They turned left on Forty-seventh Street. As they crossed Lexington, Charlie pointed south. “Grand Central Station’s just down there,” he said. Gorham was silent. They reached Park Avenue and turned north. “When I was a boy,” said Charlie, “there were railway yards here. Park Avenue wasn’t so nice then. But the railway lines are all under the ground now, and Park Avenue looks pretty neat, don’t you think?”

“Yes, Dad,” said the little boy.

There was something else, he realized, that he wanted to convey to the boy. Something deep and important. Beyond the magnificent houses and apartments, the teeming life of the streets, the newspapers, theaters, galleries—the huge business of the place. What he needed Gorham to understand—what his son was heir to—the thing that really mattered—was the New Yorkers’ indomitable spirit.

Even the Depression hadn’t really brought the city down. Three giants had saved it. FDR, the president of course—and the good old Dutch name of Roosevelt was as New York as could be. It took the guts and daring of a New Yorker, Charlie reckoned, to push the New Deal through. Second, from the early thirties, right through to ’45, New York’s tiny, feisty Mayor La Guardia—a Republican technically, but a New Dealer all the way—had run the most honest administration the city had ever seen, and championed the poor through all those painful years. Third, and no less dramatic in his own way, that brutal giant Robert Moses.

No one had ever seen public works on the scale Commissioner Moses undertook. Those massive bridges—the Triborough, from Long Island to Manhattan; the beautiful Whitestone, from Long Island to the Bronx. A slew of public parks. Above all, the huge roadways that swept the ever-growing traffic round New York’s boroughs. With these titanic projects, Moses had brought countless millions of federal dollars into the city, employing thousands.

Some people said there was a cruelty about Moses and his methods. They said his big Long Island expressways avoided the great estates of the rich, but devastated the homes of the poor; that he only cared about the flow of motor cars, and ignored public transport. They even said the new highways created barriers, physically separating black neighborhoods from the public parks.

Charlie wasn’t sure. New York’s public transport was pretty good, he reckoned, and in this new age of the motor car, the city would have come to a standstill without the new roads. The criticism about the parks and the black neighborhoods might be true, but the layout of the roads was magnificent. When he drove up the West Side’s Henry Hudson Parkway, which swept one gloriously along the great river all the way past the George Washington Bridge, Charlie could forgive Moses almost anything.

The question was, he thought, as they pulled up at his mother’s building on Park, how was he going to explain all that to his son?