On the train up to New York, where I am working this week, I read Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life. Pete Hamill is, in many ways, a very unlikeable man, and the book breathes a certain belief that to state one's sins firmly is to be forgiven for them. But the book is nonetheless still very good in many ways, not least of them the powerful invocation of a New York City before television, widespread automobile ownership, or Urban Renewal.
Perhaps because of this, I've been paying particularly close attention to my surroundings this trip. I've been living in DC for eighteen months now, long enough that the streets of New York no longer absorb me as unremarkably as water surrounds a fish. At odd moments, I find myself surprised by their utter familiarity.
It's hard to describe if you haven't grown up in a big city how comforting and homey it is to walk along streets with fifteen story buildings rising on either side. A friend who recently left Washington for more rural climes said, right before he left, "I know you won't understand this, but I find the bustle of DC stressful." He was right; I don't understand it. Another friend, who grew up in suburban Florida, tried to explain it to me.
"All these people," he said, pointing at my apartment walls, "all around you, all the time."
"I know," I said, beaming. "Isn't it cosy?"
All those people give New Yorker's the kind of privacy they crave most--perfect anonymity. I love the fact that in Washington DC, I rarely pass a day in my neighborhood without running in to someone I know. But I confess it would be nice, occasionally, to be able to run out for milk with your hair a mess and your rattiest old sweatpants on, and not be confident of running into someone you used to date with his new girlfriend in tow.
The streets full of people, the tall buildings, call back to something in my childhood, walking along them with my hand in my mother's, when their towering presence made me feel as safe as if they'd been keeping the Mongol hordes out. And walking among them calls up--not memory, exactly, but a thousand memories faded into wordless sensation. I imagine one feels that way about wherever one grew up, but for me, today, it was turning off Broadway into a street lined with trees and tall buildings, pressing into the shadows with sunny broadway twenty feet behind me and the noise of the traffic already fading.
This made me feel the sad impossibility of conveying anything like the New York I grew up in--not the New York of spaldeens and knickers, definitely, but the world that replaced the world that Pete Hamill mourns. We had the little old Jewish ladies who made rugelach in the rent-controlled apartments they'd occupied since 1946, the Hungarian pastry shop, the German-Jewish butcher who gave a slice of bologna to every child who came in and the pizza places still run by wizened Italians--but we also had the heroin addicts playing chess on the poured-concrete tables that had been, for some reason, installed beside every housing projects on the Upper West Side. There were the grim, bare streets where the trees had been allowed to die and all summer the sidewalks glittered bleakly with broken glass. Graffiti on every train car, children bathing in open fire hydrants. I still remember many scenes from my childhood in the grainy footage of the opening to Good Times. The show was about the Chicago housing projects, but they looked enough like the ones on Columbus Avenue to permanently embed themselves in my childish mind as stories of home:
Or rather, near home. I went to school with the kids from the projects, but I returned home to a nice middle-class building west of Broadway. But small children don't register economic distinctions. To them, the buildings are all scenery.
What defeats me is the sheer volume of details. Today in the building of my father's elevator, I read the elevator inspection certificate--chiefly because it noted that the elevator had been briefly shut down for failing inspection. These certificates from the New York City Department of Buildings are in every elevator in New York. I must have stared at thousands of them in my life as I rode from floor to floor; they are an excellent way to avoid looking at the other people in the elevator. But before today, I don't think I ever consciously noticed that they existed. Had you given me a thousand years to list things about New York City, I doubt I would ever have recalled them.
They aren't important, in themselves, except the fact that I never really noticed them makes me wonder what else I am not noticing, and which of those unnoticed things really does matter. All of them, in some sense--they city is the millions of tiny details that everyone in it has in common. Even when you're in it, it's already something of a lost world.
Shorter Megan McArdle: So you think Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy are pretensious writers? Heh. You ain't seen nothin yet.
Many people complain that New York has lost much of its character over the past decade or so. Today, they lament, it's basically a sterile plastic suburban shopping mall minus the roof, inhabited by affluent people paying exhorbitant sums for their apartments. The friendly neighborhood baker or shoemaker is today a CVS store or bank branch.
Some of this is true, of course, but the fact also remains that the city is safer, less grimy, and altogether more civilized than it was 15 or 20 years ago. A worthy tradeoff? That's for each person to decide.
I grew up in Providence Rhode Island and feel the same way about streets lined with oak trees and dark old Victorian houses.
What seems normal and comforting depends largely on what you're used to. I knew people in Hong Kong who were horrified at the thought of living at ground level. It surprised me at first, but if one grew up on the 27th floor, the thought that a person could walk by right outside your window might seem strange and a bit creepy.
To each his own. I suppose it all depends on what you grew up with.
I was raised on a 50 acre farm, surrounded by hundred acre farms, and if I can even see a neighbor's house in the distance, it seems too close. Currently, due to financial necessity, I'm living on 1.5 acres, 5 miles outside the city limits of a small town, and I feel positively claustrophobic; I can't wait for the chance to get away to something more secluded.
Wilkinson and Suderman? God, I need a new hobby
To each his own. I suppose it all depends on what you grew up with.
