Not the first of a series on great American cities, not even a contained little guide to one of them, this article hopes merely to provide a bit of an overview to anyone spending his holiday in Manhattan.

The City is decked out in her Christmas finery now, of course. The roasted chestnut vendors are yelling louder on the corners, and an extra fleet of wreathed hansom cabs have been hauled out, as if from some secret storage barn, to further confuse the yuletide traffic. Most of the better Fifth Avenue shops are piping carols out into the street, but scarcely anyone stops to listen. Their music is drowned by the clanging bells of sidewalk Santas. Rockefeller Plaza's giant evergreen is ablaze with colored lights, and the Rockettes are kicking their hearts out in a "happy holiday extravaganza" at Radio City Music Hall, which also features a nativity pageant and "Father Goose" (starring Cary Grant and Leslie Caron; 5000 general admission seats for each performance.)

But Manhattan wears the vulgar razzmatazz of Christmas like a frock coat--underneath she is the same old town you'd see the other 11 months, carrying out, as ever, her inevitable business. Explore her infinity on your own, put your own ear to her breast, then hear her internal rumblings. You must slow yourself down, not rush through on Gray-Line sightseeing tours, inundated by some puerile spiel. "Man," wrote Jon Hendricks in a jazz poem to Manhattan, "if you can't make it in N.Y. City you can't make it nowhere .... I wrote the shortest jazz poem you ever heard. Nothin' 'bout huggin' and kissin'; one word: Listen!"

"Think you can lick it? Get to the wicket, buy you a ticket, Go. N.Y., N.Y. What they call a Somethin' Else town. A city so nice they had to name it twice ..." Jon Hendricks wrote. Millions have come to New York thinking they can lick it. Some achieve stardom, others amass fabulous wealth. But almighty few leave with the feeling they've licked it.

Maybe that's why there can be no guide to New York. No, not even by the CRIMSON. The City is too manifold, too mercurial. Its famous attractions are too familiar, its lesser-known places and preoccupations too sprawling and too involuted for anything less than a digital computer to set down the whole patchwork, in all its brilliance and multiplicity. New York is unlickable.

Statistics, of course, are always possible. New York has more of everything: 650 miles of waterfront, 1000 public schools, 5000 miles of sewer, 20,000 traffic lights, 45,000 manufacturing plants, 2,820,000 trees. New Yorkers receive 13 billion pounds of perishable and 8.5 billion pounds of non-perishable foods annually; their subway vending machines yield close to 2,000,000 pounds of pennies. Daily, they chomp 3,500,000 pounds of meat, swig 460,000 gallons of beer, pull 21 miles of dental floss past their molars, guzzle and flush 1 billion gallons of water. The municipal corporation alone owns a physical plant worth more than $15 billion. And every facility is inadequate. No adjective is enormous enough to suggest the concentration of people, commerce, religion, sport, finance, entertainment, education, and art that is New York, the mightiest community in the History of Man.

Melting Potsville

But if New York is vast, it is tiny as well more provincial than Muncie, Indiana. Stop in one of 3000-plus neighborhood churches some Sunday, and feel the Mad. Ave. tempo melt away. New York is the town where a barber, when you ask for a shave, will tell you that you need a haircut; where a million people dwell within a 3-block radius--smaller than a midwestern village, yet containing all commodities (drugstore, bar, movie, etc.) necessary for life. Some get the jitters, or get lost, one block beyond that circumscribed universe. Others never leave it at all.

That is why still, despite re-zoning, Manhattan is an incongruous potpourri of mini-neighborhoods, each with its own trace of accent, its own numbered Main Street. Don't register surprise when you turn a corner in New York and find a different town: Walk reconstituted from the graceful spirituality of Riverside Church; you are a matter of blocks from the be-bop, voodoo jungle of Harlem. Gaze down from the tallest, plushest apartment building, and spy a slum at its feet. The very old is never far from the very new. Nor the very rich from the very poor.

Cantabrigians are dogged in their insistence that the typical Harvard man is a nonexistent breed. New Yorkers never bother. The typical is not a category relevant to New York. No one bats an evelash at a drunk urinating from a Bleeker Street window; a made up queen, in St. Mark's Place, with waist length hair; a septuagenarian in Washington Heights who dresses in colonial garb.

New York absorbs all. Well actually not quite all. Two million commuters, we suppose, are never precisely absorbed. They leave their smoke--some non-vital essence imported from Tea-neck or Great Neck. The commuters, with their tired, tidal restlessness never know New York beyond the Newark bus or Long Island Railroad schedules. They scurry, a testament to the fact that New York is the most take-it-or-leave-it city in the world.

Wherever you stand in Manhattan you stand within blocks of famous persons, famous places, muggings, weird characters, impossible situations: all optional. New York has often been compared to a poem, with its vivid music (of inner machinery) and insane compression (of all tongues, races, lives). As a poem, New York's rhythms are comprehensible to 9 million; but her full meaning is forever elusive.

