Western civilization resumed on a tarmac stage-set, like a living, frenzied museum of the history of our culture. The capital of the world? Probably, at least to the ‘western world’ and of which we have so many references brought to us by movies and television. We have seen great romances in Central Park, the first urban park in the United States, with surface area of 3-½ square kilometres between Fifth Avenue and Central Park West, from 59th Street to 110th Street.
New York has always been revealed to us through the eyes of movie-makers and painters. Painters like Edward Hopper, who recreated individuality better than anyone else in a mega-city such as this, isolated figures in show cases and shop windows looking out over an ocean of concrete. We can admire much of his work in the Whitney Museum of American Art, in Greenwich Village, alongside the most famous contemporary artists: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock or Georgia O’Keeffe. Because New York is the capital of everything, also of contemporary art: The MoMa, Museum of Modern Art, on 53rd Street between the Fifth and Sixth Avenues, or the Metropolitan on Fifth Avenue. On Fifth Avenue we will also find the legendary jewellery shop, Tiffany’s (which, again, we came to know through the cinema and we can imagine Audrey Hepburn with her nose glued to the window) and, if we wish to experience luxury in its full dimension, we can take a look at Bloomingdale’s or Macy’s. Never, even in a week, would we be able to get to know the city in all its magnitude, but we can get a rough idea by taking the ferry to Staten Island, which gives us a panoramic view of the city and the Statue of Liberty. Manhattan, Midtown, the Village, Soho, Harlem, Chelsea, Chinatown… Each one is a world of its own, a world made up of waves of immigrants from all over the globe, one of progress and culture… And of money. Huge fortunes have sculpted the urban landscape; the optimism of a cash register has created incredible myths: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Rockefeller Center… All made to impress us. And, indeed, it does.
