores all over the country and listen to a musical tone poem to the
city by Gordon Jenkins called "Manhattan Tower."
There was one cheery section singing out a rallying cry that might be
sung today: "Listen all you New Yorkers, there's a rumor going around, that
a lot of you good people are thinking of leaving this here town, well you
better come to me before you go, because I've been to all those places and I
know." It compared the many city charms with others such as: "Chicago's
all right, it's got Marshall Fields and Soldiers Field and it's on a nice
lake, but it hasn't got the hansoms in the park it hasn't got the skyline
after dark, that's why New York's my home, may I never leave it, New York's
my home, sweet home..." Another part of that song expressed it perfectly:
"When you leave New York, you don't go nowhere."
That record started with a mournful lament about how, "it was raining the
first time I saw my tower, my tower in Manhattan," and ended with a thought
that is even more poignant today, saying: "I knew I would return, that I
must return, for I left my heart behind in that tower, that tower in
Manhattan."
