Book description
In the stirring signature number from the 1944 Broadway musical
On the Town
, three sailors on a 24-hour search for love in wartime Manhattan sing,
"New York, New York, a helluva town."
The Navy boys' race against time mirrored the very real frenzy in the
city that played host to 3 million servicemen, then shipped them out
from its magnificent port to an uncertain destiny. This was a time when
soldiers and sailors on their final flings jammed the Times Square movie
houses featuring lavish stage shows as well as the nightclubs like the
Latin Quarter and the Copacabana; a time when bobby-soxers swooned at
the Paramount over Frank Sinatra, a sexy, skinny substitute for the boys
who had gone to war.
Richard Goldstein's Helluva Town is a
kaleidoscopic and compelling social history that captures the youthful
electricity of wartime and recounts the important role New York played
in the national war effort. This is a book that will prove
irresistible to anyone who loves New York and its relentlessly
fascinating saga.
Wartime Broadway lives again in these pages through the plays of
Lillian Hellman, Robert Sherwood, Maxwell Anderson, and John Steinbeck
championing the democratic cause; Irving Berlin's This Is the Army
and Moss Hart's Winged Victory with their all-servicemen
casts; Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! hailing American
optimism; the Leonard Bernstein-Jerome Robbins production of On the
Town; and the Stage Door Canteen.
And these were the days when the Brooklyn Navy Yard turned out
battleships and aircraft carriers, when troopships bound for Europe
departed from the great Manhattan piers where glamorous ocean liners
once docked, where the most beautiful liner of them all, the
Normandie, caught fire and capsized during its conversion to a
troopship. Here, too, is an unseen New York: physicists who fled
Hitler's Europe spawning the atomic bomb, the FBI chasing after Nazi
spies, the Navy enlisting the Mafia to safeguard the port against
sabotage, British agents mounting a vast intelligence operation. This
is the city that served as a magnet for European artists and
intellectuals, whose creative presence contributed mightily to New
York's boisterous cosmopolitanism.
Long before 9/11, New York felt vulnerable to a foreign foe.
Helluva Town recalls how 400,000 New Yorkers served as
air-raid wardens while antiaircraft guns ringed the city in
anticipation of a German bombing raid.
Finally, this is the story of New York's emergence as the power and
glory of the world stage in the wake of V-J Day, underlined when the
newly created United Nations arose beside the East River, climaxing a
storied chapter in the history of the world's greatest city.
"...a splendid study of the stay-at-homes during
those hectic years... Goldstein creates a vivid picture of everyday
life at home in New York City during [World War II]." --Maury
Allen, The Columnist
Richard Goldstein writes for The New York Times,
where he also worked as an editor. His previous books include
America at D-Day; Desperate Hours: The Epic Rescue of the Andrea
Doria; Spartan Seasons: How Baseball Survived the Second World
War; and Mine Eyes Have Seen: A First-Person History of the
Events That Shaped America.
