New York was once dominated by a tavern culture, “and television was one of the things that cut into the social function of the saloon,” said the writer Pete Hamill, a chronicler of drinkery who wrote a 1994 memoir, “A Drinking Life.”
He argued that television was, even worse, a destroyer of an entire ambience that extended into the neighborhoods of New York.
“When I went away to the Navy in 1952, everyone sat outside on summer nights, and we had an aural culture,” he recalled, and though radio was endemic, “people made their own entertainment.”
But “when I came back in early 1955, all of them were gone because television had come along,” Mr. Hamill said. “There was a blue glow in the apartments upstairs, and a blue glow in the bars. And no one on the streets. Television had won.”
