The Capital of Nostalgia : Part 4

Downtown; My Manhattan
by Pete Hamill

(Page 4 of 6)

Sometimes I would explore these mysteries in the library of the newspaper, using slow time to take out envelopes of crumbling clippings. Or I'd ask older reporters and editors. Sometimes I'd be told, "Major Deegan was a Tammany hack who served in World War One and lived until the 1930s." Then I'd confirm this with the clippings. The Bronx was named for a guy named Jacob Bronck, a rich Dutchman who owned most of it as a private farm. Harlem was named Harlem for the same reason Brooklyn was called Brooklyn: The Dutch got there first and named one place Haarlem and the other Breuckelen after places in the country they'd left behind.

In short, I was educating myself as a reporter, but also as a New Yorker. Much of my reading never found its way directly into newspaper stories, of course. For one thing, I was young and having too good a time in the company of people I loved. For another, the original stories had faded from the newspapers and my discoveries were irrelevant. On newspapers, we believed we were all writing history in a hurry, and after the first few days, even the most appalling stories gave way to the shock of the new. Still, it was clear to me that the only way to try to know this city (or any other) was on foot. I didn't learn to drive until I was thirty-six. Who needed cars when you had two good legs and the subways moved under the traffic?

Even today, I wander through the city as if I were a young man. Something always surprises me. Something else fills me with wonder. I pass a building I've passed a thousand times before and see it suddenly in a new way. In good weather, I like to stand and watch the passing show, a flaneur lounging in a doorway. I see a burly black man help a blind woman across a street. I talk to him later and discover he is from Togo, "all the way in Africa," and he works for one of the fabric wholesalers on Walker Street. He tells me why he came to New York. "For my kids," he says. "I want them to be free and, you know, healthy. In Togo, lots of things are green and beautiful, but the neares' doctor, he was seventeen kilometers away, man." I see a cop flirting with a pretty girl, a tourist from Italy. "Hey, you want me to walk you?" he says. She smiles a dazzling smile and moves on. He sees me watching, smiles in a conspiratorial way, and says, "Makes you wanna live forever."

The New Yorker learns to settle for glimpses. There are simply too many people to ever know them all, to unravel all of their secrets. Nobody in such a vast and various place can absorb everything. You know the people you love and the people with whom you work. The rest is glimpses. And on certain days, yes, you want to live forever.

And yet, in many separate ways, the people of the city express certain common emotions. The forms and details are different for every generation and every group, but certain emotions have continued to repeat themselves for centuries. One is surely greed, the unruly desire to get more money by any means possible, an emotion shared by citizens from stockbrokers to muggers. Another is sudden anger, the result of so many people living in so relatively small a place. Another is an anarchic resistance to authority. But far and away the most powerful of all New York emotions is the one called nostalgia.

The city is, in a strange way, the capital of nostalgia. The emotion has two major roots. One is the abiding sense of loss that comes from the simple fact of continuous change. Of the city's five boroughs, Manhattan in particular absolutely refuses to remain as it was. It is dynamic, not static. What seems permanent when you are twenty is too often a ghost when you are thirty. As in all places, parents die, friends move on, businesses wear out, and restaurants close forever. But here, change is more common than in most American cities. The engine of greatest change is the cramped land itself. Scarcity can create a holy belief in the possibility of great riches. That's why the religion of real estate periodically enforces its commandments, and neighborhoods are cleared and buildings hauled down and new ones erected, and all that remains is memory.

This book is littered with casualties of time and greed and that vague reality called progress. Just one example here: I was in high school in Manhattan when I came to know the Third Avenue El. Sometimes I took it as a ride, not just a means of getting from one place to another. I loved its rattling noise, the imagery associated with the 1933 movie King Kong, the stark shadows cast by its beams and girders, and the rows of tenements and Irish saloons that I could see swishing by from its windows. I had no memory of the Second Avenue El, or the Sixth Avenue El, or the Ninth Avenue El. They were all gone. But in some ways, the Third Avenue El seemed as permanent as the Statue of Liberty, and for me it provided a ride through more than simple space. It hurtled me through time as well. They started tearing it down in 1955. By the time I returned from Mexico in 1957, the Third Avenue El was gone too.

There would be many other disappearances, including too many newspapers. Buildings went up, and if you lived long enough, you might see them come down, to be replaced by newer, more audacious, more arrogant structures. I came to accept this after the el had vanished and some of the worst office buildings in the city's history began rising on Third Avenue. There was no point, I thought, in permanently bemoaning change. This was New York. Loss was part of the deal. In the same year that the Third Avenue El disappeared, so did the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. The demise of the Third Avenue El was a kind of marker, the end of something that had outlived its time. But for many people, the flight of the baseball teams was an example of unacceptable losses. Some never got over it. After a long while, I finally consoled myself about the Dodgers by saying, Well, at least I had them once and I will always have them in memory. That nostalgia lives in me today. It erupts whenever I see a fragment of black-and-white newsreel showing Jackie Robinson heading for home. But to talk about the Dodgers' departure without cease would be to live as a bore. New York teaches you to get over almost everything.

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.