Downtown Read online

  In some ways, my experience of the city has been unique, even for a native. After the summer of 1960 I was a newspaperman, paid to move through many neighborhoods with pen and notebook in hand. No other experience can be so humbling. You think you know the city where you were born; each fresh day as a reporter teaches you that you know almost nothing. I could go to the scene of a murder and record the number of gunshot wounds, the caliber of the bullets, and the name of the person whose corpse was sprawled before me. I’d talk to the police, the relatives, and the neighbors, including the nearest bartender. I could listen while the victim’s relatives wailed their laments. Trying to rescue the human reality from the murder statistics, I was often instructed by the street-smart photographers, who were paid, above all, to see.

  “Look at this guy’s socks,” a photographer named Louis Liotta said to me one morning at a murder scene. “One brown sock and one blue sock. What’s that tell you?” I didn’t know what it told me. Liotta explained: “This guy got dressed in the dark.” He paused. “Or someone dressed his body in the dark—and at home, or there wouldn’t be two different socks.”

  When I talked to a detective about the socks, he said: “Look, the socks tell you he probably got dressed at home. Or his body was dressed at home.”

  But as I got better at seeing and describing what was directly in front of me on a Manhattan street, a troubling dissatisfaction began to grow within me. I acquired enough craft to get the facts and then write a story for the next edition that would give the readers a sense of what I had seen and heard in a place where the readers had not been present. But I was nagged by doubt, knowing that I’d only skimmed the surface of the story and some larger truth was always eluding me. Who were all these other people in the neighborhood where one of them had now been killed? How did they live? Where did they go to school and what were their jobs and how did they find their way to these buildings? What was this neighborhood itself? How did it get here? And what about certain abiding New York mysteries: Why was the Bronx called the Bronx? How did Harlem get its name? Who was Major Deegan? From the specifics of a newspaper story, I was learning how little I knew about my own city.

  Sometimes I would explore these mysteries in the library of the newspaper, using slow time to take out envelopes of crumbling clippings. Or I’d ask older reporters and editors. Sometimes I’d be told, “Major Deegan was a Tammany hack who served in World War One and lived until the 1930s.” Then I’d confirm this with the clippings. The Bronx was named for a guy named Jacob Bronck, a rich Dutchman who owned most of it as a private farm. Harlem was named Harlem for the same reason Brooklyn was called Brooklyn: The Dutch got there first and named one place Haarlem and the other Breuckelen after places in the country they’d left behind.

  In short, I was educating myself as a reporter, but also as a New Yorker. Much of my reading never found its way directly into newspaper stories, of course. For one thing, I was young and having too good a time in the company of people I loved. For another, the original stories had faded from the newspapers and my discoveries were irrelevant. On newspapers, we believed we were all writing history in a hurry, and after the first few days, even the most appalling stories gave way to the shock of the new. Still, it was clear to me that the only way to try to know this city (or any other) was on foot. I didn’t learn to drive until I was thirty-six. Who needed cars when you had two good legs and the subways moved under the traffic?

  Even today, I wander through the city as if I were a young man. Something always surprises me. Something else fills me with wonder. I pass a building I’ve passed a thousand times before and see it suddenly in a new way. In good weather, I like to stand and watch the passing show, a flaneur lounging in a doorway. I see a burly black man help a blind woman across a street. I talk to him later and discover he is from Togo, “all the way in Africa,” and he works for one of the fabric wholesalers on Walker Street. He tells me why he came to New York. “For my kids,” he says. “I want them to be free and, you know, healthy. In Togo, lots of things are green and beautiful, but the neares’ doctor, he was seventeen kilometers away, man.” I see a cop flirting with a pretty girl, a tourist from Italy. “Hey, you want me to walk you?” he says. She smiles a dazzling smile and moves on. He sees me watching, smiles in a conspiratorial way, and says, “Makes you wanna live forever.”

  The New Yorker learns to settle for glimpses. There are simply too many people to ever know them all, to unravel all of their secrets. Nobody in such a vast and various place can absorb everything. You know the people you love and the people with whom you work. The rest is glimpses. And on certain days, yes, you want to live forever.

  And yet, in many separate ways, the people of the city express certain common emotions. The forms and details are different for every generation and every group, but certain emotions have continued to repeat themselves for centuries. One is surely greed, the unruly desire to get more money by any means possible, an emotion shared by citizens from stockbrokers to muggers. Another is sudden anger, the result of so many people living in so relatively small a place. Another is an anarchic resistance to authority. But far and away the most powerful of all New York emotions is the one called nostalgia.

  The city is, in a strange way, the capital of nostalgia. The emotion has two major roots. One is the abiding sense of loss that comes from the simple fact of continuous change. Of the city’s five boroughs, Manhattan in particular absolutely refuses to remain as it was. It is dynamic, not static. What seems permanent when you are twenty is too often a ghost when you are thirty. As in all places, parents die, friends move on, businesses wear out, and restaurants close forever. But here, change is more common than in most American cities. The engine of greatest change is the cramped land itself. Scarcity can create a holy belief in the possibility of great riches. That’s why the religion of real estate periodically enforces its commandments, and neighborhoods are cleared and buildings hauled down and new ones erected, and all that remains is memory.

  This book is littered with casualties of time and greed and that vague reality called progress. Just one example here: I was in high school in Manhattan when I came to know the Third Avenue El. Sometimes I took it as a ride, not just a means of getting from one place to another. I loved its rattling noise, the imagery associated with the 1933 movie King Kong, the stark shadows cast by its beams and girders, and the rows of tenements and Irish saloons that I could see swishing by from its windows. I had no memory of the Second Avenue El, or the Sixth Avenue El, or the Ninth Avenue El. They were all gone. But in some ways, the Third Avenue El seemed as permanent as the Statue of Liberty, and for me it provided a ride through more than simple space. It hurtled me through time as well. They started tearing it down in 1955. By the time I returned from Mexico in 1957, the Third Avenue El was gone too.

  There would be many other disappearances, including too many newspapers. Buildings went up, and if you lived long enough, you might see them come down, to be replaced by newer, more audacious, more arrogant structures. I came to accept this after the el had vanished and some of the worst office buildings in the city’s history began rising on Third Avenue. There was no point, I thought, in permanently bemoaning change. This was New York. Loss was part of the deal. In the same year that the Third Avenue El disappeared, so did the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. The demise of the Third Avenue El was a kind of marker, the end of something that had outlived its time. But for many people, the flight of the baseball teams was an example of unacceptable losses. Some never got over it. After a long while, I finally consoled myself about the Dodgers by saying, Well, at least I had them once and I will always have them in memory. That nostalgia lives in me today. It erupts whenever I see a fragment of black-and-white newsreel showing Jackie Robinson heading for home. But to talk about the Dodgers’ departure without cease would be to live as a bore. New York teaches you to get over almost everything.

  Our losses would culminate, of course, with the violent destruction of
the World Trade Center. For many New Yorkers, now including the young (who grew up with the twin towers), even such a ferocious human toll can provoke nostalgia. Months after the murderous morning of September 11, 2001, I kept hearing New Yorkers speaking in tones of regret about the loss of the buildings themselves, even people who didn’t care for them as architecture. For me, the twin towers were in Downtown but never of Downtown. That is, they were detached from my sense of the home place. And yet most New Yorkers missed their position in the skyline, the sense of dominance they suggested, and longed for the comparative innocence of the brief years in which they existed.

  “I hate to admit this,” one close friend said, “but when I look at the old photographs of the Trade Center, I’m sometimes choked with nostalgia.”

  Nostalgia. The word itself, as critic and educator Nathan Silver has pointed out in his fine book Lost New York, is an imperfect one to describe the emotion itself.

  “The word in English is hopelessly wishy-washy,” he wrote in the revised 2000 edition of his 1967 book. “It seems to denote something between a handwring and a tearjerk, referring as it does to a wistful, regretful feeling. Nowadays most urban dwellers accept that a city’s past vitalizes a coherent sense of the present, but calling that ‘nostalgia’ evokes the approximate reaction that one would get from mentioning heirlooms or embroidery.”

  The New York version of nostalgia is not simply about lost buildings or their presence in the youth of the individuals who lived with them. It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same. Tuesday turns into Wednesday and something valuable is behind you forever. An “is” has become a “was.” Whatever you have lost, you will not get it back: not that much-loved brother, not that ball club, not that splendid bar, not that place where you once went dancing with the person you later married. Irreversible change happens so often in New York that the experience affects character itself. New York toughens its people against sentimentality by allowing the truer emotion of nostalgia. Sentimentality is always about a lie. Nostalgia is about real things gone. Nobody truly mourns a lie.

  That is why, in a million small ways, New Yorkers behaved so well on September 12, 2001. Millions of us wept over the horrors of the day before. Many mourned their own dead and the dead of the larger parish. More millions grieved for the world that existed on September 10, knowing it was forever behind us. For a while, at least, all felt various degrees of fury. But nobody ran. We knew that at least we had lived once in that world before the fanatics changed it forever. With all its flaws, horrors, disappointments, cruelties, we would remember that lost world all our days and most of our nights. And now we would get up in the morning and go to work. Our only consolation would be nostalgia.

  That tough nostalgia helps explain New York. It is built into our codes, like DNA, and beyond the explanation of constant change, there is another common thread in our deepest emotion. I believe that New York nostalgia also comes from that extraordinary process that created the modern city: immigration.

  Every New York history stresses the role of immigration, because the tale simply can’t be told without it. Starting in the early nineteenth century, the city absorbed millions of European immigrants, many arriving in waves: the Irish in flight from the desperate famine of the 1840s; Germans and other Europeans after the political furies of 1848; the immense flood between 1880 and 1920 of Italians, Eastern European Jews, and others in flight from debasing poverty or murderous persecution. We know much about them, and yet we know so little. Many were illiterate and wrote no memoirs or letters; memoir was a genre practiced by their children. We do know that most were young and poor, for the old and the rich don’t often emigrate to strange countries. We know that a common mixture of overlapping hopes served as their personal engines: the desire to raise their children in a place where they’d be healthy and educated, a longing for honest work in a place where they would not be tested about religion or origins, the hope for personal freedom in a country where nobody need ever bend a knee to a monarch.

