Joseph Mitchell, John McPhee, Susan Sontag, Truman Capote, David Foster Wallace,  David Sedaris, Susan Sheen, John Updike, Ian Frazier, Gay Talese et. al. are some of the luminous non-fiction creators who have seen themselves enshrined in the echelons of such a fantastic, diversified genre. Narrative nonfiction can conjure up sub-categories of memoir, personal essay, lyric essay, review, and or a “Profile”, the latter of which became an art form itself bolstered by the intensive, fruitful work at a Mecca of non-fiction, The New Yorker. The genre was first impressed unto me by both a course taken at my school in London and the close-quarters mentorship of two NYU professors I’ve had the pleasure of working with in my scholastic career. The course packets that these classes provided me with further expanded my nonfictional gusto. I was fascinated with the travels of Lawrence Weschler, the dialogues with John D’Agata, the agonizing level of detail in Susan Sheen’s reportage for The New Yorker, the rallying cries of James Baldwin, the tongue-in-cheek societal commentaries of David Sedaris, the poignance of John Updike’s, the acerbic wit of Hunter S. Thompson, the ethnographic savvy of Susan Sontag, the timely, impassioned decrying of Jeremiah Moss and so on. The conduits through which creative nonfiction can be produced are, in spite of the glittering names listed above, egalitarian. This is a style of writing that can privilege and equate any experience to the other, whether it is V.S. Naipaul wandering post-revolutionary Iran in his fantastic “Among The Believers” or John Calaptino’s “The Interpreter”, his piece on Professor Dan Everett, who believes he has brought an Amazonian language which subverts all existing linguistic convention to light. If the emotions are pure, and if the piece has heart, then it is already overwhelmingly sufficient. The content remains unbothered by that which it surrounds it. Lucy Grealy’s phenomenal memoir, “The Autobiography Of A Face”, includes scientific references to her facial deformity when she feels necessary, not for when she thinks an institutional desire for one percolates. 

Mitchell is the worshipped archetype of what a non-fiction writer ought to be. His quaint, measured and composed writing style was the benchmark of grace, eloquence, and above all, the diffusion of an unfiltered, undisturbed truth that enclosed him. His seminal pieces for The New Yorker in particular, including but not limited to the multi-part personal odyssey of “Joe Gould’s Secret” and the galvanizing story of McSorley’s heritage in “The Old House at Home”, are major contributors to the fundamental non-fiction literary canon. He juxtaposed active agency with a submissiveness to permit authenticity. While David Foster Wallace was staunch in his declaration of how even the most minute interactions between foreigners and a site of any valued historical importance inherently ruin the vintage, untouchable qualities of said site, Mitchell seems determined on grappling with the subject at hand but relegating himself -- and consequently the reader -- to a metaphorical back seat. Mitchell’s magnum opus is the aforementioned multi-part narrative titled “Joe Gould’s Secret” documents a phantom Greenwich Village in the 1960s, encumbered by the splendid brilliance of eccentrics, bohemians, musicians, and poets: an efflorescence of the creative energies explored in my piece.

Mitchell, with the reluctant permission of his New Yorker superiors, was enabled to run a profile on the elusive bohemian, and in doing so defied the upper echelon glitz often associated with the magazine. What resulted is perhaps one of the most uncanny tales to sliver its way into the revered pages of the weekly. The initial ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’, named “Professor Sea-Gull”  was manifested in the frame of a more comedic, insightful profile, largely consisting of the bizarre antics of Gould’s and how he would often inconvenience Mitchell. Published in 1942, it stands erect as a paragon of interactive, new journalism, and could be cited as a catalyst for the movement altogether. The story did not terminate there, however. Mitchell kept in regular touch with Gould, so much so that their rapport as writer and subject morphed into an oddball friendship altogether. Twenty years later, the familiar “Joe Gould’s Secret” was published in 1963, weaving together a smorgasbord of truths that had been cloaked by mystery and intrigue in the previous  piece. Mitchell had, as a function of the sheer amount he spent with Gould, gotten himself involved deeply, with Gould’s welfare as his top priority. News of Gould’s death in 1957, five years before the final piece saw the light of day, must’ve absorbed the vivaciousness out of Mitchell, because while the famed author lived another 39 years, he mysteriously never published another piece. 

***

In his revered work “The Aesthetic Hypothesis”, Clive Bell posits that the aesthetic experience is wholeheartedly defined by the emotional response to it -- art acts like a sort of stimulus.

Lizzy Goodman, whose electrifying work “Meet Me In The Bathroom: Rock and Roll and Revival In New York City, 2001-2011” was a principal source for the latter stages of the work, closes her piece with a bittersweet declaration that reads like a confession. It is a statement of integrity that she seems to feel she owes to her readers, as if the preceding content in the work was deceiving of some sort. The bombastic, wild story of the New York post-punk scene in the 1990s was not a tale that was defined by one person:

“...the main character was New York City, which itself is a kind of mirage...New York is an apparition generated by those who come together to breathe life into something not quite temporal, something that has to be conjured. And it’s not possible without the particular alchemy generated when every last person who happens to be there at that precise moment...So finally, thank you to everyone who was there. And to everyone who wishes they had been. This book is for you.”

Goodman’s lyrical sentences are a fantastic endeavour in communicating something similar to what this creation, “Mythical Nostalgia in Vanishing New York”, aims to do. For the main character in this unrivalled city is, conclusively, itself. What’s more, It is a cruel injustice to the very areas I mention to try and perform some kind of meager, half-hearted attempt to record the entire history of said locations -- if I were to do this, the discrepancy between the finished product and the plan would be analogous to Joe Gould’s haphazard diary entries and his initial vision to write the unfinished Oral History. But what is fervently championed is an overpowering affection for the city, one that has -- just as it did for the multinational immigrants aeons ago, staying true to its promise -- now become very much a home to me. Joseph Mitchell and I are on the same conceptual boat: In the only piece of writing discovered following his de-facto retirement in the wake of Joe Gould’s death, Mitchell declares “I wasn’t born here, I wasn’t a native, but I might as well have been: I belonged here”.

A gentle wind rumbles through the storied avenues, between the steel monoliths and haze of red lights that align the streets. It is the undercurrent of creative energy effervescing from a spirit, the remnants of immigrants and travelers from far-fetched corners. The parasitic, the El Dorado, the avenue-incising, the nucleus of heart and chaos, thewondrous land of constant reinvention, the perennial promise,  the eternally ascending, the spectre-filled, the metallic, the dream-busting, the prophecy-fulfilling, the otherworldly realm of New York manages to confound and captivate many. Strolling along the fabled streets and avenues in the dead of night makes for astounding epiphanies. Perhaps no other city manages to relegate its wanderers to such insignificant minutiae. Thousands have bled on these gritty, uncannily stained sidewalks; hordes more have passed through the serpentine Hudson and East Rivers which environ the jagged, asymmetrical island. It is tilted in a bizarre manner; a product of serendipity; literally askew on a map of the world. No other type of orientation would be more fitting. From its nascence as a multi-cultural, religiously tolerant Dutch trading post, administered by the rambunctious Peter Stuyvesant, to its self-proclamation as the greatest city in the world, this metropolis is easy to perceive as anomaly; staked high above all its cosmopolitan rivals. 

