New York never goes entirely to sleep, and on at least one night you should stay up with her. Feel her pulse after the lights go on and remain after they go off again. Hang about a Village coffee house to overhear a cerebral young man intellectualize a girl from the New School into sharing his pad. Take in a wee-hours' movie bill (adults only) at one of the 42nd Street houses between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. Go for a sandwich at Reuben's (6 East 58th St.) and pick up dessert at the all-night vegetable stand east of Third on 59th.

At 1 a.m. the cleaning ladies leave their office buildings and Broadway's still a traffic jam. An hour later the drunks roar in bars and continue until 4 when they're spewn upon the city streets and gobbled, many of them, by pimps and whores who've waited all night for their exodus. Night club shows end earlier, threeisn, a fine time for a walking tour of midtown. By five the bartenders are wending homeward, and pigeons strut unchallenged down Park Avenue. Head over to Fulton Street Market and have an-early seafood breakfast with rubber-booted fishermen at Sloppy Louie's (92 South Street). By six the early commuters are pushing in on the subways and Broadway is alive again. It's a melancholy jaunt.

Changing Faces

In all, New York boasts little simple gaiety, carnival style. It's not a town of light pastels--pinks or greens or yellows. Even the old melting-pot brand of local color is graying around the edges now. The teeming foreign quarters are thinning out with the accents, as assimilation works her inexorable blending, and homey slums give way to lofty housing projects. Not much, in fact, enjoys permanence in New York: glimpses of ugly tenement and high-rent duplex shift kaleidescopically.

Districts, like buildings, are transients here, segments of an endlessly redecorated stockade around Central Park. Now Greenwich Village hosts beats and artists. But it was first settled by Negroes, who now live in Harlem. And Harlem's the old home of Jews and Germans, who've moved down to the Lower East Side and Yorkville. The munificence of New York, now preponderantly on the East Side, moved there from the West Side.

The city has squeezed skyward for want of horizontal space, but these modern towers lack the airy quality of European cathedrals or New England spires. They strive towards heaven irreligiously. The tone of the city is very Jewish, a bit raucous, and more than a little disappointed in spite of itself. One rarely smells good luck in the bustle, and never fullfillment. But stimulation, hope, excitement, yes, if sometimes of a baleful, hopped-up variety. Manhattan seems often like an exhausted animal on No-Doze, chasing its own tail.

The Vestigial Town

Yet a peaceful New York, something more relaxed than a dexedrine hangover, exists as well, though you must look harder for it these days. You can get lost without much trouble in the still paths of Van Cortland Park, where the slither of garter snakes and scamper of rabbits will echo louder in your ears than the muted hissing and groaning of traffic in the distance. Or cross the bay to the dusky lanes and country gardens of Staten Island. Even occasional streets like those rows of brownstones in the sixties, between Park and Second, release you from the hustle of the town. These are not organic New York, of course, merely vestigial reminders of a town of meadow and orchard. The unparalleled proliferation of people and concrete came later.

In those days they called Nassau Street "The Street that Leads to the Pie Woman's" and Broad Street was known as "Smell Street Lane." Wall Street had its actual wall then (the Dutch had set it up for protection against the Indians), a real canal ran across Canal Street, and a country road called "Verdant Lane" wound about the west end of what is now Times Square. East of Riverside Drive between 125th and 132nd Streets lay "Mother David's Valley."

Then the growth explosions began. They're still going on. No other city in history so typifies the delusions, the momentum, the pace and direction of its time. Some residents feel its heartbeat and would never live elsewhere. Like Joyce and his Dublin they commune inextricably. Others (more like Kafka and his Prague) live perpetually estranged and threatened by their city. But almost no one is indifferent to New York.

More than likely you will find it a batty town, a town of extraordinary sophistication, of tension and irritability, of intellectuality and pseudo-intellectuality, of a haunted sort of joie de vivre, of disinterest, of anonymity, and, also, of lust, gentleness, altruism, and a peculiar brand of human affection. Some gray day when no one seems to care, stop by the tarnished statue of Hans Christian Anderson in Central Park. His nose, you'll see, his ancient bronze nose, is shinier than a new penny, twice as bright as the rest of him. It got that way from constant loving tweaks. If this century can claim an El Dorado, it must be New York