Culture and Environment: Up and Down Fifth Avenue.

On the avenue, Fifth Avenue

Rose Field calls herself a Fifth Avenue "call girl." This 60-year-old is on call as a volunteer saleslady at a second-hand shop called Connoisseur's Corner near the bottom of Fifth Avenue, the avenue that many consider the first when it comes to variety.

Rosie, who lives nearby at ritzy Two Fifth Avenue, has worked at the Corner without pay for 14 years. She and other women give their time to sell paintings, lamps, rugs, old furniture and other oddments people donate and thus can write off their taxes. The money goes to support the Albert Einstein College of Medicine up in the Bronx, the widow explains.

"Over half our customers are decorators and dealers," says Rose, which tells you the merchandise isn't just junk.

You could browse and swap stories in the little bazaar all morning. But it's only one nook on a boulevard that boasts B. Altman, Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany, Cartier, and more famous stores than any one street in the world. That two-mile luxury lane between 42nd and 59th streets attracts more people for more reasons than any street in New York.

Farther uptown there are more important museums—a good mile's worth—than on any street anywhere. You can see Rembrandts and other art treasures and walk into the original Egyptian Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can listen to a teen-age girl play a Bach prelude with four mallets on a marimba on the sidewalk in front of the New York Public Library—or inside have a choice of seven million books.

To make the beautiful people more beautiful, Elizabeth Arden offers the complete body job. Just standing by the door, it is said, feels like a massage. And then there's husband's lib, a fixture on midtown Fifth, who ducks for cover at the lunch rush

You can strut in the Easter Parade . . . gaze at glittering Christmas trees or go ice-skating in Rockefeller Plaza . . . run around the lake on a motorless Central Park road, or drive through the park in a horse-drawn carriage . . . barrel silently up, the shafts to the 102nd-floor observatory of the Empire State Building for an awesome overview of The Big Apple and adjoining boroughs and states . . . join a walking tour of Millionaires Row uptown . . . meditate in St. Patrick's Cathedral or other great churches, synagogues or mosques . . . dine at some of New York's poshest restaurants, or grab a bite at a coffee shop around the corner. You can stroke a rabbit in the park zoo . . . arrange for an elephant to be flown in from India . . . play with the new line of electronic toys at FAO Schwarz. You can keep yourself gainfully occupied or blissfully distracted for years on its 138-block length.

You have to be choosy. Get a good guidebook. Michelin's Green Tourist Guide to York City suggests walks to the high spots on Fifth Avenue, with good maps and a detailed section on the museums.

Stop for a moment to get the sense of the street. You are looking at the north-south artery that splits The Big Apple into east and west. This is a weekday, and the great conduit pulses with traffic, all southbound, as Fifth is one-way. Rumbling buses and grumbling trucks, hustling taxis, timid cars from New Jersey and New Mexico, and the unpredictable bane of so many motorists—bicycles—rolling down the asphalt.

Look the way the traffic is moving. Your eye stops on a great white marble arch straddling the foot of Fifth. New York's answer to Paris's Arc de Triomphe, the Washington  Arch was built to mark the 100th anniversary of George Washington's inauguration as the first president of the United States.

Legend has it that around 1920, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and friends were feeling no pain when they scaled this 47-foot-high arch, and she proclaimed that New York City was seceding from the United States of America.

The pleasure of a dip in the fountain at Washington Square in Greenwich Village.
The fountain is credited with many legendary, midnight, naked dives.

Behind the arch you'll find one do-it-yourself reason why some Greenwich Villagers never venture much farther north than 14th Street: Washington Square, surrounded on four sides by New York University, which owns most of the property. The Village nerve center earns its title as a watcher's paradise.

"We have entertainers here, circus performers, acrobats, comedians, banjo players, Frisbee throwers, group singers," says Melvin Geller, a 59-year-old retired high school teacher who plays chess at the outdoor tables in the southwest corner every day when it's warm outside.

"We even have people doing dances in the street, which are very strange. Some blacks also turn on their big tape recorders and do a sliding 'brake' dance."

Twice a year, in May and September, a thousand or so artists display their work in the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit, which spills into the adjoining streets.

A blue-uniformed patrolman, who declines to give his name (which is on his badge), calls this a good beat and "fairly safe. People that frequent the park and live around it have a lot of political clout," says the cop. "Mayor (Edward)Koch lives right down the block."

The fellow on the left is famous for pulling the old-time cabs in Central Park. That most famous Fifth Avenue denizen, the shopper, prepares for a hard day's pleasure, hunting bargains and eyeing the windows of the toniest boutiques in town. 

