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Stephen Graham, the English travel writer, describes
his night walks through all of Manhattan in his 1927 book
New York Nights.
It is five a.m. Something of the burden of the city
has been lifted. The air is light. The heart seems freed.
I feel happy to be walking. I love the space and the quietness.
I have got rid of the idea of going to bed, got rid of the
routine of daily life. New York and its millions, its wealth,
its mysteries, are mine. There is a sense of conquest. The
majority of people are asleepbut I am not the least
sleepy. It seems as if life has just begun. I am dancing on
a springed floor. The stones of the side-walks help me to
leap along First Avenue, grim, empty, gloomy Avenue One, which
has no turning to the right except little bottle neck lanes
which go down to the edge of the water of the East River.
I spent many nights in this way wandering about the city and
returning at dawn, resuming next night at the point where
I had left off the night before.
Whoever would know the poetry of New York must walk it in
the after-midnight hours, see the red light come out on the
Metropolitan tower preliminary to the striking of the hour;
one is too pre-occupied and diverted to observe it in the
livelier hours; enter the Central station at four a.m. and
see it anew, deserted, silent, beautiful as on the morning
of Opening Day; see the City Hall at dawn hanging down from
on high like the skys apron.
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