Not a stranger, a New Yorker: A look back at Downtown life a half-century ago

On Thursday evening, restaurateur and author Keith McNally received the 2026 Gotham Book Prize at the Museum of the City of New York for his memoir “I Regret Almost Everything.” McNally speaks with difficulty due a stroke, so his acceptance remarks were read aloud by Lucas Jansen, a filmmaker who is working on an adaptation of the book. They are printed below in full.

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In my memoir I’m hypercritical of the winners’ acceptance speeches at the James Beard Awards. To avoid looking like a complete hypocrite I’m going to tread carefully with this speech and be very sparing with my use of superlatives.

I wish to quietly thank the 10-person jury for choosing my book, and Bradley Tusk and Howard Wolfson for creating the Gotham Book Prize. I also wish to thank the Museum of the City of New York for hosting this beautiful event.

I must say that it’s a real honor to receive this award and I just hope you won’t regret giving it to me when you’re all stone-cold sober tomorrow morning.

In his short book “Here is New York” written in 1949, E.B. White writes: “The residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. The city can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending on a great deal of luck. No one should come to New York unless he is willing to be lucky.”

I was willing to be lucky when I arrived in New York in 1975.

I was 24 with vague plans of making films. Running out of money in my second week, I ditched the film idea and found a job as a busboy at an ice cream parlor called Serendipity on E. 60th St. I was stacking chairs onto tables after my shift one night, when a group of waiters offered to take me to a place they called the Village.

It was after midnight when five of us squeezed into a Checker cab. The taxi sped down Fifth Ave. 60 blocks without stopping at a single light. Each time we approached a red stoplight, it effortlessly gave way to green. This seemed to me, a young, working-class Englishman, to symbolize a world denied to me in my country. The world of easy access and blissful unencumberedness. America.

Like many immigrants, my desire to live in New York came from watching films. One in particular: “Klute.” There’s a terrific scene early on where the two leads, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, are out past midnight buying fruit from a sidewalk produce stand. Watching Sutherland run his fingers over a luscious-looking peach, Fonda’s sexual desire for him explodes onto the screen. This was the exact moment when I longed to live in New York. But it wasn’t the scene’s eroticism that triggered the longing. It was the fact that you could buy fresh fruit in Manhattan after midnight.

The odd thing about seeing New York for the first time was that it seemed more like the films than the films themselves. Places rarely live up to expectations, but New York did — particularly its element of availability. Unlike London in 1975, subways ran all night, bars served until 4 a.m., taxis were available 24/7 and diners never closed. Not that I needed to have an egg sandwich and a coffee at 3 in the morning, but knowing I could, made a difference. It still does.

One of the first things I noticed about New Yorkers — or Americans — is how pleased they are when immigrants achieve success. Growing up in London on the wrong side of the tracks, England’s middle and upper classes were suspicious of immigrants and the working classes and did their patronizing best to keep us in our place.

It was only after arriving in America that I realized how much England’s class system was ingrained in me when on my second day in New York I felt strangely liberated. It’s a cliché, but when first living in New York I had the feeling that anything was possible. As a testament to this, four months after starting work as a busboy at a swanky, Manhattan restaurant called One Fifth, I was suddenly promoted to general manager. I couldn’t believe my luck.

Two years later, in the summer of 1977, I moved to SoHo. This was the summer when the gigantic Pan Am sign still towered over Park Ave. It was also the summer when the Son of Sam’s killing of six people led to New York’s biggest ever manhunt.

Living in SoHo — a bohemian neighborhood of water towers, fire escapes and cast-iron buildings — in the mid to late ’70s was my happiest period in New York. There was a sense of exhilaration in the air, and the whole neighborhood pulsed with the spirit of approaching change.

Unknowingly, I caught the wave of that change, and for the next three years would experience the most stimulating and open-minded years of my life. It was the world of the art-house cinema, the Village Voice, the Mudd Club, CBGB, the bars of Mickey Ruskin, and the films of Amos Poe.

It was a world populated by those whose downtown fame would later take off, like David Byrne, Patti Smith, Spalding Gray, Philip Glass and Deborah Harry. And also those whose downtown fame would remain doggedly on the runway, like Eric Mitchell, Lizzy Mercier, James Chance, Rene Ricard and Taylor Mead.

One of life’s cruelties is that we only recognize special times in hindsight. I had no idea how happy I was living downtown in the ‘70s until the ‘70s were long gone. But before the ’70s were over, there existed in New York — for the very briefest of moments — a kind of convergence between my life and the spirit of the times.

But every New Yorker who’s willing to be lucky, has his or her own convergence, when they ride that special wave of exhilaration that only the city of New York provides. I was lucky enough to recognize and catch that wave and that’s when I became a New Yorker.

McNally in his own voice then said he was donating the $50,000 prize to the City of the New York and the Museum of the City of New York.