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Top Things I Remember About NYC as a Nine-Year-Old in 1964

Times Square in the 60s.

Times Square in the 60s.

It was 50 years ago next month: June 1964, the New York World’s Fair. I’ve talked before about being a Sally Draper contemporary, and indeed there was no Shea Stadium for me, but there was a yes to the World’s Fair, my first-ever visit to my dad’s hometown, New York. Although it’s pretty shocking to realize you can remember something that happened 50 years ago, so clearly, that subject is for another post.

Dad took me, and my older sister Kate and my younger sister Pati on this journey (to Oz). I knew instinctively that I wouldn’t stay in the place where we lived after just that one trip. But other than that, here are some of the great things I remember about New York in 1964 through the eyes of a 9-year-old:

  • Ice Delivery Truck – as in the block kind of ice, the kind that goes in an, you know, ice box, dropped on the ground in small business doorways in one enormous brick.
  • NYC’s distinctive odor! Something like a mixture of train oil and cat piss. I remembered that smell as a sense memory all these years, and still catch a whiff of it on certain streets in NYC, and nowhere else.
  • NY Harbor spray from the Staten Island Ferry.
  • The theater lights on Broadway. Richard Burton was on the marquee for his Hamlet.
  • Subways — and restrooms in the NYC subway — they seem to have disappeared, or I’m making it up and memory is not reliable.
  • All the people, the streets full of more people than I’d ever seen in my life, in all shapes, sizes and colors. All of them seemed dressed up to me.
  • Being in Manhattan was like always being downtown (my frame of reference was Milwaukee); there were no trees. Zero.
  • Carol Channing and Louis Armstrong singing “Hello, Dolly” on the radio, like once every half hour. And we sang along.
  • The Jingle-Jump: This weird toy that involved hopping and a ball tethered to your ankle. Google it. Was popular that summer.
  • My blond aunt (the only blonde in our family), her apartment, her 2 dogs and 3 cats and the 5 of us humans in her one bedroom apartment. The fact that she fed her dogs beef kidney, which she chopped up into little bite-sized pieces for them. They were poodles named Jacques and Guy.
  • Seeing the NYC skyline for the first time from the NJ Turnpike. It just, like, appeared. Again, like Oz. I was surprised the air was dirty.
  • The Unisphere at the Fair; also “It’s a Small World After All” at the Fair, the Futurama at the Fair.
  • Going to see the “Fall of the Roman Empire” flick, a 4-hour film starring glorious Sophia Loren and the hunky Stephen Boyd (OMG, an early crush, for sure) at an incredibly huge theater with grownups who were, again, all dressed up.
  • The road trip: Mostly remember the Chicago Skyway, the Appalachian mountains from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and my dad’s aged relatives in Youngstown, Ohio. They were probably 60 or something.
  • Finally, hoodlums in my aunt’s UWS neighborhood snapped the antenna off my dad’s VW microbus! Now that area (78th/Amsterdam) is much more fancy.

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