I was raised on a 50 acre farm, surrounded by hundred acre farms, and if I can even see a neighbor's house in the distance, it seems too close. Currently, due to financial necessity, I'm living on 1.5 acres, 5 miles outside the city limits of a small town, and I feel positively claustrophobic; I can't wait for the chance to get away to something more secluded.
Sorry about the double post. I was just trying to refresh the page; dunno quite what happened.
Megan, you need to watch the PBS documentary called New York: A Documentary by Ric Burns. Not the lone, twin towers dvd that came out after 9/11, but the original series. The early parts are a bit... dull if you aren't interested in early American history, but the DVDs that focus on the late 19th and 20th century (and, which have Pete Hamill in them along with Koch, Guiliani, Ginsburg, etc) are fabulous. They balance all of the points you have with amazing film, pictures, and interviews.
I grew up in Cincinnati, in the central city not the suburbs, with streetcars and later electric trolleys, open air markets and a bustling downtown. Much of that was gone by the time I left in the early seventies, lost to suburbanization and "urban renewal," a synonym as near as I can tell for Interstate Highways driven through once vital neighborhoods.
I moved to Boston and felt immediately "at home" in the crowded density of it and when, some years later (1980) I moved to New York (to 92nd Street on the Upper West Side), felt even more at home. I loved the density, the crowds, the sheer quantity of human energy in the place, along with the anonymity and the powerful intimacy of the friendships formed in some ways in reaction to the city's loneliness.
I've always wondered about the powerful sense of place I felt having grown up in a place that was so much smaller, but there it was.
I still regard New York as a kind of home, even though I left permanently almost 20 years ago. I miss the energy though when I go back I'm often overwhelmed by it. I especially miss the aimless walks through which I discovered so much of the city. I would take the subway somewhere in Manhattan and take indirect routes home, taking half a day or more, stopping for coffee or food along the way, window shopping etc, turning onto whatever street seemed interesting and always finding something to see. I miss too taking a subway line to the end of the line in the Bronx, Queens or Brooklyn simply to see what was there.
What I think is interesting about this is how similar it feels. I grew up in Chicago in the 80s and 90s, but this post and the one above it could easily have been written about that city as well (indeed, even the comments apply). The mirror image of Megan's claiming the Cabrini projects for NYC, I suppose.
The Chicago my parents grew up in - in the 50s, 60s and 70s - was a pretty gritty place as well, filled with a color and sense of place that I fear it's losing while I'm alive. What I remember from the 80s is vague, but I do have the sense of having lived in two separate cities. Cabrini is now (even more of) an empty shell, sparsely inhabited and perpetually being demolished. There remain poor neighborhoods, but gentrification spreads ever farther throughout the city, and the poor residents move to the suburbs while the middle class and rich claim them.
But the city is "safer" now, and "healthier".
But the city is "safer" now, and "healthier".
I'm a suburbanite who aspires to own enough land that he can hunt without driving anywhere, so the urbanite mentality is tricky for me to understand. Why does there seem to be so much nostalgia for dysfunction, crime, and poverty? "Sterile" is often used as an insult for suburbs but the great thing about sterility is that it prevents you from getting horrible infections and dying. In what sense are dirty needles preferable?
I can see the appeal of a corner butcher shop, at least if you don't have to pay its prices. What is the appeal of heroin addicts, whether playing chess or not? Why is gentrification so lamented--do you really prefer violent and filthy neighborhoods whose economy depends on liquor stores?
I've always noticed the elevator inspection stickers...don't know why.
The most poignant memory I have is playing in the playground on 85th & 5th, I think, near the Met. Good times back in the late 70s.
Rob, I think you could understand it from your perspective as a hunter. Why wake up early in the morning, drive an hour into the deep woods, sit in the cold and the damp, and wait a long time for an animal,try to shoot it with an expensice rifle, and engage in the messy business of skinning and gutting it, when you could just buy some meat at the super market to the strains of Neil Diamonds, "Sweet Caroline"? Whether it's the sun in the morning, or the crack of a .223, it's a real memory, something undimmed plesantness doesn't produce in abundence.
rickm, you're a coward, and full of douche. FYI.
I just participated in the world wide photo walk sponsored by Scott Kelby.
It's a similar experience.
On the one hand, you're posting shots you're pleased with. On the other hand, you're looking at shots other people got of details you missed, angles you didn't think of, and cool stuff you walked right past.
It's been a wonderful experience.
Lots of New Yorkers pay attention to the elevator inspection certificates, and occasionally, the mysterious folks who sign them become minor celebrities, as noted in this article about the once ubiquitous T. D'Alessandro, who inspected Upper West Side elevators when I was a neighborhood resident.
Megan I expected more from you than the typical I grew up in the "only real city" mentality.
The trite reference to heroin addicts in a way that makes them sound charming is also below your normal quality of writing.
Whoever knew heroin addicts added charm to a city? Let's import some to Seattle!
Was Marcel Proust Irish too? Whatever you do don't move to Dallas. You'll be reading the notice inside the car glove box because you'd need to be a lizard to go outside and some poor psychiatrist is going to have to try and decide if you are delirious and how to treat you.
