I recently found Park Avenue Summer by Renee Rosen (Berkley/Penguin Random House, 2019) in a Little Free Library kiosk in Harlem. This historical novel is set in New York City, in 1965, when a young woman fresh from Ohio named Alice Weiss comes to the big city with the dream of becoming a photographer. To her complete surprise, she ends up as the secretary to the editor Helen Gurley Brown, who, on the heels of publishing her bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, has been chosen by the Hearst Corporation to revive the half dead Cosmopolitan magazine.
When I read the paperback's storyline on the back, I instantly knew I had to take it home with me. Novels like this one and Pete Hamill's Tabloid City (Little, Brown and Company, 2011) that take the reader inside a media workplace rarely fail to fascinate me. So far I'm enjoying Park Avenue Summer.
There is one thing in the book I should note that caught my attention. It's a scene in which Alice finds a semi-furnished apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for $110 a month (paid for by a weekly paycheck of $55). The thought came to me that if rents in 2025 were that affordable, there would be almost no homelessness anywhere in New York City.
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