I fear for New York

Spectator

09-07-2025

As a kid growing up in the Bronx and afterwards in the suburbs to the north, I loved New York. To me it was like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz – vast, glittering and full of promise. It was where my family settled after escaping the nightmare of communist dictatorship, in the aftermath of the crushed 1956 Hungarian revolution. It was where we found freedom, democracy – what they used to call the American Dream.
In later life, after I had left America and come to London, I made occasional return visits to New York and noted the changes wrought by time – mostly for the worse. But my affection for it never wavered because it held so many fond memories. Such as those childhood Saturdays spent in Yorkville, the Upper East Side neighbourhood based around Second Avenue, once pulsating with Hungarian grocery stores and bakeries, bookshops, cafés and restaurants – the legacy of the big influx of our compatriots and fellow émigrés. My mother would happily shop for her Hungarian goodies – the sausages and salamis, dill gherkins and poppyseed cakes – and gossip with her friends, while my father met with his Hungarian émigré publisher to discuss his latest book. Afterwards we'd all go for a traditional meal at one of the many Magyar restaurants.
But don't think we didn't enjoy the all-American delights as well. We sometimes went to the Horn & Hardart near Grand Central Station – the first ever automated cafeteria, where you put a coin into a slot to open the little window behind which lay the dish of your choice. Macaroni and cheese, ham on rye sandwich, blueberry pie… Only in America! And a special treat was a visit to Schrafft's on Fifth Avenue for a stack of pancakes or ice-cream sundae.
These old establishments gradually disappeared. During my two-year sojourn in Connecticut in the 1980s, it was hard to find traces of them on my cherished day trips into 'the City', as natives refer to Manhattan. That was a rough decade for New York, with soaring crime rates, crumbling infrastructure and the Aids epidemic. But my favourite spots continued to thrill: the Rockefeller Centre, the Chrysler Building, Grand Central Station, Park Avenue. (I'd steer clear of the tacky mess that the once-exhilarating Times Square had become.) All in all, I still regarded New York as an erstwhile home to which I had a profound and enduring connection.
I last visited New York eight years ago. It was not a happy experience. Goods and services were all ridiculously overpriced and overtaxed, the pavements of every block were scattered with beggars, and the underground system was so dingy and menacing that it made the London Underground seem positively uplifting. The place was dirty, the traffic jams were unrelenting, and I felt generally ripped off. I decided it would take a great deal to tempt me back.
New York, once my family's sanctuary from communism, could one day have a mayor who takes his cue from Marx and Lenin
In recent years I have read how this Democrat-run 'sanctuary city' is now full to bursting with undocumented migrants, the administration can't cope, and middle-class taxpayers have been abandoning it for pastures new. Was the Big Apple really now rotten to the core? I didn't want to write it off yet, because there was always the hope of a new mayor coming to the rescue and reversing the years of failure and decline. For example, someone like the smart and efficient Michael Bloomberg, the Republican whose three-term tenure from 2002 to 2013 did much to improve life in the city. But that hope is now dead. I don't ever want to set foot in New York again.
Why? The frontrunner to be the next mayor is the Democrat candidate Zohran Mamdani – former hip-hop musician and son of wealthy Indian immigrants – whose 'socialist' policies would deliver the city its coup de grâce. Not just because he is vocally anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian in the most Jewish city outside Israel, and would therefore only deepen its atmosphere of anti-Semitism. But also because, while he denies being a communist (he would hardly admit to it), his views are proto-Marxist, to say the least. One of his goals is to 'seize the means of production'. That's what the Bolsheviks did.
New York has many residents who have fled from communist and socialist regimes – not merely the Soviet Union and its satellite states, but from the likes of Cuba, Venezuela, Belarus, China and even North Korea. A few have spoken out in the press recently, claiming to find Mamdani's rhetoric 'dangerous and frightening'. I couldn't agree more. The idea that New York – once my family's sanctuary from communism – could one day have a mayor who takes his cue from Marx and Lenin is a bitter irony. My parents must be turning in their graves.