One of the very first things I almost always remember is how keenly aware I was of the way the northeastern weather changed from late summer to back-to-school autumn plus Indian summer and then to early midwinter as time moved on into my first year-round stay in New York at long last. Not that I hadn’t already had to adjust to temperature changes that were every bit as different from the range of variations (mostly above zero and seldom more than ninety plus or minus degrees) that I had grown up getting used to responding to down south. But a difference was that when I was on the road with the band, adjustment had never been a matter of the coming of seasonal changes in temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and visibility, but rather a matter of traveling into different geographical regions where the climate was different whether you arrived in winter, spring, summer, or autumn. So I already knew from personal experience what the weather of the different seasons was like in areas from border to border and coast to coast, from New England and along the Great Lakes through all of the Midwest and across the Great Plains and beyond the mountain range country to the Pacific Northwest and then down the continental shoreline to the desert and Rio Grande country sometimes before zigzagging back down-homeward across the Southwest Territory before heading back northward again, sometimes as if barnstorming off the old L & N Railroad route from New Orleans by way of Mobile up to Chicago or as if off the Mississippi River by way of Memphis to St. Louis. And sometimes also as if off the old Atlantic Coast line or Seaboard Airline up from Florida.
But the only time between graduating from college and settling into the furnished apartment in Manhattan that I had remained in one place long enough to find out how it felt to have the seasonal changes come and go had been the more than a year of months that I had spent in Hollywood, where seasonal changes were not really very noticeable.
Incidentally, along with all of the other special New York attractions, there were also the famous men’s clothing stores that in those days included Abercrombie & Fitch, Rogers Peet, John Davidson, and Triplers as well as Brooks Brothers, J. Press, Chips, Herzfeld, and the men’s shops in such high-fashion department stores as Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller, and Bergdorf Goodman, but the all-purpose wardrobe I had already gotten together on the circuit included everything I needed for the time being. So it was not me but the first-time arrival from the mostly milder and shorter winter weather down home, whose seasonal initiation also of necessity included Lord & Taylor and B. Altman. Not that I did not also make the rounds with her, nor have I ever cut back on seasonal window shopping. Not in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Beverly Hills, and never in London. On the other hand, I have never had any strong urge to do very much if any in Paris, Madrid, or Rome in the first place. Men’s clothing has never been among the things I liked about France. Once I got beyond the beret stage in Paris, that was as far as my personal interest in French men’s clothing went until the arrival of bikini swim trunks.
You knew that the northeastern winter weather would be there very soon when the roasted-chestnut vendors began to take their places near the warm pretzel stands and pushcarts along the sidewalks. Leaves in Washington Square had already begun to change from deep summer green to an early autumn yellow here and there by the middle of October that year. So we scheduled an outing in Central Park for the second week in November to catch the colors at their peak against the blue and white brightness overhead framed by the smoky gray haze of the Manhattan skyline as we remembered it all from Technicolor movies, travel brochures, and color spreads in the slick paper magazines over the years. And you couldn’t have picked a better day to spend doing what we did that Saturday.
On our first visit during the early part of that September, we had gone in at the entrance off Columbus Circle. So this time we began at Grand Army Plaza, at Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue and came on down by the pond and the skating rink and made our way across to Sheep Meadow and then back through the Mall and by noon we had come along the lake and past the fountain to the boathouse area, where we stopped for a snack before rambling on through part of the birdwatchers’ sanctuary before continuing on north beyond the Great Lawn and the Metropolitan Museum of Art area to the reservoir, beyond which by late afternoon we had also come on between East and North Meadows to Harlem Mews, and finally there was 110th Street, which was also Cathedral Parkway in those days.
We came back downtown along Fifth Avenue on one of the open double-decker buses that used to be so much fun for New Yorkers and tourists back then. So on our left were the mansions and ultradeluxe apartment buildings facing out onto and over the east side of the park, and from time to time you could also see through open spaces all the way across the malls and meadows to the towers along and beyond Central Park West.
Then as you rolled on down below Seventy-second Street, there was the Central Park South skyline in the offing, and when you pulled on into the vicinity of the Hotel Pierre, Sherry Netherland, and the Plaza with Fifty-seventh Street and the great midtown Fifth Avenue shopping district coming up you were suddenly aware once more of being in the most cosmopolitan area in the entire Western Hemisphere. New York, New York, I whispered, thinking, Philamayork indeed: to all intents and purposes the lodestone center
