I miss this about New York too, the conversations. Since 1998 I've been in LA instead, and it is not the same here. You *can* get in a conversation with a stranger in LA, in a bar usually, but -- there's always defensiveness. Like he's wary or she's wary that this open little moment is about to let catastrophe wedge itself in -- as if it could.
Twice in recent years I've had good long stays in the East Village. I'd have to check a calendar, but I think 2015 and 2017. A sublet for a month, six weeks. And I was relieved to discover that even though so much has changed, the people are still open and hilarious. Sure that town's got the Chrysler Building and they used to have CBGB, but the single greatest thing there is what Kerouac called "the wacky camaraderie of New Yorkers." He said because of this mood on the streets, it didn't matter how cold it got in the winter.
Outstanding. I've been in Philly almost 30 years now, and every time I visit my oldest son in Brooklyn I am reminded in a different way that it is no longer *my* NYC. You capture this sentiment, somewhere between peaceful closure and resignation, just beautifully.
Personally, I'd take a slight increase in the odds of a mugging for a more interesting city (or muggers limiting their muggings to tourists)(not ex-New Yorkers returning for a visit but the rest of them). Few love/hate relationships are greater than a New Yorker's for the city. OTOH, every day, the ruling class makes the city just a little shittier.
Which gets to one of my, like, macro bete noires: What's the quality of life for the masses? So we get the ruling class cleaning things up and erecting tall, skinny, shiftily-constructed edifices. Big deal; how's the school system? (Wait, maybe that's a bad example since the ruling class wants a shitty school system, but you get the idea.)
The City's prettier but less fun except for the topless women around Times Square. Literally, that's the sole improvement: Cleaner and boobs.
`I only lived in ATL for five years: the rest of my life in a couple of little, but was in town all the time trying to flog my artwork: RuPaul took over the 688 Club with an early all drag show (before he'd had a Genderfuck band called "WeeWeePole") the night I'd decorated* it for my buddy Chuck's band "Lubetool" (haven't figured out how to add umlauts on this new laptop), there was a music scene that was interracial, pre hip hop: and some good stuff emerged from it. REM would play in Piedmont Park for a last time, sounding like Steppenwolf...
The Atlanta pre Millenium is as dead as the place they burnt in Gone with the Wind.
Tom Wolfe, the real one, felt the same way about Asheville NC.
*wrapped portions of the exterior with Black plastic and string, and yarn webs and painted carpet backing on the walls...all scrapped from dumpsters: Chuck joked "it's more Crisco than Christo."
The Big Money found neighborhoods it previously ignored like Cabbagetown and Pittsburgh, and is working on the area around the AU Center (what I used to call Morris Clark SpelHouse).
It's become almost impossible to find a decent apartment for under $1200 a month. Ask me how I know. And this has all been within the last two or three years.
Indeed. (I know Dekalb County best.) They're building a giant *Publix* on the corner of Ponce and Sam's Crossing across from Avondale station--that land used to be a junkyard. Dekalb Farmer's Market is about to triple in size. All of the vacant lots, that you could see from the train, on Dekalb Avenue/Decatur Street between downtown Decatur and Five Points are infill condos now.
Ironically, White Flight to the Suburbs has resulted in the rise of strong immigrants communities in the Burb, and a more Dem electorate ! Gwinett Mall is Koreatown, and I ate at my first Somali restaurant..As long as the most common path to millionaire status is Land development and its allies (banking, construction, particularly subsidized highway construction) and they don’t run out of water (a real possibility..idiot schemes for aqueducts from the Tennessee river trigger plans to relitigate the State lines..) its going to keep growing…
I’m meeting my son at KPop Korean BBQ next month for his birthday.
Just remembered that any pipeline from the Tennessee River/Chattanooga would have to travel through Dalton--Marjorie Traitor Greene land. It would be shot full of holes before the concrete dried.
"All I can say is keep going, guys, palace of wisdom and all that, and if it doesn’t work out at least maybe I can afford to move back."
Ha! As you well know, people are fleeing the city in droves, stampeding to anywhere else because of the horrible socialism imposed by the Dread DeBlasio. That's why rentals are so unaffordable--because nobody wants them.
On a serious note, beautifully written as always. And I know well the mix of nostalgia and los, of place and feeling misplaced in walking the old haunts of Manhattan. When Thomas wrote that you can never go home, I think this is what he meant.
Yeah, I’m gonna be working for a company in Wilton (just outside of Norwalk), and it looks like the only affordable dwellings in all of Fairfield County are in Bridgeport
Walt Kelly regularly wrote (not in <i>Pogo</i> proper, but in his text accompanying his collections), approximately, "Everything outside New York is Bridgeport." (Checking for the correct phrasing with Google just now, because actually getting up and walking 10 feet to the nearest, or maybe 18 to the furthest, copy of such a collection would be too much exercise, I find that apparently "Fred Allen once said, 'Everywhere outside New York City is Bridgeport, Connecticut'", but did Walt say it first, or Fred, or is it just a fact of nature?) Anyway, during the 5 years I was employed at Columbia and living in Apartment 18E, 560 Riverside Drive weekdays during the school year, on the south-facing coast of Massachusetts otherwise (first landfall due south, after leaving MA: the Turks and Caicos), I drove through Bridgeport a <i>lot</i>. (Other routes too, and once I took the ferry from New London to the far tip of Long Island just so I could experience the Long Island Expressway once. Once was enough.) Yeah, mostly poor and depressed near the Post Road anyway.
But speaking of Fairfield County, one of the most recent arrivals here at the Old Fogies Home in Boston was born in Brooklyn into an Irish family of Dorothy Day fans; when she was just a kid (I'd guess, c. 1940) her father and uncles decided they wanted to be farmers, and the family decamped to Fairfield County, town of Newtown, village of Sandy Hill. So she grew up on a truck farm and loved it.
"In McCarren Park I saw a guy working on his golf swing;" - Jesus, what a detail. When I lived in Greenpoint in the 90s, I stumbled upon 2 1/2 dead guys in that park. The 1/2 -- an ill-tempered Polish guy who lorded it over the other homeless sleepers like he was King of the Drunks -- turned out to be not quite dead. He recovered and was soon back brawling on Nassau Street.
I also went up to McGolrick Park, and there were no golf shenanigans there. The place was wonderfully well-tended, and there was a Parks worker cleaning the toilets! He was plunging the bubblers when I got then, a job he clearly did not relish (but then he's not spoiled for choice).
Please keep these up. Between the NYC and DC stories I am reminded of Scott Fitzgerald’s follow-up to the “holding two opposing points of view” quote: “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
This is excellent, Roy. With the exception of a few pre-teen years, I’ve spent my entire long life in New York City, and I’m only able to live in Manhattan now by dint of subsidized housing. Being such an old geezer that I can no longer joke about it, I've sold out some of my longing for the NYC of my yewt to the needs of old age and infirmity. My wife, as a young nurse back in the good old days, was once mugged late at night on the Brooklyn Bridge by a guy with a gun (being a native New Yorker, she talked him into giving her driver's license back since the DMV was such a nightmare -- I guess he could relate). I like the fact that now I can go out at 1:30 AM and see little old ladies walking their dogs.
No doubt, any longing I have for the exciting city I used to know is suffused with nostalgia for lost youth. My days of spending a Saturday night bacchanal looking for one more after-hours freak show are over. Which is just as well, it would look like a sequel to "Cocoon." The streets now are teeming with Children of the Wealth, who must find their excitement in places us old farts don't know about. But I can still find traces of old New York in old New Yorkers, characters like my eye doctor, who in his 90s still rides the subway all over the place to find ethnic food treasures. Even as we become a Disney ride for trust funders who think a good apartment is one whose rooftop pool has a coffee bar, I still wouldn't choose to live anywhere else.
I hope you got to take enough vacations. Much as I love Manhattan, I learned early on that you couldn't live there year after year without a break and without going crazy.
Terrific piece. I lived there from '72 to '80, and whenever I go back I'm clobbered by how dense it is with people, shops, traffic, everything--which I'm no longer used to.
And speaking of Cody and Dylan: For my sins I'm doing ghostwriting jobs via an agency, and one project involves working with a husband and wife team of real estate developers in NY on a children's book. I wanted to name the kid characters "Katie" and (in my concession to modernity) "Cord," but no. They've chosen "Lexi" and "Maddox." They're the boss!
I'm just glad you have that lovely food blog that Roy hipped us to the other day, and time to write for it when you're not busy with the (no doubt engrossing) adventures of Lexi and Maddox.
This is why I love the columns of former and current perspective. It reminds me of how I write about Iowa when I leave (and I only visit it once a decade or so) because the idyllic charm of youth is gone, you stand as an outsider now looking in, but with knowledge of what was, what could have been, and (for Iowa) how awful it would be as a family to live there now. Yet we do have to acknowledge for NYC, the city changes constantly, just like it does now in Portland where I live now. The vibrancy of so many compactings does this in one sense. Where there was a one story junk shop, the old one story lesbian bar, now are multistory developments with no parking for the multicultural young who have flooded my neighborhood. For me, seeing that young love proudly walk the streets, make their presence known, it gives a bit of hope to the few multiracial couples like ourselves.
This stirred various feelings in me - about your age, living somewhere I didn't grow up (and definitely priced out of where I did grow up, though I think it was a better place to be from than to be) - definitely aware there's less than 50% left even if I'm not feeling the downhill slide very much. Your last two paragraphs really land for me, and I'm glad that you're over the exile's longing.
I miss this about New York too, the conversations. Since 1998 I've been in LA instead, and it is not the same here. You *can* get in a conversation with a stranger in LA, in a bar usually, but -- there's always defensiveness. Like he's wary or she's wary that this open little moment is about to let catastrophe wedge itself in -- as if it could.
Twice in recent years I've had good long stays in the East Village. I'd have to check a calendar, but I think 2015 and 2017. A sublet for a month, six weeks. And I was relieved to discover that even though so much has changed, the people are still open and hilarious. Sure that town's got the Chrysler Building and they used to have CBGB, but the single greatest thing there is what Kerouac called "the wacky camaraderie of New Yorkers." He said because of this mood on the streets, it didn't matter how cold it got in the winter.
As you see, I can relate! Also, very sorry about your dog.
Lovely.
Outstanding. I've been in Philly almost 30 years now, and every time I visit my oldest son in Brooklyn I am reminded in a different way that it is no longer *my* NYC. You capture this sentiment, somewhere between peaceful closure and resignation, just beautifully.
Personally, I'd take a slight increase in the odds of a mugging for a more interesting city (or muggers limiting their muggings to tourists)(not ex-New Yorkers returning for a visit but the rest of them). Few love/hate relationships are greater than a New Yorker's for the city. OTOH, every day, the ruling class makes the city just a little shittier.
Which gets to one of my, like, macro bete noires: What's the quality of life for the masses? So we get the ruling class cleaning things up and erecting tall, skinny, shiftily-constructed edifices. Big deal; how's the school system? (Wait, maybe that's a bad example since the ruling class wants a shitty school system, but you get the idea.)
The City's prettier but less fun except for the topless women around Times Square. Literally, that's the sole improvement: Cleaner and boobs.
But still, <3.
"Over the Mountains of the Moon..
Down the Valley of Shadow..."
I have that poem memorized.
`I only lived in ATL for five years: the rest of my life in a couple of little, but was in town all the time trying to flog my artwork: RuPaul took over the 688 Club with an early all drag show (before he'd had a Genderfuck band called "WeeWeePole") the night I'd decorated* it for my buddy Chuck's band "Lubetool" (haven't figured out how to add umlauts on this new laptop), there was a music scene that was interracial, pre hip hop: and some good stuff emerged from it. REM would play in Piedmont Park for a last time, sounding like Steppenwolf...
The Atlanta pre Millenium is as dead as the place they burnt in Gone with the Wind.
Tom Wolfe, the real one, felt the same way about Asheville NC.
*wrapped portions of the exterior with Black plastic and string, and yarn webs and painted carpet backing on the walls...all scrapped from dumpsters: Chuck joked "it's more Crisco than Christo."
"dead as the place they burnt in Gone with the Wind" wow
Left Atlanta in 1984; I was there not long ago and no-one warned me it had become Los Angeles with pine trees instead of palms
The Big Money found neighborhoods it previously ignored like Cabbagetown and Pittsburgh, and is working on the area around the AU Center (what I used to call Morris Clark SpelHouse).
It's become almost impossible to find a decent apartment for under $1200 a month. Ask me how I know. And this has all been within the last two or three years.
I lived in a group house off Lawrenceville Highway; no car, so I walked to the Avondale MARTA to get downtown. Boy does that ever seem quaint now
...and last I went through, fckin’ DULUTH looks like my old neighborhood
Indeed. (I know Dekalb County best.) They're building a giant *Publix* on the corner of Ponce and Sam's Crossing across from Avondale station--that land used to be a junkyard. Dekalb Farmer's Market is about to triple in size. All of the vacant lots, that you could see from the train, on Dekalb Avenue/Decatur Street between downtown Decatur and Five Points are infill condos now.
NOOOOO! LEAVE L’IL FIVE POINTS ALONE
Seriously, when I left there were a few thousand people scattered around Gwinnett County, and now there’s, what, almost a million?! What the hell?
Ironically, White Flight to the Suburbs has resulted in the rise of strong immigrants communities in the Burb, and a more Dem electorate ! Gwinett Mall is Koreatown, and I ate at my first Somali restaurant..As long as the most common path to millionaire status is Land development and its allies (banking, construction, particularly subsidized highway construction) and they don’t run out of water (a real possibility..idiot schemes for aqueducts from the Tennessee river trigger plans to relitigate the State lines..) its going to keep growing…
I’m meeting my son at KPop Korean BBQ next month for his birthday.
Land development and water shortages... like Phoenix but more humid
(Like that water would ever make it to Atlanta in the first place. Lake Allatoona would suddenly, mysteriously double in size.)
Just remembered that any pipeline from the Tennessee River/Chattanooga would have to travel through Dalton--Marjorie Traitor Greene land. It would be shot full of holes before the concrete dried.
Tennessee River says, "Respect my authority!"
My father retired to Asheville in ‘87 so Missus Hairless and I were regulars there until he moved to Tallahassee ( >=[ ). It ain’t the same either
"All I can say is keep going, guys, palace of wisdom and all that, and if it doesn’t work out at least maybe I can afford to move back."
Ha! As you well know, people are fleeing the city in droves, stampeding to anywhere else because of the horrible socialism imposed by the Dread DeBlasio. That's why rentals are so unaffordable--because nobody wants them.
On a serious note, beautifully written as always. And I know well the mix of nostalgia and los, of place and feeling misplaced in walking the old haunts of Manhattan. When Thomas wrote that you can never go home, I think this is what he meant.
Yeah, turns out that when you get old you learn home is not where but when. When can be a week or 100 years, but still it moves.
Bravo! Now do Bridgeport, for the complete George Webber reimagining.
Roy, do please: I may have to move there
?!
Yeah, I’m gonna be working for a company in Wilton (just outside of Norwalk), and it looks like the only affordable dwellings in all of Fairfield County are in Bridgeport
Bridgeport used to be poor and depressed. Don't know if things have improved there or not.
I used Oogle Street View to look at random parts of Bridgeport and I swear it looks like where they filmed GHOST DOG
Walt Kelly regularly wrote (not in <i>Pogo</i> proper, but in his text accompanying his collections), approximately, "Everything outside New York is Bridgeport." (Checking for the correct phrasing with Google just now, because actually getting up and walking 10 feet to the nearest, or maybe 18 to the furthest, copy of such a collection would be too much exercise, I find that apparently "Fred Allen once said, 'Everywhere outside New York City is Bridgeport, Connecticut'", but did Walt say it first, or Fred, or is it just a fact of nature?) Anyway, during the 5 years I was employed at Columbia and living in Apartment 18E, 560 Riverside Drive weekdays during the school year, on the south-facing coast of Massachusetts otherwise (first landfall due south, after leaving MA: the Turks and Caicos), I drove through Bridgeport a <i>lot</i>. (Other routes too, and once I took the ferry from New London to the far tip of Long Island just so I could experience the Long Island Expressway once. Once was enough.) Yeah, mostly poor and depressed near the Post Road anyway.
But speaking of Fairfield County, one of the most recent arrivals here at the Old Fogies Home in Boston was born in Brooklyn into an Irish family of Dorothy Day fans; when she was just a kid (I'd guess, c. 1940) her father and uncles decided they wanted to be farmers, and the family decamped to Fairfield County, town of Newtown, village of Sandy Hill. So she grew up on a truck farm and loved it.
I've been to NYC once. My clearest memory is of getting really sick (bad clams, I think).
