Blossom Dearie / Once Upon a Summertime... / 1958
Manhattan
playful, affectionate, lightly ironic
Video: Blossom Dearie - Topic on YouTube
A Rodgers and Hart standard from 1925, delivered here by Blossom Dearie as a wry, intimate tour of New York's unglamorous corners. Rather than belting civic pride, Dearie's light, conversational delivery treats the city's boroughs and subway as private jokes shared with a lover, turning tourist-brochure geography into something tender and knowing.
urban romance civic affection courtship irony toward glamour the ordinary made magical
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addressing a companion (and by extension the listener), proposing a shared claim on the city; the voice is charmed rather than naive, aware that she's romanticizing mundane things.
What happens
The song moves like a walking tour: it starts with a broad claim on the boroughs, narrows to specific streets and neighborhoods, lingers on sensory details of pushcarts and summer heat, then opens out into a grand metaphor of the city as a toy built for two lovers, before returning to the simple declarative opening line as a kind of closing vow.
How it's built
Built on short AABA-ish verses that accumulate specific place-names before resolving into a repeated refrain about the city as a shared plaything; the repetition of the pushcart and 'wondrous toy' sections functions like a chorus, giving the catalog of streets an emotional anchor each time it returns.
Section by section
Opening verse
“The Bronx, and Staten Island too”
The speaker claims the city wholesale, listing outer boroughs with the same enthusiasm usually reserved for landmarks, immediately signaling that this is a love song to the unpicturesque as much as the iconic.
Delancey/subway verse
The description of the subway as something that 'charms' in a breeze is deliberately absurd, and Dearie's arch delivery leans into that absurdity, making the irony part of the romance rather than undercutting it.
Mott Street refrain
“Sweet pushcarts gently gliding by”
The imagery slows down here, trading catalog-listing for a single lingering sensory picture; the softness of the phrasing turns a crowded market street into something nearly pastoral.
"Wondrous toy" section
The metaphor shifts scale dramatically, shrinking the entire city down to a toy scaled for two people, which is the song's emotional thesis: possession and play, not awe, define the relationship to Manhattan.
Closing repetition
Returning to the flat declarative opening line without elaboration gives the song a quiet, settled close, as if the tour has ended and the claim simply stands.
Craft
- catalog/list
- The song's method is essentially an inventory of boroughs and streets, which builds intimacy through specificity rather than abstraction -- the city becomes knowable and personal through naming.
- extended metaphor
- The city is figured as a toy, collapsing its scale and danger into something domestic and playful, reinforcing the song's romantic rather than civic register.
- irony
- Celebrating places like the subway and crowded streets as charming rather than stressful creates a gentle comic tension between the literal unglamorousness of the locations and the speaker's rapture.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a love song that uses the city as surrogate language for intimacy -- naming streets and boroughs becomes a way of saying 'I know you' and 'I want this life with you.' A secondary reading, supported by the almost deadpan praise of the subway and crowded sidewalks, hears gentle self-aware comedy: the lovers are so happy that even objectively unglamorous urban irritations become charming, which Dearie's arch, cool vocal delivery seems to wink at rather than play straight.
Context
Written by Rodgers and Hart in the 1920s as part of the Garrick Gaieties revue, the song predates Dearie's recording by decades and had already become a standard; Dearie's version on this 1958 album fits her reputation for intimate, conversational jazz vocal readings rather than theatrical belting, which suits the song's shift from Broadway brightness to something more wry and personal.
Listen for
- the deliberately understated, almost spoken delivery on the list of boroughs and streets
- the contrast between Dearie's light timbre and the song's grand romantic claims
- the way the pushcart imagery slows the rhythm compared to the list-heavy verses
- the return to the opening line at the end functioning as quiet closure rather than a big finish
About Blossom Dearie
Margrethe Blossom Dearie was an American jazz singer and pianist. She had a distinctive light and girlish voice.
1924 - 2009 / United States
Full biography and catalogue