New York Magazine 10/16-10/29/17

IN THE LATE 1940S, as a Cooper Union student, Alex Katz found that he couldn’t finish his drawings before class ended. “I was desperate to learn to draw more quickly,” he recalls. “I started drawing on the subways, at bars, at jazz concerts, coming home late from dates.” Commuting from his parents’ house in Queens for three years, he filled a whole closet with sketch pads. Then he stopped (“I didn’t want to become a sketch artist”). By the 1980s, he was one of the best-known painters in the world. His subway drawings emerged only this spring, in a New York show at Timothy Taylor Gallery that is now on view in London. For this issue, we asked Katz, who is 90, to head underground once more. On the afternoon…

NEW YORK’S FIRST ISSUE WAS DATED APRIL 8, 1968. While it was still on newsstands, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed. Two weeks after that, Columbia University students rioted and occupied five campus buildings. In the decades since, New York—the city and the magazine—has lived multiple lives. But here is what the magazine’s founding editor, Clay Felker, said 50 years ago in his mission statement for the launch: “We want to attack what is bad in this city and preserve and encourage what is new and good. We want to be its voice, to capture what this city is about better than anyone else has.” The issue in your hands is the first of two, bracketing our anniversary year. (The next will appear in October 2018.) It returns…

An engaged reader In late 1972, RitaSue Siegel showed up at the door of New York’s offices, then located on the top floor of 207 East 32nd Street. She asked to see Milton Glaser, the magazine’s co-founder, “The Underground Gourmet” food critic, and design director. Milton Glaser: We were in this walk-up, this one sprawling, undifferentiated space, and this woman walked in, huffing and puffing, having done the four flights. And she says, “Is Glaser here?” Someone pointed her in my direction. And she said, “I have a Nixon eggplant.” RitaSue Siegel: I don’t remember where I found it—it says Sloan’s Supermarket on the page, so I guess it was at Sloan’s. I had always admired Milton, and I thought this would be perfect and he’d appreciate it. Glaser:…

THIS IS IN answer to your request to readers who have eaten Japanese cold noodles … you called them “Zaru,” but my dentist and hairdresser, both of whom are Japanese, call them “Udon” and in Japan I had them as “Soba.” The choice of name is yours. By any name they were amazingly delicious. Mimi Sheraton June 17, 1968 AS SOMEONE BOTH involved and named by Mr. Wolfe as being involved, I would like to register disgust and disquiet at your issue devoted to Leonard Bernstein and Radical Chic, whatever that is. (Let me say right away that I’m not a relative of Mr. Bernstein.) It seems impossible that a responsible magazine would distort reality and attack a fundraising event in support of radical rights without even a sideswipe at…

The city is many cities, that’s the beautiful thing. Everyone builds their own New York, mostly out of the people who surround them. But everyone shares the sidewalks, too. And we trade apartments, sometimes finding someone else’s peroxided hair between the floorboards. We fight over cabs (and Citi Bikes) and close elevator doors on one another. Every busy intersection is a kind of rat-king tangle: chance encounters, drag-out fights, families making their way, transactions and missed connections and hustlers of one kind or another pulling scams of one kind or another on rubes of one kind or another. Which means—look around—that we are always, constantly, starring in one another’s city. Guest-starring, at least. The woman behind the deli counter; the man who bumped into you outside, somehow ruining your day.…

Gus Goldfein  14, Boerum Hill, ninth-grader Where are you going? To the therapist’s office. What’s your biggest fear? I’m afraid I’ll die before I can upload my brain to the cloud and live forever in a video game. John Wilson  60, Bay Ridge, drummer Where are you going? To Central Park. My mom lives on 50th Street, and my son is there with her. How old is your son? Thirteen. I got a picture if you want to see. [Pulls out phone.] So that’s Alex. And this is my beautiful wife, but she passed away. She was a model, and used to work for Elite and Ford all that. I got a 27-year-old boy with her. Her sister’s married to my brother, believe it or not. Now I’m just with…