One unwillingly embraces this city from a young age, and perhaps the sheer ubiquity of New York in multimedia gives it an overzealous sense of romanticization; for there is no other city that flutters about the pop-culture ecosystem with such prestige and promise. Thus, as a result, the movements and jitters of all that roam the streets seem to be choreographed with cut-throat precision. As I gallop with my  fellow rush-hour millions up the subtly sloped avenues and intersecting streets, flanking the vapid vagabonds or the slick, suave businessman the world comes to play. Whether I’m next to a zaftig, Bergdorf-frequenting silk dame of the Upper East Side,  a CBGB-name scrawling, leather-donning St. Mark’s veteran of yesteryear,  or a bespectacled,  affable New-Age tech invader, it is not antagonism I feel as curses are muttered and shoulders are nudged, but rather a sense of being inside the world’s greatest finale: a show-stopping sense of brazen bravado cloaking what is, as I have come to learn over the past five years, a sense of kindred spirit;  a unity like no other. 

All this, replete with the drowsy orange haze of the afternoon sky, the pugilistic firetrucks parting traffic like Moses, and the silent splendour of  eye-contact amidst a blurred rush past lead to a conclusion: The smorgasbord of sheer life’s presence is a worthy spectacle to each and every one of us. How could this fabled megapolis, this endless series of monoliths wherein the world has been controlled, these wonderlands of neighborhoods, each enshrined into the echelons of history, photographed, imitated and recorded millions of times all truly exist? Is it all merely a projection of the New York I’ve dreamt and felt?

Before long, the garrulous woman has entered the depths of the roaring machines below. That man, resplendently dressed in a suit, leaning on a plaque outside the Langham Hotel on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Sixth street, has vanished amongst a stampede. The scrawling debris of mattresses, cigarettes and change underneath the homeless figure who was East 2nd Street yesterday is no more. A mother of two, engrossed in the same book as you are, steps onto a different car aboard the blindingly lit 6 Train. A noted academic, who has a pleasant exchange with you around 9PM at a Lincoln Center bus stop, and wishes you well before lurching towards his now departing bus, is gone. The businessman, sensing familiar origin, inquires into your ethnicity, before dashing back into the swallowing doors of his investment bank. A cyclist shrieks “watch out!” as you mistakenly begin crossing, saving you from the imminent danger of a Hyundai rightfully charging through a green light. He proceeds down Ninth Avenue and swerves around a corner, into a rainy fog. Everyone has their own dramatic device, a signature twist on the English language, a tic, or a nod, a gesture, a prod, a firm handshake or a hearty hug, and they all end the serendipitous encounters in the same manner: a flight into obscurity,  never to be seen again. These dramatic overtures play themselves out daily, to infinite, unknown permutations. The eminent non-fiction author Vivian Gornick summarized it succinctly yet perfectly: “On the street, nobody watches; everybody performs”. While the aforementioned intimacy of that sacred stranger in the street is common, it goes without saying that you too are merely a player atop this stage, to paraphrase the Bard. You are on full display at all times, with advertent eyes above, below and ahead monitoring you. The surveillant vibrancy of New York doesn’t harken to an Orwellian motive; at least that is not the mentality that transpires. You are somebody because you are nobody;  you are a droplet in this waterfall of life.  In the January 5th, 1998 issue of The New Yorker, Bill Buford writes:

“In New York, no one knows who you are. And the experience is utterly exhilarating. An example of the city’s inhumanity? Maybe. But it might also be an expression of its insatiable humanity, an appetite for more and more about the human species, the visual equivalent of gossip”.

All these miniscule interactions between you and the academic, the banker, the woman — they can all be had within the space of twelve hours or so, and reveal an insight that is so subtle and so serpentine in it has for a long time avoided bubbling to the top of my mind altogether: New York is a city of transience. What is here today may erode into the wrath of the past tomorrow. Just as a nascent trend can be discarded into the litterbox of erstwhile phenomena, so too can an interaction, a certain store, or even a person.

 ***

As frivolous as it sounds, my primary exposure to any cognizance of New York’s was through a Spider-Man 2 videogame. The open-sandbox design of the PlayStation 2-projected New York meant that my nine-year old self would often stray from completing the missions, and instead spent minutes upon hours leaping, traipsing and swinging through the poorly animated city. I didn’t care: it was an unprecedented sense of freedom. I sat atop skyscrapers, rode ferries, crawled through alleyways, cruised alongside cars: the sheer joy I felt in exploring the entirety of a replicated, scale-model Manhattan knew no limits. I began to delineate the architecture of each respective neighborhood, and while the confines of video gaming rendered most citizens to look alike and produced patchy, often pixelated building exteriors, I couldn’t care less. The thirteen mile long island was now compressed to an accessible snowglobe. The names of neighborhoods would display themselves on my Yamaha 2003 TV: “Lenox Hill”, “El Barrio”, “Carnegie Hill”, “Kips Bay”, “Garment District”,  and, most bemusingly, “Hell’s Kitchen”. I would marvel at these nooks and crannies, for I had never heard of them; I was still very much in the mindset of the Empire State Building-Times Square dichotomy as being metonyms for the entire city. Here I was, with New York City at my feet. Spider-Man may have had the powers, but as I sat on a worn, blue rocking chair in the comfort of my bedroom, I was the one who felt apotheosis. 

Ten years later, I found myself in my video game hero’s place, but as a mere mortal with lesser powers. I was an incoming freshman at a behemoth of an institution : New York University. As a new member of a college that was even then burdened with a paradoxical reputation — located in the heart of Greenwich Village, but known as an unapologetic, land-consuming force with a financial fodder and an unfettered sense of imperial pride — the irony of my stance was not lost on me. I spent sleepless nights balancing the equilibrium of work and play, but kept regressing to the same sense of exploratory intrigue that had lured me here. It was an energy that was suddenly very salient to me, almost like a sort of otherworldly realm that can only be seen by wearing a certain type of nostalgic goggles.

I would wander the streets, first the Village and then beyond, often aimlessly, but with some kind of cursory direction, emboldened by Mitchell’s story. I was consistently struck by how vastly different each neighborhood was. Soho boasted neoclassical exterior lofts. The crimson-brown hue of quietly brazen townhouses could be seen in the  West Village. The Hulking frame of Midtown’s skyscrapers form a single-file line up the avenues. It seemed unfathomable — and perhaps still does — that one can walk amidst the gritty Bowery and then immerse him or herself in the opulence of the Upper East Side. 

I trudged through parks and onto riversides, wherever my navigational savvy led me. My class schedule at the time seemed to spiritually accommodate my nocturnal habits, as if it whispered to me, egging me on in ambulatory endeavors. Following the conclusion of final exams at the close of my first year, I vowed to walk to the top of Manhattan from 8th Street and University Place. I made it to the northern segment of a picturesque Highbridge Park in 5 hours before taking the subway home. I clambered back into my cramped Weinstein bed and, with the corners of my jaw numb from the cold, fell into a blissful slumber. The last series of sounds I heard — doors slamming, the occasional cough, backpacks being zipped — were all indicators of another day beginning. 

To regress back to Gornick and Buford, I suppose I devoted myself to these nocturnal walks because New York was a spectacle to me; and my gusto to see more of it was insatiable. I saw it as an abundance of all the offerings of life. Walker extraordinaire Philip Lopate mentions that, while walking, he seeks out the “self-dramatizing” effect in the passerby, and that catching sight of someone on the sidewalk is an apparition of that person in their purest form, more so than any intimate moment. I yearned to explore and absorb the nooks and crannies of the gridded city, for every turn, every deserted church, every iota of drab sidewalk was my kingdom. The sheer historical magnitude of certain sights would pique my interest. 

