New York on the mind

Today, the brochure extolling the experience of dining at ‘Windows on the World’ reads like a cruel epitaph on this Titanic in the skies, with its grand piano hulking in a corner, its lighting tastefully dimmed so that the sparkle of Manhattan could stream right in through its glass front, its flower-adorned and white-clothed tables and, above all, its exclusive address: 1, World Trade Center, 107th Floor, New York 212 524 7000.

The words now come to taunt and tease: ‘‘We’re above it all. Heighten the excitement of your visit to New York City. See why we’ve been named as one of New York’s top ten restaurants. Come on up and see what the fuss is all about.’’

Come on up — an invitation, with a distinctly Mae West-ish flavour, which millions have found irresistible. It’s one that this strip of geometric geography known as Manhattan, with the East River on one side and the Hudson, on the other, had written all over its sidewalks. New York had little time for the language implicit in Arrival Forms issued by the US Department of Justice’s Immigration and Naturalization Service, which divided people into Aliens, Returning Resident Aliens, Aliens with Immigrant Visas, Canadian citizens in transit, and US citizens; which instructed Aliens sternly to USE CAPITAL LETTERS, USE ENGLISH, and which issued warnings of exemplary deportation. Once you made your way past these snarls of bureaucratese and caught that cab or bus into downtown, midtown or uptown Manhattan, you instantly became a New Yorker, because everybody there came from somewhere else and nobody had the time or inclination to make distinctions, not even muggers.

No institution celebrates the instant nature of New York citizenship as well as does that wonderful museum on Ellis Island, still in the process of being created. You can catch it on the way back from the ferry that takes you to the Statue of Liberty, but that would be doing it an injustice. By the time you’ve made your way under the billowing skirt of the Lady With The Torch, physical exhaustion can douse the enthusiasm for further discovery.

Ellis Island needs to be savoured for itself because the tales it tells are simply riveting. Serving as the immigrant depot between 1892 and 1954, it had processed the details of every man, woman and child who made up one of the greatest exoduses in human history.

They numbered some 12 million, and are said to account for almost 40 per cent of USA’s population today. They were either fleeing religious persecution, political upheavals and economic misery or were just driven by an urge to recreate new lives for themselves.

You can see here gaunt faces frozen in sepia from every region in this swirling planet. You can read letters informing a mother, back home in Serbia, St Petersburg or Kingston Town, that arrival has been secured and the baby is well, or missives to anxious wives that if all goes according to plan the family will soon be reunited. You can see the battered suitcases and wicker baskets that had once held the meagre appurtenances of life required to make that great crossing. Some of these objects still survive at Ellis Island — an old fashioned chain clock, a pair of leather-laced shoes, a glove, a hand-stitched quilt, a hatbox, a diary of an anonymous writer. Most fascinating of all are the oral histories painstakingly taped and transcribed — snatches from accounts first related by great-grandparents and passed down the generations by word of mouth.

Interestingly, if you count the races which arrived you would perceive a mini united nations at the doorstep. Many were of European ancestry, but many more came from the West Indies, Asia and the Middle East. Families like the one who now runs New Tandoor Club on 133 East 45th Street which ‘‘specializes in North Indian Cuisine’’. The menu here painstakingly explains terms like chicken samosa in a lexicon that New Yorkers understand — ‘‘turnover filled with minced chicken’’, murgh malai tikka — ‘‘chicken, cashews and cheese’’, or even channa masala which comes with the straightforward description ‘‘chick peas, home style’’. For dessert there is always gulab jamun — milk dumplings in syrup — which can be had for $2 a plate.

I wonder then whether the Indians who run restaurants like these, or the Lebanese who drive cabs through Manhattan’s canyons, or the Koreans who dish out steaming tofu in sidewalk delis, will be attacked for suddenly seeming ‘‘different’’. Unthinking hatred on the streets could do to New York what the insensate, lunatic, bigoted act of piloting a Boeing into the World Trade Centre could not — destroy it.

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