Manhattan (song)

"Manhattan"
Song from Garrick Gaieties
Published	1925
Writer(s)	Lyricist: Lorenz Hart Composer: Richard Rodgers

"Manhattan" is a popular song and part of the Great American Songbook. It has been performed by The Supremes, Lee Wiley, Oscar Peterson, Blossom Dearie, Tony Martin, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme, among many others. It is often known as "We'll Have Manhattan" based on the opening line. The music was written by Richard Rodgers and the words by Lorenz Hart for the 1925 revue "Garrick Gaieties". It was introduced by Sterling Holloway (later the voice of the animated Winnie the Pooh) and June Cochran.

The song appears to describe, in several choruses, the simple delights of Manhattan for a young couple in love who are blissfully unaware of their surroundings. The joke is that these "delights" are really some of the worst, or at best cheap, delights that New York has to offer; for example, the stifling, humid stench of the subway in summertime is described as "balmy breezes", while the noisy, grating pushcarts on Mott Street are "gently gliding by". A particular Hart delight is the rhyming "spoil" with "boy and goyl".

In the lyrics' first stanza, the couple is obviously too poor to afford a honeymoon to the popular summertime destinations of "Niag'ra" or "other places", so they claim to be happy to "save our fares".

In the second stanza, they settle for a walk down Delancey Street, which was in the 1920s a boisterous commercial strip, part of the working-class Lower East Side. In the third stanza, they plan to go to Greenwich, to watch "Modern men itch to be free". In the fourth stanza, it is revealed that the only rural retreat they can afford to go to is "Yonkers", and the only restaurant they can afford to go to is where they will "starve together in Childs'" – a popular discount cafeteria. These were all working-class places that attracted the poor, the unemployed, and gays and lesbians, along with other denizens of the Prohibition-era demimonde.

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