Two Prehistoric Things About New York

New York may lead the nation in culture, taxis and good eating, but the city is decades behind in four areas:

1. Voting machines. New York City's aren't just retro; they look they date back to Tammany Hall. You make your choices and then swing a huge lever to punch them in. No hanging chads here.

2. Garbage disposals. I was on the phone with my 83-year-old aunt Louise in Santa Monica, California, yesterday. So Cal Edison had a power outage that day, and she couldn't use the garbage disposal. That brought her to reminiscing about the Fifties, when people actually were afraid to put anything down the disposal. I was laughing because garbage disposals are as rare in 21st-century Manhattan as real beaches.

3. Supermarkets. There really aren't any. Southern Californians would dismiss what passes for supermarkets here as dismissed as mom-and-pop stands. With the exception of the Whole Foods stores, which don't count as real supermarkets because of the greenily correct exclusion of such basic American brands as Tide and Crest, aisles are so narrow in Manhattan markets that you have to beg pardon to pass. In rush hour, the elbows come out. I think back to the spacious aisles of my childhood and sigh.

4. Wide streets. From Battery Park to Harlem, most east-west streets of the grid are two-lane. It only takes a crosstown trip in a taxi to realize that Manhattan is basically a small city with big-city pretensions. Making matters worse, Manhattan parking regulations are so convulted that nobody knows quite when or where it is permissible to park on the street. While I gave up my car long ago because taxis are so readily available and economical, my driver friends tell me that some signs say both that you can and cannot park at the same time.

None of these endearing quirks are enough to make me stop loving Manhattan. Taxes? That's another story.