"In McCarren Park I saw a guy working on his golf swing;" - Jesus, what a detail. When I lived in Greenpoint in the 90s, I stumbled upon 2 1/2 dead guys in that park. The 1/2 -- an ill-tempered Polish guy who lorded it over the other homeless sleepers like he was King of the Drunks -- turned out to be not quite dead. He recovered and was soon back brawling on Nassau Street.
I also went up to McGolrick Park, and there were no golf shenanigans there. The place was wonderfully well-tended, and there was a Parks worker cleaning the toilets! He was plunging the bubblers when I got then, a job he clearly did not relish (but then he's not spoiled for choice).
I have no idea why you still like humanity. I'm just grateful that you do. It's beautiful and it gives me hope.
Please keep these up. Between the NYC and DC stories I am reminded of Scott Fitzgerald’s follow-up to the “holding two opposing points of view” quote: “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
This is excellent, Roy. With the exception of a few pre-teen years, I’ve spent my entire long life in New York City, and I’m only able to live in Manhattan now by dint of subsidized housing. Being such an old geezer that I can no longer joke about it, I've sold out some of my longing for the NYC of my yewt to the needs of old age and infirmity. My wife, as a young nurse back in the good old days, was once mugged late at night on the Brooklyn Bridge by a guy with a gun (being a native New Yorker, she talked him into giving her driver's license back since the DMV was such a nightmare -- I guess he could relate). I like the fact that now I can go out at 1:30 AM and see little old ladies walking their dogs.
No doubt, any longing I have for the exciting city I used to know is suffused with nostalgia for lost youth. My days of spending a Saturday night bacchanal looking for one more after-hours freak show are over. Which is just as well, it would look like a sequel to "Cocoon." The streets now are teeming with Children of the Wealth, who must find their excitement in places us old farts don't know about. But I can still find traces of old New York in old New Yorkers, characters like my eye doctor, who in his 90s still rides the subway all over the place to find ethnic food treasures. Even as we become a Disney ride for trust funders who think a good apartment is one whose rooftop pool has a coffee bar, I still wouldn't choose to live anywhere else.
Your entire life in Manhattan?? Wow!
I hope you got to take enough vacations. Much as I love Manhattan, I learned early on that you couldn't live there year after year without a break and without going crazy.
Most of my life in Brooklyn and Queens. Only started living in Manhattan in recent years. Sorry if I gave the wong impression.
No problem. I'm originally a Queens boy and Brooklyn is my homeland.
Terrific piece. I lived there from '72 to '80, and whenever I go back I'm clobbered by how dense it is with people, shops, traffic, everything--which I'm no longer used to.
And speaking of Cody and Dylan: For my sins I'm doing ghostwriting jobs via an agency, and one project involves working with a husband and wife team of real estate developers in NY on a children's book. I wanted to name the kid characters "Katie" and (in my concession to modernity) "Cord," but no. They've chosen "Lexi" and "Maddox." They're the boss!
I'm just glad you have that lovely food blog that Roy hipped us to the other day, and time to write for it when you're not busy with the (no doubt engrossing) adventures of Lexi and Maddox.
Cord! Dude, that's why you're a legend.
This is why I love the columns of former and current perspective. It reminds me of how I write about Iowa when I leave (and I only visit it once a decade or so) because the idyllic charm of youth is gone, you stand as an outsider now looking in, but with knowledge of what was, what could have been, and (for Iowa) how awful it would be as a family to live there now. Yet we do have to acknowledge for NYC, the city changes constantly, just like it does now in Portland where I live now. The vibrancy of so many compactings does this in one sense. Where there was a one story junk shop, the old one story lesbian bar, now are multistory developments with no parking for the multicultural young who have flooded my neighborhood. For me, seeing that young love proudly walk the streets, make their presence known, it gives a bit of hope to the few multiracial couples like ourselves.
This stirred various feelings in me - about your age, living somewhere I didn't grow up (and definitely priced out of where I did grow up, though I think it was a better place to be from than to be) - definitely aware there's less than 50% left even if I'm not feeling the downhill slide very much. Your last two paragraphs really land for me, and I'm glad that you're over the exile's longing.
I completely hear ya, but I do still love it. 😉 If you find yourself back for another visit in the future, would love to buy you a drink!