There were moments in these nights when the fabulous metropolis became all mine -- there was no one to share the moment with, no one to co-author a memory alongside. The inchoate morning hours had a sinister charm to them. Luc Sante closes his impressive work “Low Life: Lures and Snares in Old New York”  with a chapter solely devoted to the mystical vibrancy night brings in New York, and in the most sublime manner believes night to be the most revealing conduit of the city’s past:

“[Night] is also the bridge to the past, the past that shares the same night as the present...it is the corridor of history...the history of the marginalized, the ignored, the unacknowledged; the history of vice, of error, of confusion, of intoxication, of vainglory...New York’s clock is directed by a moral spring, and it binds pleasure and harm inextricably together in the night. Night is forgotten and endlessly repeated.”

Unlike the hordes of tourists clamoring for the best photo, the magnetism I felt to many a sight wasn’t borne out of just a sense of shock at the fact that I’m actually here, in front of this romanticized, filmed and storied edifice. It was a moment for me to examine the notion of time’s omnipotence, and how its transformed the innate soul of the neighborhood. What had it endured? Why was I so fascinated by a time that I was never a member of? Was it a function of the novelty of being an international student?

I would pore over images from a Facebook page named “Manhattan before 1990” fervently, an addict obsessed with the past. Scores of ordinary, average photos, all varying in skill and content, are uploaded onto the virtual time machine daily. Their once mundane, unstaged captures of perfunctory Big Apple life transformed into precious relics of the past. Their candid nature marked them as being irreplaceable. The most peculiar aspect of this was the fact that I didn’t yearn to be a part of what I was seeing, just that I wanted to see more of it. Was this a sense of false ebullience?

Furthermore, I also begun to hold my own background accountable: who was I to assess the splendiferous story of New York? I had only lived here for a few months, not years. I had scribbled my name on the guest-book at the Rockefeller Observatory, not on the sacred walls of CBGB’s. However, at the time of writing, an epiphany dawns: that perhaps that’s exactly why I should be the one composing this. My biases are removed, and a non-partisan sense of liberation: I am neither Jane Jacobs nor Robert Moses. 

Alas, time the conqueror proceeds, and all one can do is wander and absorb. Beyond that, however, I am struck with an astonishing recognition of the aforementioned transience — an awareness that everything disappears in this magical city, often with little to no ceremony.

In the alleged city that never sleeps, MacDougal Street is a focal point of restlessness creativity. In the heart of Greenwich Village lies a fairly short, linear road: a place that has harnessed the fledgling, nascent aura of bohemianism. Yet, as with other fragments and slices of New York, MacDougal remains locked in a quizzical, liminal state. 

 There’s a swift sense of mythologizing that occurs when one walks down MacDougal for the first time. The screeching and honking of cars cruising through is countered by the hoots and laughter of college kids as they sample the diverse delights of the hole in the wall eateries. The mysterious, seemingly always closed Egyptian Luxor Lounge is nestled alongside Vietnamese supremo Saigon Shack. India’s Kati Roll Company is just across the street from Meskerem’s Ethiopian cuisine. A microcosm of the globalist and cordial, if not stereotypical, nature of New York is alive and well. 

 Every number plastered onto gritty doors carries a  lifetime of intrigue along with it: No. 116 was the Gaslight Cafe, a smoky lounge where artists, writers, comedians and musical performers would confer to exchange their aesthetic prowess. It has now  been rebranded by different owners as a bustling pizzeria in a glitzy corner of the Meatpacking District. The Gaslight exists purely as a phantom entity to someone like myself, envisaged as being a paragon of counterculture by the various on-screen resuscitations I’ve seen of its being: Between “Mad Men”, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”, and a notable ode to the Beat generation, “Inside Llewyn Davis”, popular culture has rendered the Gaslight as an easily-consumable, film-set-savvy location: more of a metonym of the movement it was so integral within than an actual location for it.  Leather-jacket donning gentlemen pace past the neighboring dinosaur that is Cafe Wha?, home to the debut shows of many an era-defining rock act, notably Bob Dylan. While, like its nightclub superiors, Wha? features a formidable red carpet and velvet rope, yet the doorman is busy grinning at his phone, his attention rarely challenged by any guests on this Thursday evening. 

Few books I have come across illustrate the zeal of the  Beat Generation’s proliferation in the Village area more fondly and authentically than “The Mayor of MacDougal Street”, a memoir by eminent musician Dave Van Ronk and his follower Elijah Wald. Van Ronk was as much a fixture on MacDougal Street in the 1950s as the aforementioned Gaslight was, enjoying encounters with all sorts of global musicians, hanging in radical crews of artistic vagabonds, and frequenting a number of now-closed venues like the Cafe Caricature. I was spellbound by some of Van Ronk’s  anecdotes, whether they were cheeky admissions of intoxication (“If my chronology seems confusing, that is at least in part because I am confused”) or moments of cognizance at the sheer gravitas of the movement as a whole, of which there are numerous towards the close of the work.  Van Ronk and his contemporaries entrenched themselves as figures that weren’t just injecting the spirit of the Beat generation into the Village, they were living it. They didn’t perceive their lifestyle as being one that they could simply abandon, or take themselves out of, for they had nowhere to go. While it’s pleasant to romanticize the offbeat men and women that sang absurdist poetry, and created thought-provoking, radical art, their reality was unpredictable, relatively costly, and territorial. In the same manner with which affluent white populations perceived the Harlem Renaissance as -- an exotic “frissance”, an adventure for them to sample and then promptly leave -- the riotous mood of MacDougal was easier for the wealthy to antagonize and ostracize than to celebrate. In the previously mentioned “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”,  titular star Miriam Maisel and her husband, Joel, venture down to the Gaslight to perform stand-up with the animated mettle of teenagers staying up past their bedtime. Miriam’s best friend, an unequivocal bastion of the Upper West Side bubble, replies with shock upon discovering that two of her friends have been engaging in such zany, hip antics: “I haven’t been beneath 14th street in so long”.  It further cements the notion that there was a very different metropolis south of Union Square: The easily-accessible, wealthy, sharp-edged rectangular, geometric New York begins to give way a more jagged, disorganized, curvilinear relative; this continues to be the case all the way until, and especially at, the city’s Financial District at the southern end. Whether it is fittingly symbolic of its people is another matter. 

 Van Ronk and the Village elders, so to speak, endured the sunset before the downfall of the Beat movement, and soon found themselves devoid of many outlets to express themselves in. While Van Ronk had the slight financial cushioning of record label deals , he lamented that budding, passionate musicians and artists that settled into the area as early as the late 60s had trouble finding gigs. The illusion of artistic glory had faltered, and the austerity-hit decade ahead wouldn’t do any favors for further newcomers. Financial security wasn’t always of paramount importance to Van Ronk and his peers, however: their spirit and memories would suffice. “I never made a fortune,” he writes at the end of this wondrous account, “...but dammit, this is what I wanted to do, and I haven’t had to do anything else, and what more can I ask? I wanted to be a musician, and I am a musician, and that’s what it’s all about”.