The Ivy Leaguer, however, must see New York as a college of electives, extending to him the paradoxical gifts of privacy and participation, of loneliness and union with the ultimate queerness of humankind. This is because New York is so constructed as to soak up everything without (necessarily) inflicting a single event on its denizens. Which strikes us as odd, considering it is the worst-run metropolis in the world, or at least the most unmanageable.

Understandably, Americans aren't proud of New York. They say it's the crime, or the squalor but really they're on the defensive. They dread New York's sophistication, her toughness, her cynicism. They think she looks down her 80-story nose at them, considering anywhere else pure Dubuque. They know New York's got the power (the money, the industry, the communications) but fear she's without the responsibility to behave herself.

After Bedtime

New York never goes entirely to sleep, and on at least one night you should stay up with her. Feel her pulse after the lights go on and remain after they go off again. Hang about a Village coffee house to overhear a cerebral young man intellectualize a girl from the New School into sharing his pad. Take in a wee-hours' movie bill (adults only) at one of the 42nd Street houses between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. Go for a sandwich at Reuben's (6 East 58th St.) and pick up dessert at the all-night vegetable stand east of Third on 59th.

At 1 a.m. the cleaning ladies leave their office buildings and Broadway's still a traffic jam. An hour later the drunks roar in bars and continue until 4 when they're spewn upon the city streets and gobbled, many of them, by pimps and whores who've waited all night for their exodus. Night club shows end earlier, threeisn, a fine time for a walking tour of midtown. By five the bartenders are wending homeward, and pigeons strut unchallenged down Park Avenue. Head over to Fulton Street Market and have an-early seafood breakfast with rubber-booted fishermen at Sloppy Louie's (92 South Street). By six the early commuters are pushing in on the subways and Broadway is alive again. It's a melancholy jaunt.

Changing Faces

In all, New York boasts little simple gaiety, carnival style. It's not a town of light pastels--pinks or greens or yellows. Even the old melting-pot brand of local color is graying around the edges now. The teeming foreign quarters are thinning out with the accents, as assimilation works her inexorable blending, and homey slums give way to lofty housing projects. Not much, in fact, enjoys permanence in New York: glimpses of ugly tenement and high-rent duplex shift kaleidescopically.

Districts, like buildings, are transients here, segments of an endlessly redecorated stockade around Central Park. Now Greenwich Village hosts beats and artists. But it was first settled by Negroes, who now live in Harlem. And Harlem's the old home of Jews and Germans, who've moved down to the Lower East Side and Yorkville. The munificence of New York, now preponderantly on the East Side, moved there from the West Side.

The city has squeezed skyward for want of horizontal space, but these modern towers lack the airy quality of European cathedrals or New England spires. They strive towards heaven irreligiously. The tone of the city is very Jewish, a bit raucous, and more than a little disappointed in spite of itself. One rarely smells good luck in the bustle, and never fullfillment. But stimulation, hope, excitement, yes, if sometimes of a baleful, hopped-up variety. Manhattan seems often like an exhausted animal on No-Doze, chasing its own tail.

The Vestigial Town

Yet a peaceful New York, something more relaxed than a dexedrine hangover, exists as well, though you must look harder for it these days. You can get lost without much trouble in the still paths of Van Cortland Park, where the slither of garter snakes and scamper of rabbits will echo louder in your ears than the muted hissing and groaning of traffic in the distance. Or cross the bay to the dusky lanes and country gardens of Staten Island. Even occasional streets like those rows of brownstones in the sixties, between Park and Second, release you from the hustle of the town. These are not organic New York, of course, merely vestigial reminders of a town of meadow and orchard. The unparalleled proliferation of people and concrete came later.

In those days they called Nassau Street "The Street that Leads to the Pie Woman's" and Broad Street was known as "Smell Street Lane." Wall Street had its actual wall then (the Dutch had set it up for protection against the Indians), a real canal ran across Canal Street, and a country road called "Verdant Lane" wound about the west end of what is now Times Square. East of Riverside Drive between 125th and 132nd Streets lay "Mother David's Valley."

Then the growth explosions began. They're still going on. No other city in history so typifies the delusions, the momentum, the pace and direction of its time. Some residents feel its heartbeat and would never live elsewhere. Like Joyce and his Dublin they commune inextricably. Others (more like Kafka and his Prague) live perpetually estranged and threatened by their city. But almost no one is indifferent to New York.

More than likely you will find it a batty town, a town of extraordinary sophistication, of tension and irritability, of intellectuality and pseudo-intellectuality, of a haunted sort of joie de vivre, of disinterest, of anonymity, and, also, of lust, gentleness, altruism, and a peculiar brand of human affection. Some gray day when no one seems to care, stop by the tarnished statue of Hans Christian Anderson in Central Park. His nose, you'll see, his ancient bronze nose, is shinier than a new penny, twice as bright as the rest of him. It got that way from constant loving tweaks. If this century can claim an El Dorado, it must be New York