Two weeks and twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit difference…
Looking up Broadway toward the old post office in what’s now City Hall Park. There’s something about seeing recognizable locations so completely different.. something very chilly, and I don’t mean the weather. Then as now everyone is wearing black.
“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald (of course).
This week I’ve been editing one story about a newcomer to New York and writing a new story about a different woman, years later, slowly realizing that her image of her life there is far from the actual city or her actual life. New York, the newbie and the hardened careerist are all such well-trodden ground; I hope mine are particular enough to make the stories unique. With the city a real actor as well, there’s the double challenge of getting it right but saying something new.
I was trying to remember what it was like, coming to the city for the first time on my own. Dizzying. Cold, this time of year, windy; nowhere to sit down without buying something to eat or drink.
In a way, Fitzgerald got it backwards: can one ever see the city for the first time, anymore? Most of us who come to New York already have so many semi-mythical versions of it that instead, at first, we are hyper aware of the fact of perceiving it—I’m in New York!—and less aware of what, exactly, we’re perceiving. Plus the sheer sensory overload, before you’re used to it. Forget peripheral vision for a while. When I’m new to a place my sense of scale and perspective is completely off. Those early days come back to me in El Greco elongation, in splotches of Hopper color, at weird skews, snatches of people and architectural detail detached like Chagall’s flying goats from silly encumbrances such as gravity.
I was there for a job interview in the old New York Central building, which from where I was standing on Forty-fifth Street after arriving by a too-early train seemed far less squat than I later realized it is. I sat in the L.A. Coffee Shop feeling a little sick to my stomach until it was time to go upstairs. Most of the rest of the day I spent there and in a second interview across midtown, in tiny rooms that were stuffed with binders of financial data. By the time I caught a train home it was well after dark.
Very little about my early interactions did anything to confirm that the aesthetic bliss of arrival had any bearing on the kind of life I would lead there. Petty tyranny, back-office cruelty, naïve ambition, impatience, boredom and drunkenness. But I was certain! Hope and even expectation for what I would achieve, be a part of and experience fused indivisibly with anxiety lest none of it come to pass, and suspicion that I’d come to late to the party, that all around me was evidence that the best had already happened, and I would only ever be able to guess how it had been.
That receded pretty quickly. Instead, now, occasionally, there’s retrieving that first, sharp intensity—as Joan Didion wrote, “was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.”
Ghostwatching
I came across a thread on Skyscraper City of historical photos of Toronto, plus the occasional (delightful) 1910s print ad and 1880s catalog cover. My favorite is this 1937 shot, “Window Shopping at Simpson’s and Eaton’s”:
Showgirls on lunch break? Brazen hussies? The hats! The almost-work gloves on the woman in the foreground… The light-colored suit and the shoes on the man checking out the women in white…
The thread starts in 1834 with artwork; the photos begin in the 1850s. Has any era seen such transformations in The Way We Live NowTM as did the last few decades of the 19th century and first few decades of the 20th? Gas and then electric lights, railways and automobiles, (theoretically) universal suffrage, public health, utilities and education…
I find photos taken in the last horse-drawn decades eerie:
Add full-color and electric lights and pave the streets, and this could be today’s Columbus Avenue in New York, California Street in SF, Chicago or Back Bay. But it’s so not. And it’s going about its business just fine, thanks. Looking at it, there’s some weird absence that’s not in the picture but that I can’t get rid of, knowing how differently the scene’s inhabits would size it up than I do. Is it the lack of cars, an absence that only exists—or is only visible—in retrospect? Or the space that would be filled in today with traffic, and what’s not in the photo but that I know is long gone: the scent of horsesh*t and coal smoke, mud everywhere, the drudgery of nineteenth century laundry?
Zoned Out
Last night I inadvertently reenacted the old Soviet joke about going to the wrong apartment in the wrong building in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong city because they all look exactly the same. Mine was a suburban version—though what does one even call the strip-mall sprawl outside small towns, where there’s little -urb to be sub- to? Anyhow, I missed my exit and had to turn around in the Lowes parking lot to get to the Whole Foods parking lot. Yep.
These non-places do not happen by accident. They are not mistakes. They are the result of laws that allow almost no possibility of deviation from specified lane widths, numbers of parking spaces, building set-backs from highways, drainage capacities, height restrictions. It would be illegal in most places—or require special permits and favors—to build a traditional New England small town, or, God forbid, for a town to develop into a city.
What is it doing to us to spend the time we do in such non-places, the weird between-ness of parking lots and intersections, sitting in traffic, eyes skipping over headlights and windshields, iTuned in to our own soundtrack, on the way to somewhere else?
Today I went for a run in the nineteenth century.
Headed Up The East Coast
I spent yesterday afternoon driving. The semester starts on Tuesday; emails are flying: classroom assignments, set up for class blogs (yay!); scheduling conflicts, deadlines (Deadlines?).
I love mid-winter light, especially with the sun at my back. For three hundred miles, there were no clouds or wind; a pink rim to the horizon; pale branches and brown earth through New Jersey and Rockland County, then into Connecticut, snow in the woods on the north sides of mountains. I’ve driven many of these interstates for years—ugh, the Thruway!—yet if traffic were diverted so I had to take local roads, I’d essentially be lost without a map.
When I crossed the Tappan Zee around 2:30, the Hudson was as still as early morning.
It was warm enough that I didn’t need my scarf or parka in the car. I’m like a three-year old with a new stuffed animal or doll with my Christmas scarf; can’t bear to be parted from it, more than a little certain I’m going to lose it or spill something on it.
Most of the way, I didn’t listen to the news; a few minutes of Ann Curry reporting from Haiti—“that airstrip is really going to be essential”—Wednesday night had been enough to make me wait to read about developments. Commercial news organizations have the most amazing ability to find platitudes and make the unspeakable mundane and expected. Oh, yes, the airstrip; of course. The Times did well on background about environmental problems; not so well on the looting angle. Awful how in the few hours I was out of touch the situation and the narrative changed. I do <3 my generation—when I got home Choire and Tom’s piece was the most-forwarded and blogged-about thing I saw.
Somewhere north of Hartford, I turned on All Things Considered. The radio had been left tuned to AM (by me) and an announcer was braying out headlines with that unmistakable AM brassiness: “the temperature in the city…” “traffic leaving the city…” “some wet snow Sunday night in the city…” Yes, but what city? Surely Hartford isn’t big enough to be spoken of, even in hometown radio boosterism, as if there could be no other city?
Finally a station ID: WCBS New York. But I was passing out of the range in which its news would be useful.
