At 18, there for a month on the town on a Summer break from school in the Southwest, I thought the city was a magical treat created just for me.
I had a part time job in a fancy office, a couch in student friend's apartment in the Village, and the whole damn place there for the taking.

At 23, in late 1962, I came back for 4 months in the Winter, across the river at the NY Naval Shipyard (where "cold iron" on a ship in drydock meant uncomfortable nights in the tiny shared closet called an officer's stateroom, "head" up a ladder and down the passageway). Even with duty during the day and one night out of four, NYC was still magic. Memories of WWII were more vivid for New Yorkers than the prospects of Viet Nam, so an officer's Dress Blues were a ticket to more than just entertainment. There were plenty of clubs to meet younger women, but places like the cocktail lounge at the Warwick Hotel, itself a relic of another era, great martinis and older women, far more mysterious, but all the more likely to be looking for rapid physical relationships.

Aside from the St. George Hotel swimming pool and its Italian resturants, Brooklyn was mostly the pits, with Bedford Stuyvestant, outside the Navy Yard gates, among the world's most dangerous venue, with a level of mayhem about like that of Brazzaville. Kew Gardens was the domicile of hundreds of attractive airline FAs, many of whom would later show up at European ports where the ship made port calls. For a month of Shore Patrol duty, I lived with 4 other guys in a railroad flat on West 23rd and "officed" (8 on, 36 off) just off Times Square, with a better choice of theater tickets (Free!) than the discounters or last minute box office deals.

I will always remember taking a girl to the Cloisters on the first pretty day of Spring, 1963.