“The Olden Days,” a phrase that my daughters used when they were young, amalgamates wildly different times in the past. In New York City’s Olden Days, the Lenape Indians caught fish in the Hudson, George Washington was innaugurated at Federal Hall, and Gracie Mansion was a country estate. Sometime in the Olden Days, too, I was a City Child, like my contemporary, Eloise. My youth is not a landmark of city history, but those days feel different enough from the present to merit Olden Days status. (That’s me in the photo above in 1956, feeding pigeons in the park with my sister in the carriage).

Having raised my daughters in the city where I grew up, I’ve compared childhoods here forty years apart—mine in the 1950s and 1960s, and my daughters in the 1990s and early 2000s. I have great nostalgia for my childhood, while understanding that my memories may be deceptive. Childhood days may seem simpler because my weightiest decision as an eight-year-old was whether to spend five cents on Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy or Nickel Nips at the candy store. I long for a time I remember as more elegant and refined, less frenetic and competetive, but I recognize that people who were adults then may have seen it as a time of conformity, limitations and inequality. I have read that the decade was labeled “The Age of Anxiety.” But I recall New York of the 1950s as a wonderful place for a child to live. My memories of that life— its rhythm, what we saw, what we knew, what we had, and what was expected of us— reveals some things we’ve lost in our extraordinary forward progress.

What has changed the least about New York is the beauty and energy of the city. Many of New York’s landmarks and neighborhoods have been preserved, particularly on the Upper East side and in Greenwich Village. Central Park presents scenes that resonate from fifty years ago: the music that echoes in the archway as you walk toward the carousel, the view of Central Park South from Wollman Rink, the statues of Hans Christian Anderson and Alice in Wonderland by the boat pond. And there are neighborhoods like the Flatiron district, where distinctive buildings erected over many decades— mansard rooves and gothic gargoyles, federal red brick next to limestone, cast iron beside copper roof—co-exist in a gorgeous hodge-podge particular to our constantly evolving city.

Parts of my childhood territory have changed, and some have vanished. I grew up on East Seventy-second Street, which kept its pre-War apartment buildings but lost the German and Eastern European shops that trickled down Second Avenue from Yorkville. I recall shopping for vegetables at the greengrocer under the Elevated train, which was torn down in 1955, after which the Third Avenue of tenements and brownstones slowly grew into a canyon of office and apartment buildings. My movie houses— the palaces on 72nd and 86th Streets, the 68th Street Playhouse and the Trans-Lux— are gone, replaced by multiplex theaters. When I visited my grandparents across town on West 57th Street, it resembled a Paris boulevard, with elegant limestone buildings and none of the gleaming towers of today. The places where my grandmother took me for a Saturday afternoon treat—Schraffts for butterscotch sundaes, the Automat just for fun— are gone. Fifth Avenue, once the home of distinctive department stores— B. Altman, Best and Company, Bonwit Teller— has been “mallified” by Disney and Warner Brothers and countless other chains. With explosive growth, New York has lost some architectural gems and a more human proportion, but this has been the price of progress.

The smaller scale architectural world I saw in the 1950s was accompanied by a more predictable visual world of people, because it was a decade in which fashion dictated conformity. I remember talk of “beatniks,” free spirits dressed in black like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, but they were out of sight in Greenwich Village. Most men wore dark suits, white shirts and ties, shined shoes and hats; women wore tailored suits or dresses, high heels, hats and gloves. It was a time in the history of costume when grown-ups dressed as grown-ups and children dressed as children, not in smaller versions of adult clothes. I wore smocked dresses, jumpers or pleated skirts with suspenders, and puffy-sleeved blouses. Winter coats came with leggings; city girls only wore slacks for cold weather, although shorts were standard in the summer. I had four new pairs of shoes every year from Indian Walk, our local shoe shop: brown or blue oxfords for the winter, saddle shoes for the spring, patent leather party shoes, and white Keds for the summer. I don’t know if anyone beside Jack LaLanne exercised in the 1950s (and he’s still here, which tells us something!), but I don’t recall seeing people in leotards, sweat clothes, or blue jeans. Golf or tennis players, who wore clothing suitable for their sports, were outside of the city.