Greenwich Village has at least five private streets, two of them—Washington Mews and MacDougal Alley—dead-end lanes opening into the bottom of Fifth Avenue. They're chained off to traffic, but you can walk in from 7 in the morning until 11 at night. Here were the stables and servants' quarters for an earlier Washington Square. Charming and intimate, with brick house facades, gas lights, cobblestone pavement in the Mews, these short lanes are home for well-off artists, writers and actors.

New York blocks are very short. In a minute or so you're at 36-38 Fifth (at West 10th Street), the Church of the Ascension. A plaque out front tells you this small Episcopal Church is a New York landmark, built in 1840-41 and refurbished about 1888. "They have Christmas caroling in here," says villager Mel Geller. "So if you happen to be here around Christmas time, come."

Focal points inside are the 1888 John LaFarge mural of the Ascension over the altar, and the LaFarge and Louis Tiffany stained glass windows. They are crystal clear and gorgeous.

"I've been told by stained glass makers that everything is so clear and colorful because they invented a new stained glass where thin sheets were compressed together with crushed stained glass in between," says caretaker Evelyn Consigliere. "And then they layered it, to give it an effect."

Just up and across the avenue, at 47 Fifth, you're welcome seven afternoons a week to visit the oldest professional art club in the United States. Founded in 1870, the Salmagundi club is in an old and dignified home shared with the PEN American Cen­ter, a writers' organization, on the third floor; the Society of Animal Ar­tists and the Greenwich Village His­torical Preservation office on the fourth. Salmagundi has one of the country's finest art libraries.

Membership applications are in­vited; many non-artist members are city business and professional people who dine reasonably at the club. There are changing exhibitions. And annual auctions of art work bring rev­enue to both club and artists.

At 47th street, Hassidic Jews are famed for carrying on their diamond trade.
Come spring, it's time to worship the sun in Madison Square. 

My old dentist friend Elliot Oxen-berg has his office next door, at 49 Fifth. Elliot plays jazz vibraharp. He is the only dentist I know whose dread­ful drill sounds are blunted by a steady, soothing flow of recorded mainstream jazz. ("Listen to Burton's next solo here," says the dentist.) Every winter Elliot and his wife, Cindy, hold an open-house jam session, where people who play are welcome to sit in. Maybe it's by invitation. You'll have to phone and ask.

There are some top jazz clubs nearby. Or if you're a country music buff, step into the Lone Star Cafe on the southeast corner of 13th Street and Fifth. The chili here "ranges from mildly breathtaking to incendiary, the last being our choice every time," wrote The New York Times.

For heavy eaters there is Beefsteak Charlie's—a block south—at 12th Street, site of Connoisseur's Corner where Rose Field works and this introductory tour started. Order a steak and eat your fill of salad and drink all the sangria and free beer you want. The video games are free, too.

On the avenue, if the day is sunny and warm, you may want to quench your thirst at a mobile refreshment stand. Last summer I met Saskia Reuling, from The Netherlands, dispensing non-alcoholic strawberry daiquiris and piña coladas at Blazing Blenders. The young lawyer had completed a one-year master's program at New York University, Washington Square, and was returning home in September. "Before I start any real tough life," she said, "I want to be something stupid."

After three days on Fifth, selling fruit juices at 30% commission, Saskia found passersby both friendlier and better off financially than the "weirdos and funny people" on Cooper Square and Third Avenue.

Fashion is personal, idiosyncratic, fun even crazed on fifth, or any avenue in New York, and who is to say which is the mime and which the office worker.

At 15th Street, even on a hazy day, you can still see Washington Arch to the south. And way back of the arch, the twin towers of the World Trade Center—the city's tallest building—looming up from the lower Manhattan financial district. In the uptown direction, the Empire State Building still looks imposing. Even native New Yorkers never tire of gazing at the stunning highrise. "I look at it every night when I walk home—especially since they started lighting the top for special occasions," says Melvin Geller as we walk along. "For example, St. Patrick's Day it will be colored green, July 4th it's red, white and blue, and they have dozens of color combinations to celebrate different holidays." No other skyscraper holds a candle to the half-century-old Manhattan skymark. Daytime, 15,000 people work here. Every year 15 million visitors sweep to the top.

Down on street level, it's hard to miss a jolly man in his 50s strolling the avenue with a bunch of balloons, the yellow ones longer than he is.

"Three for a dollar, get 'em here!" Billy Simmers, who's been a balloon man for years, complains that business has been slow lately. "Very slow. I might be looking for a job soon."

Billy loves children. "To kids, you know how many balloons I give away free? Kids cry for a balloon and I give it to them." But street peddlers' days are numbered, he says. The police are cracking down. "I got a peddler's license but the police don't observe. When I go to court they throw it [the case] out. I'm a veteran."

The more people you stop to talk with down here, the less likely you'll get uptown to all the better stores, the great library, Rockefeller Center, Central park, Museum Mile, Millionaires Row. But they'll still be there tomorrow.