I miss the New York that I knew.
I miss the New York that I knew.
I ’ve always resented and hated New York City, so I’m surprised to find myself saying I miss it. It dawned on me this week, when I got an invitation to an event being held by an institution that is just a few doors down from National Review’s offices. It will be a digital event. So, like the morning meetings I have with my NR colleagues, or my “get togethers” with friends overseas, I must “go” to it by going to my home computer. Many New York corporate offices don’t intend to open again until the spring, given the fears of a second wave of COVID-19. In the meantime, hundreds or thousands of struggling New York institutions will die.
I’ve already noticed that the comedy clubs I liked are closing. There was an English pub that I used to go to. Before COVID, I knew it was facing big decisions with an upcoming lease. Has COVID saved it by creating a crash in rental prices? Or has COVID destroyed it by drying up revenue for half the year?
The last time I was there, should I have said “goodbye” to my New York?
“Goodbye to New York City” is an essay genre that has filled up collections in the past decade alone. Sometimes, the author explains, it is the price. At other times, it’s the need for space, for a little bit of yard, for access to good public schools. Which is another way of saying, “It’s the price.” Sometimes the subject of the essay is giving up a dream career. Which is another way of saying that the problem was the price. Often the dream career is being an essayist living anywhere in New York City besides the Bronx, Staten Island, or Bayside, Queens. For those places are a price too high in another sense.
These essays succeed or fail in the location references, and their demonstration of extreme class and age consciousness. They name places that excite nostalgia for other former New Yorkers, or for New Yorkers who have merely migrated to a different socioeconomic class, or aged out of hipness altogether. If the essay is by a Brooklynite, control-F for Union Hall. Expect arch commentary on the “bookshelves” and the poseurs playing bocce within. The “Goodbye to New York” essay is usually about the city revealing something about the author he or she didn’t want to know.
I’ve never lived in the city and I’ve dreamed often of escaping its orbit in the suburbs. New York City is unpleasant in a thousand ways. The street grid is monotonous. On summer mornings, the city itself reeks. On summer days, water drops down on you from air conditioners. You share the city with Pizza Rat, and those mysterious animal carcasses that wash up from the East River. Like so many commuters, I find I want to take a shower almost the minute I get home after I travel through and out of the city by mass transit.
New York’s scale and density seem inhuman to me. My friends who moved to the city imagined that they would have access to all the other acquaintances of ours who also moved there. They didn’t. My theory is that it is the density of human faces between stopping points that makes travel stressful. I think nothing of driving 40 miles for a dinner companion in rural Maine. But once my friends settled into Normandie Court on East 95th, they found the idea of popping down on their monthly MTA pass to the Lower West Side or Brooklyn almost unthinkable.
My family has lived near but not in New York City because this is where the sweet spot is for career opportunities and raising a family. The New York suburbs are a great place to live. But I’ve always been cursed with the romantic illusion that it would be better to live somewhere that is a great place to die, a great place to be buried. I’d take something in California, which is a land of reinvention and dreams. Or Texas, with its gargantuan spaces. Give me London, where my mother fell in love with my father. Give me the Dublin that emerged from Joyce’s squib, the city where my father grew up. But not New York. If I want to see New York, or an idea of New York, I can always turn on a television. It’s always there. New York belonged to Wall Street, to Noah Baumbach’s sad artists, to Wes Anderson’s irascible misfits, to Scorsese’s white ethnic criminals. It belonged to soundstages in Los Angeles.
Now, having been away for the longest stretch of time since I was a teenager, I’ve discovered it’s the city I took for granted. There was the Upright Citizens Brigade theater, where Amy Poehler made me laugh so hard I almost lost my voice. There’s Brother Jimmy’s, where I told my best friends that they’d be my best men. Am I the only one with a fond personal memory at a Brother Jimmy’s? There’s the quintessential “brunch spot,” Sarahbeth’s on Central Park South, where I told my Irish sisters they’d become aunts soon. There’s the Players Club, where I ate a pizza on the street with my father, before we went inside for a standing-room-only event for the book I dedicated to him. There’s the New York Times building, where, improbably, I won a hackathon in 2013 when I thought I’d leave journalism. I suddenly miss Park Avenue, and the distinct feeling that by walking down that street from Grand Central with the sun rising and leather soles banging the pavement, you were really “making it” in life. And then there’s just Grand Central Terminal itself. Often it’s just a dash through Hudson News for a bottle of water before the commute. But over the years, it has also been where many of the greatest nights of triumph and ruin in my life ended. Underneath that ceiling, I have greeted and departed from long-distant friends and family members hundreds of times. I’ve sent them back to London, Dublin, Texas, and California, because New York has the power to draw the whole world to itself. Should I be so surprised that eventually it would draw me in too?
I miss the New York that I knew. And I cannot wait until the bridge-and-tunnel crowd can begin to reclaim our place in it.