Manhattan '45

On June 25, 1945, 14,000 American servicemen and women sailed into New York aboard the British liner Queen Mary. The city that awaited these first returnees from the victory over Nazi Germany stood at a historical climax of power, confidence, hope, and prestige, and yet remained still curiously innocent. In Manhattan '45, one of the greatest contemporary prose stylists leads us down the gangplank with the returning GIs, and allows us to discover for ourselves the island of Manhattan as it was forty-five years ago. Jan Morris takes us for a ride on the now vanished trollies, the El, and the Hudson River ferryboats, along the way introducing us to characters as disparate as Robert Moses, Sherman Billingsley of the Stork Club, Jackson Pollock, Mayor La Guardia, and Joe Gould, a Greenwich Village dweller who claimed to speak the language of seagulls. We also encounter Harlem and the Lower East Side; inspect the menu at the legendary Le Pavillon; board the Twentieth Century Limited on Track 34 in Grand Central Station; and swoon to Sinatra at the Paramount. Capturing the tremendously diverse nature of the city, Morris tells us that she titled the book Manhattan '45 because it sounds "partly like a kind of gun, and partly like champagne." Her affectionate account vividly depicts the victorious, hopeful, confident, celebratory, and explosive Manhattan of four and a half decades ago.