May 26, 2024

PROGRESS OF A SORT: Eric Adams: “New York City’s beaches are our French Riviera.”

But let’s face it, we all know where America’s French Riviera actually is:

Trolling aside, both comparisons may be more apt than the authors realize: Shore To Please. Review: The Once Upon a Time World: The Dark and Sparkling Story of the French Riviera.  

If Hieronymus Bosch ran a holiday resort, it would look like St. Tropez in the summer. It’s the same all the way along the coast from Marseilles to Menton. The rocky hillsides are swathed in concrete. The roads are jammed with preposterous sports cars and Germans in camper vans. The harbors are slick with oil and other fragrant discharges from the yachts in the bay. The harborside restaurants are extortionate and smell of drains. In Nice and Monaco, the surviving Belle Époque mansions are dwarfed by glass towers. This is the Côte d’Azur, the French Riviera: a sweaty panorama of organized crime, municipal corruption, tax-dodging, drug-smuggling, money-laundering, compulsive gambling, and gratuitous thong-wearing. I went last summer and had a great time.

The locals joke that Nice gets its name from “Ni ici, ni là“: “Neither here nor there,” neither French nor Italian, a living city and a stage set for a dream. That is what the visitors want, a break from reality on a cosmopolitan shore between the mountains and the sea. They come to escape life, as once, when the Riviera was an al fresco hospital for tuberculosis patients, they came to escape death. The English invented the French Riviera as a home away from home in the 19th century. The Americans reinvented it in the early 20th as a sophisticated alternative to home. The Germans only knocked it about a bit. The French destroyed it as the Venetians destroyed Venice, by catering to the world’s dreams and desires.

Jonathan Miles’s The Once Upon a Time World is the story of the making and remaking of the Riviera. It would be tidy to speak of its “unmaking,” but that has not yet happened and probably never will. A coast of malarial fishing villages and busy ports became an exclusive resort for the rich, then a glamorous gambler’s paradise with artist colonies on its fringes, then the world’s beach in the Jet Age when being a movie star was worth the trouble, and latterly a money laundry for oligarchs. But the view remains unchanged, and so the Riviera will go on forever, like a Disney cruise that has slipped into the Bermuda Triangle.

But New York’s mayor is making progress; I’m so old, I can remember back in March when Adams claimed that New Yorkers thought of their city as the “Port-Au-Prince of America,” a comparison that must have been a first for virtually all residents of Fun City.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll