The Capital of Nostalgia : Part 3

Downtown; My Manhattan
by Pete Hamill

(Page 3 of 6)

As it turned out, my life in Manhattan had its own geographical limits, and they are central to this book. That is why these notes are limited to those parts of Manhattan in which I have truly lived. My own city, the one that feels like home, is the one I've always called Downtown. To me it extends - in defiance of the conventions of guidebooks - from the Battery to Times Square. There is a dense, rich New York beyond the limits of my Downtown, and I've spent some time in its many parishes. But it was never mine in the same way that Downtown became one of my personal possessions. So these notes are personal too. Over the years, I have paid rent at fourteen separate addresses in Downtown, and I live now in a loft in Tribeca that was built in 1872. It stands just below Canal Street, that most exhilarating of New York bazaars. I know Mr. Singh, who sells me newspapers. I know the man who runs the corner variety store. I know the people with whom I share my building. Each day, I exchange hellos with a dozen people who work on my street. When the drivers of cars with New Jersey plates honk too insanely on their horns, I shout at them: "Knock it off! We live here!"

There are other levels of the familiar in the dailiness of my life here. My Downtown is also the place where the city was created. It is where, across the long, turbulent nineteenth century, today's New York character was formed. I look at other people and the places where they live, and the things they do or say, and I learn something about myself too. As a geographer, I'm as idiosyncratic as the early explorers of the New World. My interior maps are jagged and personal, often resembling in spirit the famous New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg showing Ninth Avenue larger than the state of California. My Downtown includes the Carnegie Deli and Carnegie Hall, which on most maps are firmly nailed into Midtown. For me, Rockefeller Center between Forty-eighth and Fifty-first streets, Fifth and Sixth avenues, is triumphantly Midtown, but P.J. Clarke's saloon, at Fifty-fifth Street and Third Avenue, is a treasured fragment of Downtown. The differences have to do with the patina of time, of course, the colors that time gives to brick, slate, copper, stone, and wood. I am always delighted to find something new, or strange, or unusual within the familiar. But I'm happiest in those places where generations have passed before me.

The bunched towers that I first saw as Oz are better viewed from Brooklyn or New Jersey. Up close, they climb out of view. Some Downtown skyscrapers have their own kind of beauty, of course, but I feel more a part of the older city, the one that was lower, that could be seen in one glimpse, that is more horizontal than vertical, that allows us to absorb the light of the city sky, the city of walkers and the city of horses. That is, I cherish the Downtown city. I have been looking at that New York for decades now. The place seems as fresh as it did when I was twenty-one. On its streets, I am always a young man.

It is a standing joke, of course, that New Yorkers are the most parochial of Americans, and that commonplace contains a small amount of truth. For parts of my life, I've wandered far from my home parishes, to live in Mexico City and Rome, Barcelona and Dublin and San Juan, and have also paid rent in New Orleans, Key West, Los Angeles, and Santa Fe. But I've come to realize that I lived in all those places as a New Yorker. I gazed at their glories and tried to learn their histories, to define those elements that made them unique, but always I measured them against my own city. In unexpected ways, they each taught me something about New York, its strengths and terrible flaws, its irritations and its triumphs, the way learning another language teaches you about your own. But in spite of their many seductions, I always knew I would go home.

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.

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.