New York [antikvár]

NEW YORK AND THE NEW YORKERS Okay, New York is crowded, dirty, noisy and impolite! But it is undeniably one of the world's most exciting cities. Other Americans often fear and dislike New York. With a typical shrug, New Yorkers dismiss this as provincial jealousy. Fire sirens may wail all night while steam billows hellishly from the manholes, walls and fences may be defaced by graffiti, and people may move faster than taxis. So what? New York is the place where it's all happening! This is the Big Apple: Wall Street and its dollars, Rockefeller Center with its multinational corporations, Madison Avenue manipulating the media, the United Nations with its diplomacy. Dynamic? And how! Put your skates on and get down to the Met. Look at the nervous knot of pedestrians waiting for the traffic light to change: a Wall Street tycoon, dark-suited; a chic black model with her portfolio; an Orthodox Jew straight out of the Old Testament; a Latin American—more Latin than American but in a rush like everybody else; to say nothing of the multitudes of Chinese, Italians, Irish, Greeks, Eastern Europeans Even the language of New York—locals tend to say "Noo Yawk"—is not quite American. Spoken in a mumbled rush, it's a tough brand of English with the exaggeration of Madison Avenue, the sarcasm of the street-wise kid and a few words of Yiddish and Italian as punctuation. New York is in many respects a "refugee camp". The immigrants who didn't want to be blended into the American melting pot stayed in the area. They settled in New York to keep their own values and 7