The Capital of Nostalgia : Part 2

Downtown; My Manhattan
by Pete Hamill

(Page 2 of 6)

In 1927, his fourth year in America, Billy Hamill was playing for an Irish team in the immigrant soccer leagues that were then common all over New York. There was a Jewish team called House of David, and German teams, English teams, Spanish teams. One wintry Sunday, in the year that Babe Ruth hit those sixty home runs, Billy Hamill played in a game against the Germans. He was viciously kicked in the left leg (almost surely by accident) and fell to the frozen earth with a double compound fracture, splintered bone jutting through flesh. He was taken to Kings County Hospital, the largest in Brooklyn. Because it was a Sunday, there were not enough doctors. There was certainly no penicillin. By the following morning, gangrene had set in. His left leg was amputated above the knee.

The years immediately after that calamity must have been filled with misery, but I never heard him say so. Among the many immigrant codes, spoken and unspoken, there was one that was absolutely clear: The only unforgivable sin was self-pity. He must have felt it. He must have throbbed with rage, too, against his terrible luck. After all, he would never again play the game he loved more than all others. But he would play no other games either. He was deprived, too, of the American opportunities for honest manual labor, those jobs in shipyards and the construction trades that employed so many other immigrants, not all of them Irish. Those jobs made everything possible in America, starting with a family.

And yet he went on with his American life. He would sing his songs for his friends in dozens of Prohibition speakeasies. He designed a bathing suit that covered the stump of his vanished leg and went swimming in the summer sea at Coney Island. And he worked. His penmanship was excellent, and so he worked as a clerk in the home office of a grocery chain. And, with his friends, he even went to dances.

In 1933, after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the end of Prohibition, he went to such a dance in Webster Hall, just below Union Square. There he met Anne Devlin. They started going around, as the Irish said, and eventually they were married. Anne Devlin did not drink. But she must have loved his endless repertoire of songs, his stoicism, his optimism. He surely was attracted by her brown-haired good looks, her sense of humor, and, above all, her intelligence. No child, of course, ever truly knows what brings parents together. Or why a marriage lasts in spite of bouts of poverty, inevitable quarrels, occasional attacks of despair on one side or the other. But they were together until the day my father died at eighty.

I was their first child, eventually the oldest of seven American children, and as a boy, I gradually understood that my father was not like other fathers in our blue-collar neighborhood. Billy Hamill could not take us to play ball in Prospect Park. He could not take us on long walks across that park to the sacred precinct of Ebbets Field. The subway was always a challenge, with its long flights of stairs leading to the street, and the need to be agile, and so he almost never went to Manhattan. He could not even march in the Saint Patrick's Day parade. His America was limited to a dozen square blocks in our small neighborhood.

My mother's New York world had no such limits. She was a quick, determined walker of the city, starting with the streets of our own metropolitan hamlet. In her company, my younger brother Tom and I learned that the only way to get to know a place was by walking its streets. We went with her as she shopped. We soon knew where the church was and the police station and the schools. But she was always expanding our frontiers. She would show us the main public library, where books were free, right there on the other side of the great arch of Grand Army Plaza. She showed us the Brooklyn Museum and the Botanic Garden. Sometimes she showed us visions that stayed with us for all of our lives.

One Saturday in the summer of 1941, while my year-old sister Kathleen stayed home with my father (she was born on May 1, his birthday, and he adored her), my mother took me and Tom on one of our longest walks. We ended up at the entrance to the pedestrian ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge. We had never before seen this great span. From the Brooklyn side, the bridge rises in a graded arc. The central walkway and the roads for automobiles are flanked by its soaring suspension cables. As my mother pointed out the distant ships in harbor and river, from that great height the size of boats in bathtubs, we reached the top of the rising arc. Then, for the first time, I saw them: spires aimed at the sky. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. All gilded by morning sun.

"What is it?" I said in a stupefied way (as my mother told me years later).

"Sure, you remember, Peter," she said. "You've seen it before." And then she smiled. "It's Oz."

And so it was.

This book is about what I learned in Oz. It is about the places where I lived and about myself, among others. To my astonishment, I've known the Manhattan streets and many of its people for almost seven decades. The day before yesterday I was five, crossing that amazing bridge. We moved in 1943 to a new flat with a breathtaking view from our kitchen windows of the harbor and the skyline, and I could gaze in all seasons at the towers. I seem to have been eleven for a very long time, in days and weeks of an endless languid summer. Then time started to rush, through adolescence and high school and a job as a sheet metal worker at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and finally into the US Navy itself. Then, after discharge and a sojourn in Mexico on the GI Bill, I was at last a kind of grown-up, living in the buildings of Oz itself. Living, that is, in Manhattan.

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.