Life and times

The illustrator is enthralled by Manhattan’s cast of characters

Illustrator Sue Macartney-snape

I HAVE RECENTLY COME BACK from spending a week in New York, a city both oddly old-fashioned and staggeringly beautiful, especially in the autumn. Taking the bus up Third Avenue to the unsurpassable Chrysler Building, with its giant gargoyles and all its silver glory, I could only gasp at the imagination it took to create it. I love the subway too – it’s like stumbling on to a film set.

One of my favourite things to do is walk around the Upper East Side looking into the luxurious apartment-block lobbies, with their doormen all dolled up in gold buttons and braid, behatted as though playing South American dictators from the past. What a mysterious life they lead. Good positions in good buildings are often passed down from generation to generation, and doormen hold a subtle sway over the buildings’ inhabitants. After all, they know so much about you: when you go out, when you come in, who you bring home… I’m told it’s wise to give a good Christmas bonus.

Of course, not all are so braided and behatted. Literally a stone’s throw from Park Avenue is the grotty Third Avenue, where in a building I know well, the doormen lounge in their chairs eating, genial slobs who promise to water your pot plants over Christmas and never do. Then you have the Soho doorman, striding about his lobby looking like an ex-boxer, buzz-cut and muscled up, and probably protecting a famous pop star or actress.

DO YOU EVER FIND yourself somewhere retracing the origins of why you are there? I went to New York for a party, and the reason I was invited dates back to 1983, when I visited Nepal with my mountaineering brother. After we got back from a hard three-week trek around the Annapurna circuit, my brother persuaded me to go for ‘the best apple pie in Kathmandu’, even though I don’t like apple pie. A few weeks previously, an aunt had taken me on a trip to Portugal, where we stayed with old family friends of hers whose grandson was apparently also going to Nepal. They said we were ‘bound to bump into each other’. I regarded them pityingly: did they not realise the vastness of the area? Anyway, in the place with the best apple pie in Kathmandu, there was the grandson! He was travelling with a friend and it was through him that I met my New York host.

So if, in 1983, I had succumbed to my aversion to apple pie and gone back to my hotel, I would not have spent this Hallowe’en in New York trick-or-treating with the writer Andrew Solomon, who was dressed as Dracula (complete with red contact lenses, which terrified a lot of children).

ON THE PLANE BACK to London, I sat next to a charming young Indian man who lives in Malaysia, and who had just been to Connecticut, where he had met Warren Buffett. I mentioned that my nephew in London had started a dogwalking business.

My new friend stared at me uncomprehendingly. ‘People pay to get their dogs walked?’ It’s no stranger than getting nannies for one’s children, I pointed out, and it’s a profession prone to the same jealousies, with the owners realising that a bit too much love is being redirected. And my nephew has an uncommon bond with dogs. My new friend went off shaking his head in disbelief.

Sue Macartney-snape’s latest exhibition, The Serious Art of Being Funny, is at Panter & Hall, 11-12 Pall Mall, London SW1, until Friday

Doormen know when you go out, when you come in, who you bring home…