A walk down Fifth Avenue by Bernard Levin

Bernard Levin begins A Walk Up Fifth Avenue with three quotes from descriptions of New York City. These date from 1916, 1929, and 1949 and were written by Jane Kilmer, Theodore Dreiser, and EB White respectively. Bernard Levin uses these vignettes to establish the reality, or perhaps the unreality of a changing city, a superficially permanent building that is truly in constant flux and is never more than a concrete fleeting manifestation of the people, interests and activities it houses. Bernard Levin’s 1989 book now becomes another historical display of its kind, as the twenty years that have passed since the publication of A Walk Up Fifth Avenue have seen major changes on the horizon, the economy and the population of New York. In 1989, Bernard Levin made little reference to Arabs or Afghans, and hardly mentions Islam when referring to the religious identity of the city. In 1989, Russians, by and large, were still in Russia, not America. The twin towers of the World Trade Center appear on three of the book’s color plates without comment, and nowhere in the three hundred pages of the book it took to walk down Fifth Avenue is there a single mention of the word “terrorism.”

To the British audience for this book, the author perhaps symbolized something essentially English. Bernard Levin, an established columnist at The Times, well-known television commentator and lately host of offbeat travel shows, came close to being a household name at the time, an instantly recognizable voice among the middle classes. But he was, himself, of immigrant origin, Jewish and, at least originally, very on the edge of the British establishment, no doubt he regularly knocked on their partially closed doors. Perhaps that is why A Walk Up Fifth Avenue treats the concepts of “new” and “old” money in New York so informatively. It beautifully describes how bleak the origins of any kind of money can be, but the obvious class differences that the distinction engenders are deeply felt and wonderfully described in the book.

However, Bernard Levin reveals that he is not a fan of luxury for the sake of luxury, and clearly has little sympathy for any kind of flashy consumption. He rubs shoulders with the well-to-do at a New York party, but gently lampoons glitz and bad taste, perhaps being guilty of applying a peculiarly British pomposity of the New World to the Old World to place himself above old money vs. a new money. snobbery. Makes a fascinating juxtaposition of the author’s opinion and the assumptions of the subjects. What makes the passages even more poignant for British readers, of course, is Bernard Levin’s long association with satire, especially that directed at the rich and powerful.

Levin is also clearly not a fan of commercialism. Ronald McDonald’s appearance in a Fifth Avenue parade prompted Levin to describe the character, with some irony, as “a true hero of our time.” It prompts the reader to ponder that Santa Claus as we know him today is largely the product of an old Coca Cola promotional campaign and his default red and white is not much more than a corporate trademark. And perhaps even the practice of giving gifts on a day other than the Three Wise Men was an American invention, driven more by marketing than generosity. One wonders if a century from now children will sit on the knees of a hamburger clown to receive their annual education in consumerism.

A walk down Fifth Avenue is much more than a travel book. It is considerably less than a story and never attempts an analysis. It’s an informative, slightly random mix of what caught the imagination of an observant and vaguely irate British journalist as he tried to probe the heart of one of the world’s largest cities. It is an uneven read, but doubly gratifying, as the book not only takes the reader there, but now also offers evidence of its own justification, because it catalogs the change and invites us to reflect on our current state, equally tenuous and impermanent.