The San Remo cafe, at 98 MacDougal Street, hosted a plenitude of  literary figures as they dove into dialectics about postmodernism. Of the apothecaries, cafes, bars, restaurants, watering holes, speakeasies, and lounges, I notice that the San Remo seems to be the only venue that has been formally eulogized, as a historical, drab plaque commemorates the glitterati that dined there. It, shrouded in darkness and dirt, doesn’t manage to attract a glimpse, much less an actual read-through, from the pizza-yielding, data devouring NYU freshmen that run amok in more gimmicky spots along the lines of “Off The Wagon” and “Insomnia Cookies”. They parade about, their shirts untucked and their makeup smeared as they seek their next vice. I doubt the staff at Artichoke Pizza can remember the last time an order was recited to them sober by the latest freshmen class. These collegiate, high-metabolism fiends have their eyes glued to their phones, and perhaps I should check my hypocrisy before I resort to demonizing them: I, too, have enjoyed a night out in the motley Village. I like to subscribe to the belief that their choice to revel on MacDougal is out of an altruistic, preservationist motive to fuel local business, not due to the fact that it is massively convenient as an NYU student. But are they that oblivious to what’s going on around them? Are they purely in an NYU-induced  trance, unable to comprehend the urgency of transience? Surely, they must. Yet, I’m left stumped and feeling a guilty sense of condescension. Perhaps they are the ones with a more righteous, progressive view, and I am the one in the perplexing, nostalgic trance.

The inimitable university next-door knows no limits, and, in avaricious style, has pursued a bold plan of expansion overseas, in an effort to create a self-proclaimed “Global Network University”. This conglomerate of campuses in Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Accra, Tel Aviv, Paris, London and Washington D.C. represent NYU’s indefatigable efforts to ascend to tantamount status as, say, Harvard or Princeton. The cutting-edge technology, esteemed faculty and brilliant range of amenities available at these “portals” arrive at a steep price, but is undoubtedly of an excellent standard. However, there’s more strife and mixed opinion surrounding Washington Square Park, as NYU, under the administration of the gleefully expansionist John Sexton, has been excoriated as a driving force in the demise of the Village. It’s a sentiment, I think to myself as I amble past Generation Records on Thompson Street, parallel to MacDougal, that places both myself and NYU in a spiritually disturbing position: a progressive, liberal  institution that has belonged to this area since 1915 is also a principal harbinger of monotonous change with little regard for Greenwich Village’s history. I almost chuckle to myself as I underscore my own “Vanishing New York” experience: the Coles Fitness Center I frequented my first year, on Mercer Street just north of the bustling highway that is Houston Street, has been knocked down in lieu of a daunting mixed use building that injects more territorial, if not symbolic, supremacy into NYU’s purple veins. The university’s conquistador mentality, launching legal battles and burning bridges with locals, begun to mount so dramatic a story that the nation’s media begun to pry curiously, relishing the internal strife between the faculty of the university and their jocose President as being a battle of epic territorial proportions. The New Yorker went as far as to title Rachel Aviv’s  September 13 expose “The Imperial Presidency”, borrowing the title from Arthur Schlesinger’s decorated critique of the national presidency in the United States, and implying as much. The university’s 2031 Plan, a monstrous 171-page document, is summarized in two lines that ideologically seem to posit a Catch 22: “NYU will respect the limitations of its urban environments.” “NYU cannot let space constraints limit its academic ambitions”. 

  An eye-watering odor of spices rises to the surface as Friday lunchtime strikes and a fleet of multi-cuisine food trucks eagerly park in prime spots. Eager, pimpled students wait patiently, shrugging every now and then to adjust their Herschel backpacks while they exchange schedules. They’re inebriated on the pure sensation of belonging to such a storied and esteemed university.  A frivolous, friendly man approaches me on the corner of MacDougal and Washington Square South, his dreadlocked hair covered in tinfoil. He asks if I’d let him shine my shoes for a price of my choosing. I politely decline. He wishes me well before scurrying back into a Crépe shop on MacDougal. A group of French tourists ask me for directions to the historic Stonewall Inn. As I simplify my sentences, their frowns turn to smiles. Two colorfully-dressed women pass me pamphlets detailing a new religious order. The world seems to come to me as I stand at this one corner. Diversity of race, sexual orientation, thought, and income is on show in this neighborhood, and they gel with a melodic, natural tolerance. 

 As I cross the street alongside Washington Square South to Mayor --and NYU alum-- Fiorello LaGuardia Place, a Hockney-esque vanishing point emerges: the Freedom Tower, in all its glorious, hopeful might, stares back at Washington Square, symbolically epitomizing the tug of war that has percolated: the defense of antiquity versus the promise of a functional, more orderly society. 

      MacDougal Street and its surroundings were, and still are, on the precipice of time’s warp. Contention for the spirit of Greenwich Village reached an apex during the 1950s, when the war between Robert Moses,  the ultimate “Power Broker”, and Jane Jacobs, Village local, took flight. In the book “Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder And Transformed the American City” by Anthony Flint, the battle between the idyllic, World’s Fair-worthy, ultra-futuristic vision of Robert Moses and the preservationist, more heartfelt stance of Jane Jacobs, is expanded upon. Moses, while not an elected official, presided as a member of over twelve municipal committees, gathering  swift approval for his audacious, minimalist and functional plans. Jacobs had moved to the Village by complete circumstance, but begun to question the relentless rate at which Moses’ plans were swallowing the city whole. The conflict that Flint’s title refers to is one that waged itself in the very park that NYU circulates, and involved an audacious proposition to, in the zeitgeist vein of Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, place a highway in the middle of the park: a continuation of the mighty Fifth Avenue, which comes to a halt before George Washington’s gaze at his eponymous triumphal arch. Through her brilliant writing, public outreach skills, and her ability to spring upon Moses’ comment that the only group obstructing his visions of grandeur were a “bunch of mothers” — consequently organizing a “Moms For The Park” March — David managed to trump Goliath, and the city scrapped the plan altogether. At the heart of the conflict was a vastly intriguing philosophical skirmish: Robert Moses’s vision held that “urban renewal”, promising a convenience equivalent to peaceful suburbia, was the path forward in cities, and if a remnant of old Manhattan stood in its path, then, well, it would have to be done away with. In the blue corner was the timorous, excitable Jacobs, who felt so strongly about opposing these policies that she went as far as to write her magnum opus, “The Death And Life Of Great American Cities”, about the subject. With acerbic wit, Jacobs propounded a philosophy that cast cities as being “organisms”: living, breathing beings that needed to be managed with care and policies of sustainability. Furthermore, she felt that “social capital” superseded Moses’ efforts to spearhead “urban renewal”, i.e. people, rather than projects and blueprints, will ensure the livelihood and prosperity of New York. 

   I cut across the street and into the park, struggling to imagine a two lane highway bursting around the arch and through Thompson Street. A coiffed piano player asks a child to make a request in between songs. A college jazz band collective channels Miles Davis into the unsuspecting spring air, and twenty-something lovers quarrel on memorialized park benches, their gestures wild and frenzied. I take a seat on large, marble, worm-like panels that remain in the center. I can’t help but think that this location and the area around it has a blurred identity, a crisis that is carrying itself out in the boardrooms of real estate developers’ offices in lieu of on the actual streets. It is, like the following neighborhoods I shall explore, on the precipice, dangling that which makes it unique, and often forced to refashion its old world charm into something more digestible.

 After all the lore that had been associated with it, I had been dying to dine at Keith McNally’s venerable Minetta Tavern, and was excited to dive into one of the most celebrated burgers in New York, but felt a quizzical sense as the community-aggregated Google consensus of the restaurant popped up online: “A celeb-magnet hot-ticket tavern with upper French bistro fare & reimagined vintage decor”. While this description would suck in any gastronomist off the street, it confirmed the disparity that had emerged between the no-frills, diner of Mitchell’s telling and the new identity of McNally’s masterpiece. My friends and I enjoyed dinner that night, feasting upon buttery mounds of spinach, crisped fries and, of course, a succulent, compact yet explosive burger. I feel obligated to, at such an institution, tackle the dish with a knife and fork, as opposed to the grotesque (but perhaps more enjoyable) wholesome experience of eating a burger with my hands. The medium-cooked meat scatters into every crevice of my teeth, while a serpentine slithering stray caramelized onion complements the smoked dish perfectly. An extravagant soufflé which resembles more of a mushroom cloud than a dessert is the final act of the Tavern’s production. A group of bejeweled ladies strolled past, gasping with glee as they catch sight of it. As someone who doesn’t usually indulge in sweet treats, this was a respite from my routine. A worthy gustatory investment: Beneath the aromatic foam lays a succulent chocolate, minty pearl of delight. 

