My happiest New York City Thanksgiving memory happened way back in the 1970s, after I had moved from Manhattan in which I was born to the end of Long Island. Two close friends who lived on the Upper West Side invited me and another friend to their apartment for Thanksgiving dinner. Neither of us had been to their place before and, after driving in on the Long Island Expressway, we actually found a place to park right in front of their brownstone apartment! It was a particularly beautiful fall day, with crisp, clear air, and bright blue sky with an occasional puff of cloud. Walking up to their second floor apartment, I felt that this was not the typical West Side of New York brownstone. I should know; I was born in Manhattan. As we all settled in with a cocktail and were admiring the pumpkins and bright fall foliage of the table’s centerpiece, I asked about the apartment. It had the highest, most ornate ceilings I’d ever seen in a New York City apartment, and an actual fireplace. There was something about the place that seemed out of the ordinary. I was impressed when they said the building had been the home of Enrico Caruso, one of the world’s greatest Italian tenors who died in 1921. It had been broken up into one-bedroom apartments, but its grandeur was still present and I did feel a sense of history, especially when I found out that Enrico Caruso had died in the Vesuvio Hotel in Naples, Italy, which coincidentally was the hotel where I had stayed on a trip there in 1957!
Only in New York City on a beautiful fall Thanksgiving Day can one be in such an aura of charm, the historic past and the convivial present.