  But many paid an emotional price for their decisions, and that shared sense of disruption would lead to the second stream of New York nostalgia. For the rest of their lives, those first-generation nineteenth-century immigrants would carry with them what their American children could not fully comprehend: the things they left behind. Those things were at once objects, people, and emotions, and they were part of what almost all immigrants came to call the Old Country. The place where they were children. The place where they ran with friends on summer mornings. The place where all spoke a common language. The place of tradition and certainties, including those cruel certainties that eventually became intolerable. For a long time in the age of sail, most knew they were leaving the Old Country forever. In Ireland, when still another son or daughter prepared to depart for America, families often held what became known as “the American wake.” Their wailing was a lament, as if for the dead.

  Similar rituals marked the departures of many Germans, Jews, Italians, and Poles as they traveled across land to the ports of Europe and then on to the scary Atlantic and the distant harbor of New York. Parents were certain they would never see their children again, and children surely felt that way about their parents. That rupture with the immediate past would mark all of them and did not go away as the young immigrants grew old. If anything, the nostalgias were often heightened by the coming of age. Bitterness often faded, but not the sense of loss. Some would wake up in the hot summer nights of New York and for a few moments think they were in Sicily or Mayo or Minsk. Some would think their mothers were at the fireplace in the next room, preparing food. The old food. The food of the Old Country.

  Many of their nostalgias would be expressed in music. There were hundreds of nineteenth-century songs, in all languages, about vanished landscapes full of well-loved streams, or golden meadows, or the slopes of remembered hills, peopled usually by girls or boys who were left behind. The songs were often calculated treacle written in a cynical way for the immigrant market, but they triggered genuine emotions. With their labor, the immigrants who were singing these songs had purchased their tiny shares of New York. Most saw their children grow tall and healthy and educated. To be sure, some immigrants did little singing or remembering; they collapsed into alcohol, drugs, or criminality. Some were broken by New York and its hardness and returned in shame to the Old Country. Or, if the shame of failure was too much to admit, they moved west, to the empty land Out There, vanishing into America.

  And yet . . . and yet, for those who prospered and those who did not, the music was always there. Those immigrant songs were sung in tenement kitchens and in dance halls, and at weddings and funerals. They ensured that from the beginning of the immigrant tides, loss and remembrance were braided into the New York character. Every immigrant knew what Africans had learned in the age of slavery: that there was a world that was once there in the most intimate way and was now gone. Part of the past. Beyond retrieval. On the deepest level, it didn’t matter whether you had that past taken from you, as had happened to the Africans, or whether you had decided personally to leave it behind. At a certain hour of the night, the vanished past could be vividly alive.

  That double consciousness—the existence of the irretrievable past buried in shallow graves within the present—was passed on to the children of the immigrants and, with diminishing power, to many of the grandchildren. All were conscious of time and its accompanying nostalgias. Events in the larger world often imposed that sense of time. I know a few old New Yorkers who still divide time into three epochs: Before the War, During the War, and After the War. They mean the Second World War. Each of the three periods shaped by the war has its own nostalgias, its own music, its own special sense of hope, anguish, or loss. New Yorkers on the home front experienced that war in a way that was different in the details from the way it was experienced in California or Mississippi or Florida. Other New Yorkers still mark a great shift in the per
sonal consciousness of time by the departure in 1957 of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. Many conversations still can begin, “Before the Dodgers left . . .” Others mark time by the murder of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the event that was the true beginning of what became known as the sixties.

  But the old immigrants themselves lived through that one great defining rupture: between the Old Country and the new. That wrenching break did not happen only to others; it was not forced upon them by history; the immigrants lived it themselves and thus made their own history. And their passage would cut a permanent psychological template into the amazing city they helped to build. In the age of the jetliner, there are no more American wakes. The departed emigrant children can now visit the Old Country, carrying their own American children with them, to celebrate holidays and weddings or to mourn for their dead parents. If they can afford the airline tickets, they can show their children the places where they were young. They can show off their photographs of New York streets, New York schools, New York apartments, New York graduations, New York ball games, and New York picnics. This, they can say in the Old Country, is their America. But the sense of the drastic break, of things left behind, remains with them, and therefore with us. Their nostalgias are familiar. They are the nostalgias that every one of their predecessors felt in the darkest hours of their Downtown tenement lives.

  Here among us now in New York are the Dominicans and the Russians, Indians and Pakistanis, Mexicans and Chinese and Koreans, and others from what a visitor to New York in colonial days once called “all the nations under Heaven.” Even from Togo. Some have moved into Downtown neighborhoods that once provided imperfect nurture to the Jews, Irish, Italians, and Germans before them. Some are settled in Brooklyn or living in newer places in Queens and the rehabilitated Bronx, and travel by subway to jobs in Downtown. Their presence always cheers me; they are proof that in the city of constant change we also have our continuities.