The service was impeccable; each waiter looked as if they had stepped out of an Armani fashion catalogue’s pages . The bezel diamonds of Rolexes and Cartier bracelets projected themselves onto the otherwise dull ceiling , a disco-ball of gleeful excess. Caricatures of former patrons adorned the walls, as did grainy photos and scratched maps. McNally, possibly gauging the historical delicacy of his 2009 asset, told the press that he’d like for the interiors to be kept “exactly the same”, which he has done, following a clean-up refurbishment. The greatest alteration to Minetta’s innards wasn’t this revamp though. It was in all the people around me —riding this meteoric gastronomical comet to its Michelin Star accolade and beyond, a far-cry from the struggling artist clientele who would spare change for vagrants like Gould as he poured ketchup into hot water (“the only free dish”, he is alleged to have said).  

Jeremiah Moss, whose  “Vanishing New York” blog and consequent book have become a Bible for nostalgic urban explorers , articulated a skeptic’s reaction to the anachronistic restaurant, arguing that the Tavern is a prime  example of a phenomenon that has emerged in the past fifteen years named “fauxstalgia”: Efforts on behalf of restaurateurs, developers and retail conglomerates to repackage, rather than preserve, the past in order to create a profitable experience. Moss speaks of a “Disnleylandification” trajectory that MacDougal street is heading into as a result: Crippling rents, a loss of a loyal customer-base and the domineering presence of more accessible chains have paralyzed many an independent institution. As I pay the check of $153.65 and recline into my seat, depleted from the magnitude of what I’ve consumed, I’m forced to wonder: Is “fauxstalgia” the only way of saving such places? Is it more honorable for a decades-old institution to fade into mythologized memory than to be resuscitated as a tacky -- or in the Tavern’s case -- glamorous shadow of its former self? For, as we tumble out onto the buzzing Friday evening atmosphere of MacDougal Street, and away from the shuttered, guarded elusivity of the Tavern, this much is certain: the restaurant completely repudiated itself from the reputation it once had, and all the thirsty musicians,  famished artists, esoteric eccentrics, brazen bohemians and sojourning travelers the Tavern once was home to for decades seeped into Earth’s past. 

As Chase Bank branches, CVS, Starbucks and McDonald’s wriggle their ways into valuable  property spaces, facing off with fifty-year old jazz clubs, rock venues and thrift stores, I’m led to wonder: Who really won between Jacobs and Moses? While gentrification ushers in safety and convenience, it seems to have begun to strip MacDougal of the very people who put it on the map. Moses may have faced his Waterloo in the battle for Washington Square Park, but his “urban renewal” policies seem to visibly live on with the rate at which the Village is being devoured by real estate developers and repackagers like McNally, for better or worse.

I turn off MacDougal at its southern end, onto Houston Street, and recall a poem, “Last Call”,  penned by Elijah Wald and its ceremonious “Mayor”, Dave Van Ronk: 

“And so we’ll drink the final toast

That can never be spoken:

Here’s to the heart that’s wise enough

To know when it’s better off broken.

And the tin pan bended, and the story ended.” 

- p.266, “The Mayor of MacDougal Street.”

Van Ronk and his glittering, evergreen peers almost seem to foreshadow their movement’s demise with how bluntly the work ends. Whether MacDougal and sacred parts of the Village meet their own curtain-call soon -- well, that’s when the story will really end.

Grappling with the bolt of thunder that was St. Mark’s Place was similar to the blurry thrill of a first girlfriend. I had matured in every sense of the manner when I begun hanging around the East Village: I was no longer a feeble, naive freshman, I was generally acclimated with the vast scope of New York streets, I had found wondrous, diverse friends, and even been in a college fling, or two, or three. Every unchecked box of the urbanite NYU student had now been fulfilled, and I had the fortune of living with two of my closest friends at a cozy, if not dust-ridden and crumbling, prewar apartment on 4th street between 2nd and 1st Avenues.

Being situated in the core of what was once an unpredictable neighborhood soon transformed into being immersed within the vibrantly young, and predominantly safe East Village Historic District, selected at the very least for its reasonable rent price and proximity to the purple empire a few streets over. I’d sniff and cough as I explored, my innards tickled and tormented by the copious amounts of mites and detritus a hundred year old building injected into my lungs. Prior to living in the youthful, colorful neighborhood, St. Mark’s Place had been a pit stop associated with the promise of a college night out: between the pickings of ill-fated karaoke parlors, the Indian and Bangladeshi street vendors, tattoo parlors, multifarious bars, a wide selection of open-late eateries including the sumptuous Khyber Pass and Mamoun’s, St. Mark’s was one of those streets that you’d either start or end the night with. 

In the daytime, few other streets, even in a city as disorienting as New York could be, featured shop-windows which contained stacked, dismembered baby dolls, complete with gouged eyeballs like those of Search & Destroy’s, or a haphazard collection of mannequins, memorabilia, and newspaper cutouts strewn all over the floor over at the storefront at Trash & Vaudeville, a first-stop for punk fashion. If New York is a melting pot of cultures, cuisines and ethnicities, then St. Mark’s Place is one of the focal points in the heterogeneous cauldron. 

In the nightlife landscape of a NYU student, this haggard, loud, blaring street flexed its muscles too conspicuously for anyone to miss. The essence of St. Mark’s Place isn’t just rooted in the sheer movements that have planted their flag here, but in its inexorable diversity. The most comprehensive work dedicated to the street is St. Mark’s native Ada Calhoun’s “St. Mark’s Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street”. Calhoun, who had spent several years on the street as a child, dove into the  exoskeleton of the fascinating area, highlighting a number of renowned names that had called St. Mark’s home at one time or the other, including but not limited to Keith Haring, Abbie Hoffman, Lenny Bruce, members of both The New York Dolls and the Velvet Underground, and W.H. Auden, who famously would use the lavatory at a nearby liquor store, as his apartment was so cramped and inhospitable that it didn’t feature a bathroom. To attempt to chronicle every movement, every political faction, every ideologue or art collective, every immigrant tenement that was set up, every late-night anecdote from the age of Patti Smith and Led Zeppelin, every poem sung aloud at the Grassroots Tavern, every Jewish vs. Italian mob skirmish that took place, every hippie, every punk, every Hare Krishna activist, the trials and tribulations of every famous resident, or every story behind some of the Victorian and Greek revival architectural styles all merit some other manifestation;  each topic deserving of endless books to capture their beautiful madness. 

That being said, these bustling, creatively contrarian spirits merge to form a landscape that doesn’t just welcome change as much as it is wholeheartedly defined by it. MacDougal street may have been the convivial center of the Beat movement, but St. Mark’s has revelled in a kaleidoscope of dynamism, constantly evolving; constantly a home for those who are perceived as outcasts or pariahs. This full-throttle mentality is best summarized by Calhoun:

“The street has been rich and poor and rich again. The cycle of wealth and poverty has spun like a wheel for four hundred years. The street is prosperous now, featuring comically high rents...But it is insanity to think...that rents will ‘keep going up forever’-- that a place where change has come so often will never change again… how ironic a street famed for experimentalism should be home to such prickly nostalgia.”

