On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence—I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I up hold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.   Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally. The sidewalks were wider than any causeway; the street itself was immense, and it quaked and gleamed…

This is Saul Bellow’s “Broadway uptown” in the middle of the twentieth century. “The carnival of the street,” he called it, “the dust going round like a woman on stilts.” Four and a half decades on, the Upper West Side (roughly from the Seventies all the way up to Columbia University on 116th Street) still clings to Broadway’s pouring, pressing, teeming wadi, and the dizzying dust, though descended from its stilts, still goes round and round, crawling into your nostrils and stippling its egalitarian stucco over every race and kind. The fruit stores are still there, run by Koreans. The inexhaustible current of voices is still there, though you are less likely to hear