Although we had been living our entire lives up
within New York City, to us kids in the 1930s and 40s, "the City" meant the island of Manhattan (which is, of course, only one of the city's five boroughs).
We used the trolley or elevated train for local travel to movies or shopping from about age eight or nine. By ten, we were able to use the subway to go to the city. The entire city was crossed and recrossed with a vast public network of trolleys, buses, subways, elevated trains, and even ferries. You could travel many miles over hundreds of square miles for a nickle. You could even move from subway to bus or other transit by a system of passes issued on the spot.
My uncle, Bill Mannion, had been a New York City cop since the 1920s. He was still just a patrolman in the 30s but he worked at a desk in a Manhattan precinct with responsibility of assigning protection ot crowd control police in the theater district for appearances of big entertainment celebrities so he was in frequent contact with all the big theaters and even Madison Square Garden where we got to see the Ringling Bros. Circus, rodeos, and hockey games. Any Saturday or summer day, we could get on the subway to the city and stop in to see Uncle Bill at his precinct. We just had to tell him what film or event we wished to see and he would make a phone call and passes would be waiting for us at the door. What a life!
But, the city was more than movies. It also had the Museum of Natural History which we visited many times to goggle at the dinosaur skeletons, the dioramas, the wonders of life and the past. Right off the main lobby of the Museum was an entrance to the Hayden Planetarium but we never got in because there was a big charge, probably 25 cents.
Once in the city we rarely missed a chance to have lunch at the Automat, putting nickles into a slot and opening the glass door to retrieve a sandwich or dessert or to pour a cup of cocoa or coffee. A clerk sat at a booth in the middle of the eating ares to disburse nickles. You could place a quarter or larger denomination of coin or bill and the clerk would instantly and without counting, toss the correct number of nickles from a handful into one of the scooped out trays. Even after getting our change we would often stand to watch this 'magic' performed for other people. Talk about free entertainment!
When we were a few years older we went way up into the Bronx to see the famous Bronx Zoo. Carrying a brown bag lunch we could spend a full day there.
Many native New Yorkers laughingly admit to never having seen some of the city's famous landmarks. I went up to the observation platform of the Empire State Building when I was a teenager but I never, to this day, have ever been on the Staten Island Ferry! Maureen, born and raised in Manhattan, has never been up in the Empire State Building. Neither of us has ever visited Ellis Island.
We did go to dinner in the Windows On the World restaurant in the World Trade Center, but regrettably the surrounding vista was unseeable through thick clouds that time. (It was later destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001.) About 15 years ago, we spent several days in a hotel in the theater district of New York as tourists, even taking a sightseeing bus tour to see some of the other sights we'd missed in the first seventy years. We even rode a horse-drawn Hansom Cab through some of Central Park!
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