From the visual and gustatory delights on show, that boundless diversity still very much seems to be the case. But the perilous, plodding vision of New York that is swallowing up the environment around it is starting to gently sink its teeth into the hallowed street of musical, artistic, and historical lore. My conjectural thoughts were confirmed by a wave of news articles that appeared while conducting research for this very work: a digital graveyard appeared on my screen, listing storied venues that had joined the annals of mere nostalgia. Sasha Frere-Jones, a notable music critic for The New Yorker, begins his positive online review of Calhoun’s book by mentioning that “New York breeds mourners...if you grow up anywhere in the city, there’s a good chance your childhood memories will be sold to the highest bidder...you won’t be invited to the memorial, New York runs a red light past sentiment”. With the gusto of an Agatha Christie murder scene, an anonymous, blood-red painted declaration on the walls of the shuttered Mars Bar rung out for everyone to see: “The East Village is Dead.” Whether this is true is, of course, somewhat subjective, but the graveyard adds tombstones to its array several times a year: “Cherries”, a sex-geared costume shop, shut in November 2011. Further up the street, “Sounds”, a records store cherished by Frere-Jones, also disappeared, seemingly overnight, in November 2015. “St. Mark’s Bookshop” -- which, as  Calhoun points out in page-turning investigation in The New Yorker was the only independent bookstore left on the street — suffered from plaguing symptoms of financial dissolvence, and was next on gentrification’s hit-list. As I scanned through the piece, eager to learn about the collapse of such a staple, I couldn’t resist the notion that the webpage was reading like a sort of obituary. Calhoun pointed out that, in the days before the physical closure, regulars, browsers, friends and one-time customers visited the facade of the Bookshop to “pay their respects”, further propagating the point that this was an elegiac experience. At least, unlike countless other independent institutions that faced the ghost of Moses’ urbanization guillotine, it had one.

Some age-old favorites have managed to prevail though; their windows are a magnification of another time, out of place amidst a Target and Starbucks sort of world. The Gem Spa has a treasure trove of occurrences associated with it, and unlike many other sites, the gravitas of history doesn’t collide on you. This is an ordinary candy-newsstand shop, where the cashier keeps an eye on his customers’ antics and fuddled college kids devour pie slices from the nearby 2 Bros as liquid mozzarella drips onto the floor, much to his chagrin. Neatly arranged confectionery treats jostle each other for a customer’s attention, as does an enormous wall of up-to-date publications. However, thanks to Jen Carlson, I was able to further apprehend this place’s identity for something more than an appendix to the riotous street it’s on: The New York Dolls shot the cover of their self-titled debut LP right outside, Robert Mapplethorpe treated Patti Smith to one of the store’s famous egg-creams on a date in 1967, Ted Berrigan and Allen Ginsberg both included “GEM” in their poems, and, perhaps most flabbergastingly of all, “Gem Spa” is the title of a Basquiat painting. I thanked the cashier and strolled out, an egg-cream’s tangy, frothy flavor resonating in my mouth. A bittersweet thought intensified: If New York doesn’t acknowledge niches like the Gem Spa, a pit-stop for punks, hippies, Beatniks, college students, and a wayside wanderer with enough change to use throughout six decades, then what will become of this space in a few years’ time? I cross the street and find myself in front of a boisterous branch of Dallas BBQ, its blinding neon silhouettes of pigs calling for attention. It’s not difficult to find more of these screaming oppositions in an area as liminal and blurred as the East Village.

 Moreover, what shocked me was how recently some of these seismic changes occurred. I’m not just referring to the closure of many of aforementioned venues, but also the amoebic manner in which movements and sentiments enjoy their lifespan. One book that underscored this principle was a work that covered a surprisingly contemporary time period, especially when juxtaposed to the timeframes meditated on earlier, and in doing so made the phantom New York I longed to be a part of that much closer. “Meet Me In The Bathroom: Rock and Roll and Revival In New York City 2001-2011”, by Lizzy Goodman, covers an incredible epoch, wherein the musical landscape of post-punk and the roots of electronic pop music were beginning to take full flight. As well as reading about the riotous antics of Interpol, The Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem, there was brilliant, oral-history coverage of a transitory East Village New York, shedding itself of a coarse, 90s skin and boldly striding into the 21st century, replete with a pugilistic attitude that remained resilient even in the wake of the September 11th attacks. 

The post-punk movement was in itself an attempt to regress to past glory: the punk scene, which held St. Mark’s Place as its vital organ, had dissipated in popularity as the hair-metal, more delicate face of the 1980s began. Sonic Youth, Television, New York Dolls, and the amusingly named Richard Hell and the Voidoids had turned Manhattan venues on their belly with their relentless, sweaty and unabashed form of music during the 1970s. Mohawks, beer bottles and cigarette butts, as well as a cornucopia of narcotics, were the order of the day across downtown New York as The Sex Pistols, led by the notorious Sid Vicious, blasted their brand of angry nonchalance across the Atlantic from Britain.  To the post-punk 90s kids, these bands had been stuff of legend, plastered on their bedroom walls: somewhere in between Led Zeppelin’s 1975 Physical Graffiti album (which featured a photo of 96 St. Mark’s Place on its cover) and the grunge of Nirvana in 1991. Punk was a furious, no-holds movement had gone mainstream for the world, and specifically for New York, to run wild with. 

One specific venue casts its spectral, grim shadow above all others in the battle for New York’s soul. Its walls, usually black, are covered unreservedly with stickers, scratched messages, messy graffiti, incisions, thumb-tacks, Polaroid photographs, mini concert ads, pamphlet pages, rebellious messages, profanities, rusted nails, peace symbols, skulls, and that’s only a sixteenth of the location. Every photo on the venue’s website, run and maintained by friends of the owner, features chaotically designed homogeneity throughout the entire club. It sits under a jet-black awning at 315 Bowery. Blondie, The Dictators, Talking Heads, Guns N’ Roses, The Strokes, the Ramones, Murphy’s Law , and many more have graced the beer-soaked, unkempt, downtrodden stage.

 It is locked in world music lore as being a site of pilgrimage for rock fans. The only issue is that it doesn’t exist anymore. 

CBGB’s legacy is so boldly publicized that it strikes a familiar chord with most New Yorkers. The club closed in 2006 due to rental debacles and landlord wars, though the Gothic typeface of the old spot has been emblazoned onto T shirts and various merchandise since. For some, CBGB’s demise was emblematic of the last light burning out in old New York. “All of Manhattan lost its soul to money lords,” says Cheetah Chrome, member of The Dead Boys, CBGB regulars. A “Save CBGB” website still exists on the internet, its simple, early 2000s HTML format a stark, sorrowful contrast to the club’s zany interiors. John Varvatos, an upscale fashion brand which sells leather jackets at nearly $2,000 a piece, moved into the vacancy. According to Moss’s “Vanishing New York”, the eponymous designer requested that the interiors be kept intact, and that the shop would not carry out any wholesome renovations so as to maintain the rocking charm of yesteryear. I paid a visit to the once holy site, and microscopic remnants of the club are visible outside. Yet, another one of Moss’s terms that I’ve found use for perked itself up again: fauxstalgia. John Varvatos, generally a proprietor of rock-inspired fashion, seemed to find a way to refine CBGB’s into a marketing tool, offering occasional concerts and a corny vinyl collection. I’m not an angsty contrarian -- I do believe their efforts are somewhat genuine.