The rhythm of a city childhood in the Olden Days was slower and quieter, with time for lounging, dawdling, and day-dreaming. I spent nursery school and kindergarten learning to cooperate with others, and went to a neighborhood school for first grade, where I learned to read. My mother was a children’s book editor, so when reading became my favorite pastime she kept me supplied with books. Sitting in the living room with my legs slung over the arm of a club chair, I raced through the series books—The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Dana Girls— and other classics, like Eloise (my idol), Pippi Longstocking, The Five Little Peppers, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and Misty of Chincoteague. I had no homework before fifth grade, so after school my friends and I played Clue and Parcheesi, played hopscotch or roller-skated in front of our buildings, went to the candy store, to Lamstons (our Five and Ten Cents Store), or to the Park. We played with dolls, starting with Tiny Tears or Betsy Wetsy, then moving on to Madame Alexander and Poor Pitiful Pearl, and finally to Barbie, who arrived in 1959 to pick up our waning interest. My one organized activity in second grade was a Brownie troup; on weekends I took a ballet class, and a nanny took me ice skating at Wollman Rink.

In addition to having a slower pace, childhood used to last longer. I was a child, with a child’s interest in playing and toys and books, until I was eleven. Before sixth grade my social life was simple; out of the girls in my class I had a “best friend” every year, but I played with everyone.

In sixth grade there were cliques, which came along at the same time as boy/girl parties and Spin the Bottle; at that point we started to listen to rock and roll, and sometimes watched American Bandstand. But my interest in music, and what eventually mushroomed into teen culture, didn’t ratchet up until the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, when I was beginning high school.

Our social world was small and comprehensible, because our lives were circumscribed. My sphere included my school, my parents’ friends and acqaintances from work, and our beach club in Westchester. My family was Jewish, as were many of our friends; while I learned about places that didn’t allow Jews, in Manhattan I wasn’t affected by that very much. I also knew from grown-up conversations that a few families had a lot of money, but money and status were not visible or relevant to me. Most of the people we knew were “comfortable.” The fathers worked— lawyer, doctor, dentist, writer—and most mothers stayed at home and took care of the children. My mother, with her full time job, was unusual. People had ample apartments, but we didn’t know many families with a second home. For vacation, families might take a trip in the winter, as we did to Miami, and spend some time in the summer at a lake or beach resort.

The larger world stayed in the background while I focused on my little life, because information was not very accessible. Our television was in the living room, and I didn’t watch the evening news. I didn’t read the newspaper, except for the Funnies on Sunday, until our sixth grade class on current events. The one gigantic story in the air was, of course, the Cold War and atomic weapons. I worried that the Russians could drop The Bomb on 72nd Street, and was anxious when I saw a newsreel about bomb shelters. But within my own world I felt safe, and I had a lot of independence. Parents were generally relaxed about safety. They told us not to talk to or accept candy from strangers, to “cross at the green, and not in-between,” and sent us on our way. At age seven I went around the corner to the bakery for croissants, at nine I walked to school and took the bus across town to my ballet class. In the summers in Larchmont, I rode my bicycle until twilight—no hands, no helmet—and got blistering sunburns that were slathered with Noxema. (Head injuries and skin cancer—who knew?) No one worried that I might be kidnapped as I sat on the curb waiting for the Good Humor man with my quarter for a Raspberry and Peach Humorette. By the time I was eleven I had free run of the city, traveling by bus and subway to the theater district, to Brooklyn and to Staten Island.

