The Capital of Nostalgia : Part 1

Downtown; My Manhattan
by Pete Hamill

In Downtown, Hamill leads us on an unforgettable journey through the city he loves, from the island's southern tip to Forty-second Street, combining a moving memoir of his days and nights in New York with a passionate history of its most enduring places and people. From the Battery's traces of the early port to Washington Square's ghosts of executed convicts and well-heeled Knickerbockers; from the Five Points, once the most dangerous and squalid slum in America, to the mansions of the robber barons on "the Fifth Avenue"; from the Bowery of the 1860s, the vibrant heart of the city's theater world, to the Village of the 1960s, with its festival-like street life, this is downtown as we've never seen it before. Hamill weaves his own memories of Manhattan with the liveliest moments from its past, and points out the hints of that past living on in the city of today, fueling the ever-present nostalgia of its inhabitants.

Hamill introduces us to the New Yorkers who have left indelible marks: Peter Stuyvesant and John Jacob Astor, Stanford White and George Templeton Strong, Edith Wharton and Henry James, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, W. H. Auden and Allen Ginsberg, Boss Tweed and Fiorello La Guardia, Jimi Hendrix and Thelonious Monk, and scores of others. And he takes us to the eateries, saloons, theaters, movie houses, bookstores, and street corners they-and he-once frequented, whether still standing or existing only in memory.

Through the city's transformations, the pulse of Pete Hamill's brilliant voice melds with the pulse that drives New York - that mixture of daring, greed, anger, rebellion, hope, entrepreneurialism, and longing that never fades. Written by native son who has lived through some of New York City's most historic moments, Downtown is an extraordinary celebration of the magnificent, haunted place that Hamill continues to call home, and that people from all over the country and the world have come to call their own.

Chapter 1

THIS IS A book about my home city. I was born in the immense and beautiful segment of it called Brooklyn, but I've lived and worked for much of my life in its center, the long skinny island called Manhattan. I live here still. With any luck at all, I will die here. I have the native son's irrational love of the place and often think of William Faulkner's remark about his native Mississippi, and how he loved it "in spite of, not because." New York is a city of daily irritations, occasional horrors, hourly tests of will and even courage, and huge dollops of pure beauty. For any native the home place is infused with a mixture of memory, myth, lore, and history, bound together in an erratic, subjective way. That's as true of the natives of New York as of the natives of Oxford, Mississippi. That mysterious mixture is why so much of this portrait is personal. Past and present are merged in its pages, as they are in my consciousness. But something else is in the mix too. Something magical. And certain moments of magic are always present tense.

In my earliest memory, I am five years old, coming home from the Sanders Theater in Brooklyn. I am with my mother and we have just seen The Wizard of Oz. The year is 1940. In the safe darkness of the movie house I've seen emerald castles and a lion that talked and a road made of glistening yellow bricks. But in memory all of that is a blur. In memory, my mother takes my hand and the two of us are skipping all the way home singing "because because because because because!"

On this wonderful evening, my mother still has brown hair. She is laughing and exuberant, clearly made happy by going to a movie with her eldest son. I remember nothing else, except the word because. Later, I will learn that the woman I call Mom is actually Anne Devlin Hamill, an immigrant from the hard, dark city of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. She arrived in New York, with perfect Irish timing, on the day the stock market crashed in 1929. She was then nineteen. The calamity of the Great Depression did not dismay her. She went immediately to work for a rich Manhattan family as a domestic servant, glad of the work, joyous about being again in the city of New York. In all the years that followed in the life of Anne Devlin, that city would always be a wonderland. Why? Because.

Above all, because her journey in 1929 was Anne Devlin's second migration to the place that would be her home until her death at eighty-seven. On these streets, she had once been five too. I would learn that in New York, many stories begin somewhere else, for people who become center fielders and for those who start as domestics. Her father was named Peter Devlin, who went to sea as a youth, became an engineer, traveled as far away as Yokohama and Rangoon, worked for years as an expert in refrigeration for the Great White Fleet in the banana trade with Central America. He was a Belfast Catholic, and at sea he was free of the accumulated bigotries that went with the endless religious quarrels that began in the Irish seventeenth century. When he married in his thirties and soon fathered two children, Peter Devlin decided that it was time to live again on land. He had seen many places in the world, but he and his wife chose New York. The young family of four settled in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn in the parish of Mary Star of the Sea, hard by the harbor. There he would work on the ships of the Cunard Line but live on land with his family. The Devlin children (the other was my uncle Maurice) would be raised in a city where nobody cared about their religion. They would grow up in the greatest metropolis in America, where everything was possible, if only you worked. Above all, they would grow up free of the iron certainties of the European past, the first requirement for creating an American future.

Then, in 1916, while the slaughters of the Great War raged in distant Europe, disaster struck in Brooklyn. My grandfather Devlin fell from the deck of a ship and was crushed between hull and dock. My mother was then five, and remembered later the tumult and the tears in the flat in Red Hook but few of the details. She did remember New York fading into fog and the long voyage home across the vast Atlantic. Her mother must have known that German submarines were prowling the approaches to Ireland and England, but she chose to risk any danger to get back among her own people. One of the few consolations in any life is a sense of the familiar, with all of its imperfections.

The widow and her small children made it safely across the Atlantic, but that year Ireland was seething with violence and sectarian hatred. At Easter, there had been a nationalist rising in Dublin against the British rulers of Ireland, with deaths and executions. For many people, Irish nationalism was exclusively Catholic (it wasn't), and in the North, all Catholics were accused by some citizens of stabbing England in the back while the men of Ulster were dying in vast numbers at the Somme. The theory wasn't accurate (many Catholics fought under the British flag), but the fury was real, and so was the fear. But the anger had its own justification. After all, the sons of Ulster were filling the graves of France. It was no surprise that the bitterness, and its local violence, would continue in Northern Ireland long after the Great War finally ended, long after civil war had run its course. Too many Irish corpses would fill the graves of Ireland.

Somehow, in the midst of so much turbulence and fear, young Anne Devlin managed to do what few women, and almost no Catholic women, ever did in those years: she finished high school. That same year, her widowed mother died of a stroke at age forty-seven. And Anne Devlin, now an orphan, decided that it was time to return to the city she had last seen slipping away into fog. Her brother, Maurice, would stay in Belfast for another thirty years. But my mother would sell the family piano, buy a steamship ticket, and go back to the place where she had last seen her father, long ago, when she was five.

My own father, Billy Hamill, was also a child of Belfast. He was twenty when he arrived at Ellis Island, to join two older brothers who had already fled the bitterness of the Irish north. He had only completed the eighth grade when he was apprenticed as a stonemason, but he carried other credentials to America. He was a wonderful singer of songs: Irish rebel songs, the songs of English music halls, jaunty tunes of human foolishness, and songs of sad longing. I grew up hearing those songs and can remember many of the lyrics to this day. He was also a wonderful soccer player. Years later, his friends told me about his magical legs, those legs that carried him across playing fields, that seemed to have an intelligence of their own. The Irish novelist Michael McLaverty, who chose to stay in the Irish north, told me in 1963, "God, he could play that game."

Copyright © 2004 by Deidre Enterprises, Inc.

About the Author

Pete Hamill started his career at the New York Post in 1960. He is the author of seven novels and two collections of stories, and his writing has appeared in most national magazines. He has been a columnist for many years, and currently writes for New York's Daily News. He lives in New York City with his wife, writer Fukiko Aoki.