However, these ideas present themselves as somewhat corny and embarrassingly unaware, though they are not as cringey as the decorated restaurateur Daniel Boulud opening a brunch spot nearby and naming it “DBGB’s”. That, even to someone like me, felt like painful sacrilege. A few blocks down, monumental, gorgeous glass structures are erected by Avalon Communities for residential and office use, bringing trendy new restaurants alongside them. I know a few NYU students who live there, and they are blissfully unaware of the area their properties encroach on. It’s not their fault, after all. So who is going to take the blame for the sneaky annihilation of the East Village; a sentence of death by a thousand cuts and a million more rent hikes? 

It’s certainly easy to romanticize the past, and the clambering, I-can-almost-taste-it nature of the writing I produce certainly implies a sense of idolization. I’d never disregard the plethora of crime, the stinking odor of unsorted garbage, or the sleazy, prostitute and drug-ridden guise that New York adopted as austerity hit “Fear City” in the 1970s. That which occurred at St. Mark’s Place is as crystal a window into that uglier, more dangerous era than any other.

That being said, it’s still an integral part of the megapolis’ identity, and a cog of its machination that becomes more, not less, important as it grows and subsumes further. The East Village is representative of the dynamism of a certain spirit; a spirit so embracing and welcoming it is perhaps the most quintessentially American tenet of the anomaly that is New York. Folks in and around St. Mark’s have rallied to all sorts of movements; they’ve felt the agony of being the token pariahs and the ecstasy of the miraculous, bittersweet moments that the clubs and bars of yesteryear keep behind their shuttered doors safely. St. Mark’s Place is here to see, to smell, to revel in, to gorge in, to drunkenly slump on, and the sheer connotation that bleeds on that stretch of land between Avenue A and 3rd Ave will find a way to live forever, but it’s up to our younger generations to revive that madness, even if it is just to preserve rather than inauthentically reenact. It is with an inkling of dread that I admit: The East Village didn’t die — the urgency to preserve it did. 

Today’s palpable friction between uptown and downtown in New York isn’t a new one. The Upper East and West Sides breed rampant generalizations about the cognoscenti of Manhattan’s elite with the cultural acceleration that its downtown counterparts endure. From the very beginnings of Dutch occupation in Manhattan, elite officers, committee members and leaders of the Dutch East India Company sought to move north, evading the lurid humdrum of that beneath what is known now as Canal Street. Killian Van Rensselaer, Peter Stuyvesant, and Jonas Bronck and others occupied the untarnished farmland to the north. If those names don’t sound familiar while examining a map of the metropolitan area, they should.

It seems unfathomably stupefying that on this mere thirteen mile stretch of land, the Lower East Side belongs to the same city as Lenox Hill does. Or the fact that Soho and Chinatown are a couple of kilometers from each other. The “boundary” streets, which I define as being expressway roads along the lines of 14th, 34th, 42nd, and Canal streets, are spiritual spines, each attached bone leading to a distinct universe. That all these immigrant, poor, extravagant communities could submit to a larger, pluralistic ideal has put forth by no means an egalitarian society, but a firm sense of irresistibly heartwarming identity. 

     Of course, as Moss laments in “Vanishing New York”,  scores of Jewish, Italian, German, Irish and Ukrainian bakeries, restaurants, bars, and theatres have vanished into the vortex of photographs and memory, and immigrant identities are under threat. The notable example he focuses on is the plight of De Robertis’ Pasticceria, which had transformed into an indispensable neighborhood hotspot and a symbol of pride for the Italian-American community. After a mixture of rental turmoil combined with the powerhouse of Starbucks next door, De Robertis sold its property space and, soon after in December 2014, its last cannoli. It had been on that address for a hundred and ten years. 

   However, as we do shift uptown, The last area I present is perhaps the most peculiar of all. Sutton Place has set one foot in the past, and one in the present, with no visible ambitions for the future. The area of 53rd to 59th streets on York Avenue has seemed to evade the constant whirlwind of tourism that has engulfed New York. The sheer existence of the road looks like an oblong, accidental, out-of-place linear addend to an already orderly, symmetrical, gridded city.

It was around 5PM on a Wednesday. The streets were clean. No hot dog carts, tacky salesmen, or vagabond travellers seemed to be pacing around the area. Few pedestrians were scattered across the streets. A handful of shops were present on the southern wing of the road, closer to the United Nations-Tudor City area.The air seemed fresher, as if this particular jigsaw piece of the symposium that was New York had been preserved as a sort of monument. Due to the residential nature of the neighborhood, it is not included on touristy, Comic Sans font pamphlets or walking tours. The closest subway stop, a tentacle reminding it of the city its in, is two avenues away.  The Queensboro Bridge splits through the street, and thus, for mechanical convenience reasons, the road oddly slopes at an incline upwards, clashes with the nascent end of the bridge, only to slide back down. It is functional engineering, but seems like a youngster’s megalomaniac dream of creating one of those do-it-yourself- Hot Wheels circuits. 

Sutton Place’s serendipitous relevance with most isn’t physical, rather it is through another sort of medium.  Some owe it to the seminal “Catcher In The Rye” by the reclusive J.D. Salinger. Our troubled, pendulous protagonist Holden visits his teacher and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Antolini, in what is described as being a “swanky Sutton Place apartment”.The brief episode ends in a bizarre experience wherein Holden’s head is touched inappropriately, and he consequently flees. Retrospectively, the entire scene feels like a surreal episode, as Holden escapes and we don’t find him neither returning nor reflecting on the oddity of what happened. Perhaps Woody Allen’s silhouette reclining drowsily on a park bench in Manhattan (1979) piqued interest in the eponymous parks that align the river. Could it have been John Cheever’s “The Sutton Place Story”, a short story which first found itself in The New Yorker-- as so many have -- in its 29th June, 1946 issue that set Sutton from obscurity to relevance? The neighborhood is a backdrop for quintillions of stories written and filmed alike, but, as I feel my calves aching from the sharp incline of the streets, a sense of faded splendor seems to set in. I feel as if, in a city of 8 million or so,  I can be isolated here, for this slice of New York is bereft of demand and replete with the hushed, the dusted, the restrained; it has the prowess of a film-reel machine now stored away and covered with a velvet cloak. As sterling silver screen star and Sutton Place resident Greta Garbo famously said: “I want to be alone”. She may have found this desire sated in this quaint, poignant, marble-clad neighborhood. The neighborhood’s distance from any remnant of downtown, replete with its rectangular parks and show stopping Queensborough Bridge views, further inculcated the idea of another city altogether. Of the three neighborhoods I had surveyed and sampled the delights of in a Tocquevillian fashion, Sutton Place was -- dare I say it -- astonishingly well preserved. That being said, the avid city wanderer can only romanticize for so long before the cold knuckles of abrupt change come knocking. While the clean, pearl-grey streets, oddly devoid of gum and newspaper scraps, remained quiet and harmonious, a war with perennial consequences beckoned , its belligerents gearing up for endless dialectics.  A series of articles by Real Estate Weekly chronicled a local pattern of headbutts between Yorkville & Sutton Place’s  Manhattan Community Board 6 and a prominent real estate development group which aimed to plop a thirty-something story skyscraper in the middle of the cultural hearth of the street. The revivalist apartment buildings and ivy-laced, steel-gated townhouses would now face the prospect of an identity vacuum commencing. I clicked through the articles with the addiction-stroked hunger of a serial TV show binger, eager to see the outcome of the written confrontations that begun two years ago. A minuscule sense of anxiety started to permeate: Surely, we all knew how this was going to end. The eternal, uneven struggle between Moses and Jacobs was sizzling with a familiar urban intensity. But, alas, a heavenly stroke of conscience managed to usurp and even belittle the plan altogether. With the fervor of a eager anchor awaiting a judicial verdict, Christian Bautista reported that, in a rare victory for the city, Sutton Place’s local community board unanimously approved a proposal to not only stymie construction of the monstrosity, but curtail all future efforts by ruling that no new building in the area can exceed a height of 260 feet. The project in mind was set to storm past approximately 700 meters (Bautista, “Community Board Approves Sutton Place Rezoning Plan”).