I grew up in the post-War prosperity that created and nurtured our consumer culture, and I remember seeing toys I wanted. Sometimes they were at F.A.O. Schwarz, like the Eloise doll, but more often they were at Lamstons. I wanted a Davy Crockett hat, and then I wanted Mouseketeer ears; Disney was behind much of the merchandise, then as now. Sometimes I just needed a package of jacks or a Spalding ball, a jump rope or a notebook. I asked for a bicycle, a two-wheeler, because I was impatient to learn to ride and expand my territory in the summer. I was caught up in fads—I loved the hula hoop and the yoyo, and collected trading cards—but there wasn’t an enormous quantity of merchandise directed at and advertised to me. I had much less stuff than children do today, and there was less hoopla about it. In fact, when children had too much, they were described as “spoiled.”

While I was not very interested in material things, I was captivated by the television and movies of my era. During the daytime, if I were home sick from school, I got to see re-broadcast classics from the earliest years of television, like My Little Margie, Topper, Our Miss Brooks, The Goldbergs, Beulah, and I Married Joan, which hold up remarkeably well over time. On Saturdays the Our Gang comedies from the 1930s were on television. In the evenings during grade school I watched family programs like Lassie, Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show. Most of these shows portrayed a way of life that was foreign—as a Jewish child in New York, my acquaintance with American small town life was slight— but I loved the shows’ characters and moral themes. Not all of the television I watched was child-oriented; I saw The Steve Allen Show, which introduced me to edgy and adult humor, and of course The Ed Sullivan Show.

My friends and I went to movies, and fixed on Who We Wanted to Look Like When We Grew Up, which changed over time. My own ambitions went from Deborah Kerr to Mitzi Gaynor to Leslie Caron to Audrey Hepburn, although I landed up far from those marks. My first male matinee idol was on television—I imagined running away with Buffalo Bob, of the Howdy Doody Show, in a station wagon. I outgrew Buffalo Bob when I discovered Danny Kaye and Cary Grant and later Rock Hudson. While popular culture is by nature ephemeral, and we accept its rapid changes, celebrity culture in those days moved more slowly, and was more managed and restrained. We knew less about fewer people, who were distinguised by having done more to merit our attention.

Childhood was different fifty years ago because our parents had different priorities and expectations. In the 1950s most adults became parents, which was sometimes incidental to their lives. People who had children were “providing,” “raising” and “minding.” The grown-up world was somewhat removed from ours. Grown-ups went to the theater, parties and night clubs; except for holiday celebrations, and the occasional inter-generational gathering, we stayed at home. Parents expected certain behavior: politeness, good table manners, consideration for others, responsibility for our belongings and our homework. In addition to being considered spoiled if we had too many material things, children were spoiled if we were allowed to dominate adult proceedings.

For my eleventh birthday, my grandmother gave me a beautiful peridot birthstone ring. I remember opening the box, seeing the stone glinting in the late afternoon sun, and realizing that it was my first “grown up” jewelry. Shortly after that, childhood shifted into adolescence. The complex nature of that phase was echoed by the transitions that the country was undergoing in 1961. My parents and their friends populated the glamorous New York world that is now being explored on television in Mad Men, but the reality of a decade of two-martini lunches and long cocktail hours and infidelity and the fallout of divorce was not glamorous. The darker side of our parents’ lives emerged; when they got into trouble, they had a hard time getting out of it. I had already overheard rumors about a wife-swapping at the beach club, the mother of a friend who went “to rest” in a hospital, and the man who left work because of his drinking. At that point, my sheltered life ended officially and I entered the more complex second decade of my youth.

The decade that followed, not part of the Olden Days, marked the beginning of the time in which New York, along with the rest of the world, became an infinitely more complex place. I have continued to move forward, accepting some changes and embracing others, and my appreciation of New York has grown as I’ve lived, worked and raised a family here. I feel fortunate that I started out when childhood was a time and place a bit apart, connected to the main land but not subject to all its constraints. My parents no longer walk these streets, but of their many gifts I’m most grateful that they shared their love of this wonderful city, and gave me a New York Childhood in the Olden Days.