Lost New York

Di una New York perduta parla Cynthia Zarin - poetessa e autrice di un libro di saggi uscito di recente presso Knopf, An Enlarged Heart - in un'intervista.
Q. In a few essays, particularly in “Restaurants,” there’s an elegiac sense of what disappears from New York over time. Having lived here a long time, is there a particular closed-up place you miss the most?

A. The other day I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I found myself thinking about the pool in the cafeteria. It was made of green marble, I think, and when I was a child we used to throw pennies into it — that’s a real loss; it was magic: a lagoon in the center of the museum! And the Éclair Bakery on West 86th Street; in my twenties, when I was feeling blue, I used to walk over there and eat — what else? — éclairs. Isaac Bashevis Singer lived down the block and I often saw him there. And Zito’s on Bleecker Street — I was there on the day they closed and I asked if I could have the bread board and Zito said, “what do you want that for?,” and I have it in my kitchen. And Café des Artistes, and the old movie theaters, the Thalia and The New Yorker, which was like walking down into a nautilus … nyt.