Another twist, thought to have crumbled into the obsolete folders of history, emerges. Until the late 1920s, Sutton Place was a cesspool of filth, primarily occupied by neglected immigrant tenements. These functional, semi-brutalist edifices were strictly built to cram in as many people per room, and so they did. The conditions within these high-tension, claustrophobic confines were often as perilous as the riotous, bellicose New York outside of them. I couldn’t believe it -- the Sutton Place, home to Freddie Mercury, Marilyn Monroe, Kenneth Cole, and the incumbent U.N. Secretary General, was once a quagmire of broken dreams like its distant downtown relatives? It seemed unattainable.

After reading Michelle Wang’s report, this much is clear: a match can start a house-fire, and Sutton was soon ablaze with frivolous amounts of wealth. At the core of this dynamism was a tale of two Annes, both scions of the Vanderbilt and Morgan fortunes respectively, and their choices to settle into a decrepit, underlooked riverside neighborhood along the East River. Word of mouth must’ve spread, and perhaps Manhattan’s elite took a fancy to the affordable prices and the quaint coastal views. The, rest, as they say, is history, and the once dilapidated area expected a neoclassical renaissance that would shelf a part of itself forever.

Exhausted from trudging up and down Sutton Place and gathering peculiar frowns from uniformed, well-groomed doormen, I decided to enjoy a respite by way of sitting in one of the mini-parks that are lodged as close to the river as one can get. The sky sunk into the orange splendour of sunset, and an iconic “PEPSI-COLA” sign waved to me, rife with a nostalgic tinge of a time when those topsy-turvy red letters shone proudly on beverage cans. To the left, a sparkling Queensborough bridge yawned with the faint noises of people entering and exiting this magical island. The tranquility was interrupted by an epiphany: Wasn’t the narrative of Sutton Place’s revival in the 1920s a similar one; a narrative that was analogous to the piecemeal reconfiguration of MacDougal Street and St. Mark’s Place? I felt confused, then surprised, and sighed, my warm breath swept away by the chilly spring evening wind.

The Sutton Place whose past I had glorified and revered wasn’t even the authentic one. For it too, experienced a period wherein it eroded its initial identity. And, in a hundred years or so, maybe another budding, cumbersome NYU student will glorify their past, also known as our future, unaware of the seismic changes that stripped it from its initial bedrock. I felt a sense of disgusted melancholy: who was I to present this multifaceted story of both poor and rich? I had been fooled, somewhat.

Certainly, the Sutton Place that dripped gilded charm in the 1950s merited greater attention versus the nascent, fledgling poverty-ridden one of the 1920s. But if we arbitrarily select the history we want to magnify, then who’s to say that the stories of crime-filled, vice-laden, trash-piled St. Mark’s or the anecdotes from the bohemian, hippie, outcast fervor of MacDougal’s will be able to prevail when squared against the glossier, safer, and more sanitized vision that comes to fruition? I am not saying that the histories of these sites will be wiped out from the knowledge of further generations, but I do think it’s worth mentioning that the entrenchment of a favored story, one written by the wealthy victors, is very much a possible phenomenon-- this area is living proof of it. However, Sutton Place’s exquisite lore can still be one to be captivated by, but that is a function of mythologizing a sense of nostalgia. I leave the park as dusk confirms her presence, and wander north to the bellowing underbelly of the Queensborough bridge.

I stare out onto the street from its apex underneath the structure, akin to a king atop a mountain, before turning to meander on back into the harried, thronged New York, away from a time I loved but never knew. 

There’s a fascinating word I stumbled across online, extracted from an online list of “untranslatables”: words that don’t have direct parallels in the English language, like Schadenfreude . “Mono-no-aware”, a Japanese term, seemed to envelop a phenomenon that I don’t think even numerous sentences could communicate. It is unpacked as follows:

“The unavoidable nature of finite existence is contrasted with the never-ending stream of change, as life continues to occur despite the continuous passing of objects and experience. The realization of impermanence is therefore bittersweet, tinged with mourning, and yet also capable of recognizing the beauty of change in itself.:

I believe that sets an accurate tone for this piece for obvious reasons, not simply due to the notion of inevitable transience that it tear jerkingly envelops so well, but for the fact that the preset comically stands: through it all -- and perhaps this is my writerly sense of elusivity cropping up -- I don’t feel as if I ever really found the words to communicate what I experience while in these moonlit trances of absorption. To echo Jacobs, I concur that this city is indeed a living, breathing organism in how symbiotic it can be. It latches onto the innards of your cognition and fundamentally changes who you are, the way you see that which is around you; the manner in which you talk to locals of this city.

For even that is a lustrous, sublime quality: to be a native New Yorker. I view them as specimens of another universe, either massively heedless of the changes surrounding them or alarmingly cognizant that De Robertis, CBGB’s, and others have met their unfateful end. As I touched upon before, I felt like Tocqueville wandering through the nascent experiment that was the United States in the mid 19th century and like Edmund Burke waxing lyrical about political disturbances in his seminal “Reflections on The Revolution in France”, which is to say: I felt like an outsider. This complemented the journeyman quality of my ambulatory expeditions and added a sense of novelty and objectivity. But to be tortured on the past is not an absolute: anyone can research the myriad of books and online sources available on New York’s history, but not everyone feels that emotive tussle. I like to think that the disposition to dive into the beauty of mythological nostalgia exists in everyone, and that there are more of us, tucked away on our East Village fire escapes or atop triumphant penthouses, their sense of “Mono-no-aware” waiting to be uncovered.

The unfiltered yearning to leap into the unmatched tale of New York’s sites is valid whether you’ve been here for one day or for eighty years. Jeremiah Moss, the most visible torchbearer of this mentality, has only been in the city since the 1990s.

I implore everyone to apply the sentimental outcome of examining a mythologized-nostalgic past and turn them into practical solutions, not only for the sake of the city, not only for the bulwark of memory, not simply for the endless tales and stories that occurred in these magical settings, but for the fortification of our poignant history as humans: these venues aren’t just backdrops, they’re the finest passages into our own aspirations, frivolities, tendencies and natures. Diving into the nostalgic narrative of New York is the optimal window through which to see another world, and consequently to discover that which evokes us.

In 2010, The New York Times decided to serialize a few of Jeremiah Moss’s blog posts long before he ascended to book fame, selecting to highlight a specific conquest of his. His multidisciplinary adventure sought to discover whether Edward Hopper’s 1942 masterpiece “Nighthawks” was situated in  a real location, rectifying an unsolved mystery. Moss and his acolytes rummaged through archives, consulted noted experts and pieced together an investigation like sleuths. However, there was no conclusive evidence, with Moss admitting that his guess of the diner being located at the corner of Greenwich Avenue and Mulry Square was hopeful conjecture at best. He ended the piece, mired in defeat, with the following sentence, a statement so gorgeously universal that it encapsulates the ethereal nature of this infinite struggle. “It seems the longer you live in New York, the more you love a city that’s vanished”,  he writes. “For those of us well versed in loving what’s lost, it’s an easy leap to missing something that was never really there.”

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Shahid Mahdi

2018