Megan I love your blog, I check it all the time. But I really wish you'd just once, not take yourself so seriously with this stuff.
Everyone can tell you really like the New York of days bygone days; but also you really like the exclusivity associated with it. That's fine! Pretension isn't a mortal sin. You're still exceptionally readable!
You're so ready to admit your other girlie indulgences. I don't get the hangup you have about admitting that there's something romantic about growing up in the NYC you're describing, and that it feels good to have been part of it when you know almost no one else was. You're part of the inside club; you like it; just admit it and these posts would seem much, much less "nya nya, look what I have and you don't."
a) I don't know how you got the idea that I *liked* having heroin addicts next to the housing projects and dead trees. 'Tis true that I don't like places that are economically homogenous, but I don't approve of graffiti or crime, as a rule.
b) bcg, I loved the New York of my childhood. I don't think of this as bragging, any more than I'm bragging about my parents when I say I love them. I assume that others feel the same way about wherever they grew up. Mostly, anyway.
I don't know how you got the idea that I *liked* having heroin addicts next to the housing projects and dead trees...I loved the New York of my childhood.
That would be the NYC in the days before the heroin addicts had been forcibly separated from the dead trees, would it not? Which you look upon at least favorably, if not perhaps somewhat more favorably than you do even today, right? It just strikes me as weird because I can't imagine what could compensate someone for having to live next to that. I don't even like to have decent people that close by, never mind bums, addicts, and criminals.
But I suppose we can all feel nostalgic for our childhood, regardless of what form it took.
I honestly don't understand why anyone would take Megan to task for expressing nostalgia for her childhood. I didn't grow up in NYC and am glad I didn't see junkies on the street of my neighborhood. But as Megan said, to a child, the street (and the junkies) are just wallpaper. What's important is not the street itself, it's the "walking along them with my hand in my mother's" part.
Why do you love your mother even though she can be a real bitch sometimes? Love is not believing that something is perfect. The confusion between those two sentiments is one of the major problems with modern relationships.
I spent my infancy in Greenwich Village.
The story of how I came to be (both generally and with respect to NYC specifically) is long in the telling, but of relevance to this post is the fact that when we left, it was to a sleepy market town in the lower Willamette Valley. It was an exurb of Portland even 30 years ago, but... so. Isolated.
The house was a stone's throw from a railroad crossing, and we all looked forward to the times the train came through, because the rest of the time, it was so. Quiet.
Mom especially made no secret of the fact that the quiet drove her crazy, even though she grew up not far away in an environment that wasn't terribly different when she was a young girl.
Why do you love your mother even though she can be a real bitch sometimes?
If I were describing somebody, and I mentioned that he had been an abusive drunk who had cleaned up, I don't think I'd put "sober" and "less likely to hit you" in quotations marks as Abe did above (which was what prompted me to comment initially), or suggest that sobriety (aka gentrification) was somehow negative (again, as Abe did).
I have nothing against your nostalgia; I just struggle to understand the an attraction so powerful that manages to overwhelm the negatives that you yourself describe.
On the other hand, I will admit to missing living in east King County for vague unspecified reasons.
The mixture of high functioning and helplessness, ambition and tragedy relieved by concentration and playfulness evoked by heroin addicts playing chess on the project's chess boards is evocative of the glory and tragedy of the outpouring of G-d in humanity IMHO, a 'little less than the angels' indeed.
If dysfunction, crime and poverty (all of which have overtaken the vibrant working class neighborhood I grew up in in Cincinnati) were all there were to New York or to any of the great cities there would be no reason to love them. Those things exist in every city I've lived in including the one I live in now. Would that it were otherwise? Yes, of course.
But great cities have more than enough to compensate for their downsides unless of course you don't care for the things they have. I lived in Boston and New York for fifteen years, never owned a car, never missed having one and loved walking or taking trains everywhere. In those cities and in Minneapolis where I am now, I can walk everywhere except to work (but my wife does). That includes a choice of grocery stores, movies, lakes, parks, pro sports, an art museum, music dance and theater. Not to mention my favorite form of hunting, shopping.
As for suburbs, hey some of best friends...but are they interesting once you leave the house? And how long does it take to drive to someplace that is?
I could be and probably am wrong about this, but I suspect my cliched notion of the burbs is as ill-informed as the notions some suburbanites have about cities.
I honestly don't understand why anyone would take Megan to task for expressing nostalgia for her childhood. I didn't grow up in NYC and am glad I didn't see junkies on the street of my neighborhood. But as Megan said, to a child, the street (and the junkies) are just wallpaper. What's important is not the street itself, it's the "walking along them with my hand in my mother's" part.
Sorry about the double post...don't know why it happened, just came in and refreshed the browser.
When you get to an age when second childhood begins to seem an attractive option, it helps to have a good range of landscapes to be nostalgic about. I think Negan is on the right track in combining nostalgia for the black raspberry country of upper NY State and the fifteen story streets of Manhattan.
Washington I am dubious about. It has come a long way from the big company town I first encoutered in 1951, but it is still far less a real city than, say, Boston. Perhaps the best compromise is to feel nostalgic for that untypical piece of Washington, Rock Creek Park.