The Capital of Nostalgia : Part 5

Downtown; My Manhattan
by Pete Hamill

(Page 5 of 6)

Our losses would culminate, of course, with the violent destruction of the World Trade Center. For many New Yorkers, now including the young (who grew up with the twin towers), even such a ferocious human toll can provoke nostalgia. Months after the murderous morning of September 11, 2001, I kept hearing New Yorkers speaking in tones of regret about the loss of the buildings themselves, even people who didn't care for them as architecture. For me, the twin towers were in Downtown but never of Downtown. That is, they were detached from my sense of the home place. And yet most New Yorkers missed their position in the skyline, the sense of dominance they suggested, and longed for the comparative innocence of the brief years in which they existed.

"I hate to admit this," one close friend said, "but when I look at the old photographs of the Trade Center, I'm sometimes choked with nostalgia."

Nostalgia. The word itself, as critic and educator Nathan Silver has pointed out in his fine book Lost New York, is an imperfect one to describe the emotion itself.

"The word in English is hopelessly wishy-washy," he wrote in the revised 2000 edition of his 1967 book. "It seems to denote something between a handwring and a tearjerk, referring as it does to a wistful, regretful feeling. Nowadays most urban dwellers accept that a city's past vitalizes a coherent sense of the present, but calling that 'nostalgia' evokes the approximate reaction that one would get from mentioning heirlooms or embroidery."

The New York version of nostalgia is not simply about lost buildings or their presence in the youth of the individuals who lived with them. It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same. Tuesday turns into Wednesday and something valuable is behind you forever. An "is" has become a "was." Whatever you have lost, you will not get it back: not that much-loved brother, not that ball club, not that splendid bar, not that place where you once went dancing with the person you later married. Irreversible change happens so often in New York that the experience affects character itself. New York toughens its people against sentimentality by allowing the truer emotion of nostalgia. Sentimentality is always about a lie. Nostalgia is about real things gone. Nobody truly mourns a lie.

That is why, in a million small ways, New Yorkers behaved so well on September 12, 2001. Millions of us wept over the horrors of the day before. Many mourned their own dead and the dead of the larger parish. More millions grieved for the world that existed on September 10, knowing it was forever behind us. For a while, at least, all felt various degrees of fury. But nobody ran. We knew that at least we had lived once in that world before the fanatics changed it forever. With all its flaws, horrors, disappointments, cruelties, we would remember that lost world all our days and most of our nights. And now we would get up in the morning and go to work. Our only consolation would be nostalgia.

That tough nostalgia helps explain New York. It is built into our codes, like DNA, and beyond the explanation of constant change, there is another common thread in our deepest emotion. I believe that New York nostalgia also comes from that extraordinary process that created the modern city: immigration.

Every New York history stresses the role of immigration, because the tale simply can't be told without it. Starting in the early nineteenth century, the city absorbed millions of European immigrants, many arriving in waves: the Irish in flight from the desperate famine of the 1840s; Germans and other Europeans after the political furies of 1848; the immense flood between 1880 and 1920 of Italians, Eastern European Jews, and others in flight from debasing poverty or murderous persecution. We know much about them, and yet we know so little. Many were illiterate and wrote no memoirs or letters; memoir was a genre practiced by their children. We do know that most were young and poor, for the old and the rich don't often emigrate to strange countries. We know that a common mixture of overlapping hopes served as their personal engines: the desire to raise their children in a place where they'd be healthy and educated, a longing for honest work in a place where they would not be tested about religion or origins, the hope for personal freedom in a country where nobody need ever bend a knee to a monarch.

But many paid an emotional price for their decisions, and that shared sense of disruption would lead to the second stream of New York nostalgia. For the rest of their lives, those first-generation nineteenth-century immigrants would carry with them what their American children could not fully comprehend: the things they left behind. Those things were at once objects, people, and emotions, and they were part of what almost all immigrants came to call the Old Country. The place where they were children. The place where they ran with friends on summer mornings. The place where all spoke a common language. The place of tradition and certainties, including those cruel certainties that eventually became intolerable. For a long time in the age of sail, most knew they were leaving the Old Country forever. In Ireland, when still another son or daughter prepared to depart for America, families often held what became known as "the American wake." Their wailing was a lament, as if for the dead.

Similar rituals marked the departures of many Germans, Jews, Italians, and Poles as they traveled across land to the ports of Europe and then on to the scary Atlantic and the distant harbor of New York. Parents were certain they would never see their children again, and children surely felt that way about their parents. That rupture with the immediate past would mark all of them and did not go away as the young immigrants grew old. If anything, the nostalgias were often heightened by the coming of age. Bitterness often faded, but not the sense of loss. Some would wake up in the hot summer nights of New York and for a few moments think they were in Sicily or Mayo or Minsk. Some would think their mothers were at the fireplace in the next room, preparing food. The old food. The food of the Old Country.

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.