Column | New York made me a bit sad

Little gives you as strong a feeling that a culture is terminal as a visit to a tourist attraction. Last week I was in New York for research, which gave me the opportunity to visit The White Horse Tavern, the café where Welsh poet Dylan Thomas is said to have drunk himself to his grave in 1953. Thomas himself said – just before he was taken to hospital – that he had consumed eighteen whiskies, a record. There were probably no more than nine, and it was lung problems that killed him, but it is certain that Thomas liked to get drunk in The White Horse Tavern. He wasn’t the only one. Sylvia Plath arrived, as did Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Anaïs Nin and others inspired musicians like Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison.

The watering hole is located in the Village. It is the second oldest brown café in New York, in business since 1880. The decor turned out to be a charming hodgepodge: original wooden bar and decorative ceilings, French bistro tables, marble horse heads and persistent Christmas decorations. Next to a door hung a photo of the late poet, after whom the side room was also named.

Manager Peter Ferguson, a born New Yorker, said that many visitors come to see Thomas, but also that he only encounters few writers at the bar – they can no longer afford to live in Manhattan. The house prices are too ridiculous and a little lunch can easily cost forty dollars. Take it hard? Royalties not payable. So there are tourists, just like there are tourists in Dorothy Parker’s Algonquin. When asked, Ferguson refused to say that he regretted the decline in clientele – my words. Tourists guaranteed the pub a future. Time didn’t stop you. As if to underline this, the Norwegian couple at the adjacent table spoke enthusiastically about the scavenger hunt which they had downloaded, and which had led them to shops where money could be left. The White Horse Tavern was included in the app as a ‘rest point’.

This was once a resting place, a refuge for artists. A dead man took me there, but I got the feeling that the pub itself was a grave, however lively. It is not the building, it is what happens inside the building that determines its value – we living people who follow in the footsteps of historical figures do not animate such places, we hollow them out. No one will later think about what The White Horse Tavern meant in the year 2024. Sometimes such a place is preserved out of nostalgia or profiteering, sometimes not – the building of Scribner’s Sons, the publisher of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, is now a clothing store. That wouldn’t be a problem if there were new places to take their place, future monuments. But if they are there, they are not in the heart of the world, the heart of the island city.

It is difficult not to see this as symbolic: art and literature have lost their place in social discourse, the practitioners have gradually disappeared to the periphery and become fragmented. You see something similar in Amsterdam – in the proverbial canal belt you find fewer and fewer writers and more and more expats with the type of hideous wall art that you buy by the meter. That makes the whole notion of a canal belt elite bitter. Ways of life are also under pressure in the city.

New York made me a little sad, I think. Broadway mainly featured musicals that had been on stage for centuries or were revivals of films such as Mean Girls of The Color Purple. Just as Dutch theaters are full of tribute acts that play the music of so-calledlegacy artists” who have sold their music rights to investors for hundreds of millions in recent years. Because those investors assume that in the future money will mainly be made from old music. Of nostalgia. As if the money knows that the culture is dying, and how it continues to pick as much flesh from the bones as possible.

Auke Hulst is a writer.

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