The song is a back-and-forth between once-idealistic lovers hoping to find gilded streets and a better life in New York, but were greeted instead by a cold, uncaring, difficult city that made them bitter, estranged alcoholics.
They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me
It's incredibly depressing (is there anything more heartbreaking than extinguished hope?), which is probably why the song is rarely heard in the US, but consistently voted the #1 Christmas song by the Irish.
In an essay entitled "Goodbye to All That" Joan Didion relates a slightly tamer -- but no less bittersweet -- reality about New York, namely that to experience all of its wonder, beauty, pace and excitement requires either a boatload of money, or, echoing the Pogues' insistence "It's no place for the old", the resiliency and naïveté of youth:
Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street.
But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.
I still miss it.
