New York, New York
I've been thinking about New York lately, now that it's back in the news.Its light. If New York is, as Phillip Lopate finds it, robustly "shabby and makeshift," the light of the city is otherwise. It is coolly blue and indifferently imperial. It marks out what it falls on and reveals it in diminishing orders of luminosity. The light of this city stages moments for privileged spectators: the street right in front of you in deep focus, its nondescript background and foreground equally illuminated, inscribed almost, as if you were gazing into a color photograph from the early 1950s, the Kodachrome colors of a half-century ago shading to black within the convolutions of the architectural details and the regular right angles of windows and doorways. And even the blackness has details, a surface well as an interior. Darkness in the city is not neutral. Manhattan noir is a texture, not the absence of something.
Its shape. Manhattan is shaped like a canoe, a shoe, a whale; like a cleaver, a dagger, a club, or like a lump of dough given its first hard rolling ibefore being squared off.
Its absences. "Standing at the top of Sunset Park," notes an earnest, quotidian, parochial Brooklyn guidebook, "near 6th Avenue north of 44th Street, residents and visitors can take in the spectacular view of the tallest building in each of three boroughs, the Citibank Building in Queens, the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower in Brooklyn, and the Empire State Building in Manhattan." Tallest again. Every book about New York has a hole in it. The guidebooks of the 1990s, the ones that worried about Times Square becoming too tame, are the only ones I willingly consult.
Its cemeteries. Several generations of my father's family, watery people who worked on the East River and further out to sea, are buried among the half-million or so in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Some research disclosed the exact location of my great-grandparents, grandparents, cousins, and their in-laws on Green-Wood's rambling grid that is a mirror of bothCentral Park and Manhattan. Among them is George Waldie (called Jerry), a New York harbor pilot who sailed on a brisk Saturday morning in March 1888 from Tompkinsville on Staten Island aboard the Caldwell H. Colt, pilot boat 13 (noted later with obvious irony by a reporter for the World who went along for the eventful ride and wrote about it). Unaware, they sailed into what would become, early Monday morning, The Great Blizzard of 1888. Jerry, the reporter, the other pilots on board, and the boat, after a furious battering, barely survived capsizing. But nine other pilot boats were wrecked and 17 pilots lost their lives in the dark Atlantic. Jerry Waldie survived, returned home to 153 Adams Street in Brooklyn and, some years later, moved to Green-Wood Cemetery.
My cousin Kenneth Waldie is buried in Manhattan. Not in exactly. More properly, his remains cling to Manhattan; are smeared across its boulevards; are still driven through and trodden on by the city's heedless passersby; are still being swept from its stoops; are still gathering in its dark, untroubled places; are being laid down as another layer of detritus on a landscape that emerged, scraped clean by glaciers and free of memories, at the end of the last Ice Age. My cousin was aboard the weapon flown into the north side of the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46:40 a.m. on September 11, 2001.
I dare not say that any place on this tragic island is more sacred to his memory or less.
For relief, it might be possible to think that he is still held aloft in Manhattan's generous marine light, but I do not think so.
Party crashing. The New York that we want to remember -- the city that grabbed you roughly by the shoulders and spun you around so that you could see some new, obnoxious, and gaudy eruption of democracy -- is the city that Mark Caldwell calls (in his history of darkness in New York) "a wild party that with luck anybody might crash." Not that just anyone could, as F. Scott Fitzgerald found.
This is the bait and switch of all great cities, of which New York was the 20th century's exemplar. Great cities are designed to awe and humiliate. They fleece you and reward you simultaneously, pick your pocket and widen your horizons at the same time.
Dinner at Babbo. I had dinner at Babbo in the early evening, a solitary at the bar, but not alone. A bright young couple sat at the short end of the bar; two or three other men sat along the long end. I took an empty seat in between. The young man and woman were great fans of the restaurant and ate there often enough to have preferences that the bartenders and the waiters respected. The young couple was from somewhere else, somewhere south and east of the island I think, and that place was not Manhattan, it did not matter to the waiters and the other diners. What news there might have been of that place went unspoken.
The couple was celebrating their engagement, and the other men (who knew them as regulars) began buying bottles of expensive Italian wine to share. Their gesture had the touching grandeur that attaches itself to acts of generosity in a good restaurant, which is one of the purposes of dining out. Passing bottles down and across the bar to refill the glasses of the young man and woman necessarily involved passing me, and ultimately and as grandly, my glass was filled and refilled, too. New arrivals, waiting for tables, began to stand behind us. Perhaps they were regulars, too. Wine glasses were handed over the bar and filled. How like a city!
Its stories. Narrative and place connect so intimately that pedestrianism is almost a prerequisite for good writing. Movement over a city's grid is a manifestation of storytelling, and if a lot of storytelling is just the collection of details to fill out a dinner conversation, most readers are satisfied. Data are what they want, that and some urban nostalgia. Find some grizzled survivors of the past and listen to their stories, befuddled by time and drink and hard living, stories that end abruptly in midair like the timberwork of a rotting pier, and then write down the parts that are both characteristic and enigmatic.
Its obligations. It is generally assumed that New York believes in nothing outside of itself and that within itself, New York only believes in a certain kind of style (always different, season after season, but a style still recognizably New York's). But of course, that is not wholly true. The city has at least 654 significant places of worship. My father's family attended the church of St. Jean Baptiste on East 76th Street not far from Park Avenue, because my grandmother has been educated in Quebec at a convent school associated with this church. She named one of her seven sons after the church's charismatic pastor. She gave two of her sons (one of them my father) to service in the Order of the Blessed Sacrament that staffed the church. My father, a lay brother, left the order in the late 1930s.
Its comparisons. Everyone who reads is a citizen of New York, just as everyone who goes to the movies lives part time in L.A.
The image on this page was taken by Flickr user Wally Gobetz. It is used under a Creative Commons License.