Michael and I went out to Brooklyn this past Friday to see a friend of his in a play. The theatre was out in the middle of nowhere – at least that’s what it seemed like to this dyed-in-the-wool Upper West Side-r.
After we got off the subway, we then had to walk a few blocks to get to the space. A few streets in, the tall glass and concrete buildings surrounding the station, gave way to older, lower rowhouses and storefronts. It started to look familiar. It started to look like New York.
I am sure that every generation of people who have ever lived in this city has watched it change and grow and felt a pang of loss for that which has been torn down and paved over to make way for the future.
The Lenape people saw the trees through which they hunted deer, cut down, and the streams they drank from diverted into culverts or silted over. Wooden houses sprang up only to be replaced by more made of stone. Columbia University, which was founded in 1754, was originally so far out in the countryside that they had to build a road to get to it. They used an existing Lenape trail and made Broadway.
Eventually, the forests and farmlands disappeared as the city spread and began to take over the whole island. In 1858, somebody got worried that there would soon be nothing green left and created Central Park. To the casual visitor, Central Park looks as if it is a protected part of the original wilderness. It is nothing of the sort. It is a completely artificial construct.
Designed by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, none of what you can see there today occurred naturally. It was all landscaped. There was even an African American town called Seneca Village which stood near the American Museum of Natural History which was torn down and its inhabitants forcibly ejected. The properties were then plowed under and planted with trees.
To the south of the park was an area called the Piggery District. Between what is now Sixth and Eighth Avenues, in the west 50’s was a landscape of hog yards and shanties. Irish and Dutch immigrants did their best to survive on that land by raising and slaughtering pigs. After the Park was created, it was deemed an eyesore and thought to be a deterrent for those who wanted a nice day out. The Piggery District, too, was soon paved over.
Rowhouses and tenements were then built to house the immigrant families. Poverty abounded. The area became known as Hell’s Kitchen. West Side Story was written to take place there. They even filmed the original movie of it on those streets. Almost immediately afterward, a huge section of it was torn down to make way for Lincoln Center.
My ex lived in one of those buildings that still survives. It was what was called a railroad flat; one room leads into another. Often there are entrances on either end. In most, like his, the bathtub was in the kitchen. There are still some of those left, but these days, most everyone has renovated the buildings and created separate bathrooms.
I used to live in a tiny 165-square-foot apartment that was in a three-story building between the rowhouses on 50th and 51st Streets.
To get to my apartment, I had to walk through the hallway of the building on 50th Street and out the back into a courtyard where the door to my little building was. There were six apartments in my building – two on each floor – and an additional structure on the west side of it that had a couple more.
That interior apartment block had been constructed for the men who built the rest of the houses and, in fact, the streets themselves once the pig farms had been squeezed out. Each room had a fireplace that originally had some sort of oil heater with an exhaust pipe that went up the flue. I think when I was living there I used the space for books.
Hell’s Kitchen used to be a cheap place to live. Given its proximity to the Broadway theatre district, many actors and dancers lived there. So much so, in fact, that it was often referred to as the Dance Belt. These days, though, real estate prices in Hell’s Kitchen have gone up so much that it’s driven out many of the performing artists and theatrical craftspeople who used to live there. The new arrivals now must venture far out into Astoria in Queens to find affordable housing.
I first started coming into New York City in the late seventies. My family lived about an hour bus ride away in New Jersey. In those years, Times Square was truly dangerous. A friend and I were held up at gunpoint one afternoon while I was still in High School. I say gunpoint, but really, I think the guy was pointing his finger at us through his sweatshirt. At any rate, we didn’t argue with him and immediately handed over our wallets and our gloves. The doorman at the Imperial Theatre, whom we had befriended, gave us the bus fare home.
In the seventies, Greenwich Village was the center of gay life in the city. I started working on shows at the Village Gate on Bleeker Street while I was still at Columbia. The Village Gate is where the original production of Jaques Brel played. 1983 was right at the beginning of the AIDS pandemic. Soon that disease gutted the Village. Countless people who lived there died. Suddenly all these wonderful, quirky apartments came on the market and real estate prices soared. Now the Village is home to wealthy young families. There are few artists still living there. The hole-in-the-wall cafes are largely gone, replaced by chains, and the Village Gate is now a CVS.
If you took one of us from the New York of forty years ago and plopped us down in the New York of today, we would find it very difficult to recognize. Rising costs have forced the places that made the city’s neighborhoods so appealing to close. Developers, mistaking geography for an area’s appeal have torn down the old buildings and replaced them with gleaming modern skyscrapers. Instead of eccentric boutiques and cafes, what covers much of our city these days looks like a suburban shopping mall.
The newest area of Manhattan is also the place that looks least like the New York of yore. Hudson Yard could be in Singapore or Dubai. Shiny and clean, glaringly bright in the sun, there is nary a New Yorker in sight. It is an area built for wealthy international tourists to feel at home in. It is completely devoid of its own personality. The shops inside the mall have prices that only millionaires can afford.
The theatre where we saw the play on Friday reminded me of some of the places I worked in early in my career. Unlike those old theatres, a lot of money had been spent to make this one look like not a lot of money had been spent. Back in the day, there was simply no money. We made do. These days poverty’s appeal needs to be carefully curated.
Michael and I knew a lot of other people in the audience who had also ventured out to support their friend. Afterward, we all went to a nearby dive. It wasn’t really a dive but was making a very good effort to convince us all that it was. The food was too good and too expensive.
It felt like, dare I say it, the old days to all be crammed into a table together eating each other’s French fries and talking about theatre. People from other tables stopped by to chat and as some of our group made their various ways home, others sat down and joined us. Everybody there knew at least one other person so new connections were made and old friendships enjoyed.
Then they announced last call at about 11:00 pm. By 11:30 pm we were all out. In the 1980’s we would have been there until 4 am. To be fair, all of us were in our sixties, or at least our fifties, so we were all secretly more than happy to be forced out to go home. It would have been nice, though, to leave, knowing that the younger folk were going to stay on as we would have. Instead, they all left long before us.
There was plenty about the good ole days that was anything but. The terror of knowing you do not have enough money to pay the rent three days hence was very real. The crime and filth on the streets were also very real. There was always so much graffiti on subway car windows that you could not ever see out at all.
Friday night in Brooklyn, though, brought back a lot of the good parts of the past for a minute. There was the excitement we all felt about creating a new theatre piece in a fifty-seat theatre that would never sell out. Back then, we’d agree to do anything and not worry about the pay. Our other day jobs would have to help us make rent.
This new generation won’t experience any of that. They’ll experience something else. Forty years from now, they will also all end up somewhere at a table together and wonder what happened to the New York of their youth.
I spend a lot of time walking the streets of this great city looking for vestiges of the past. I also search out everything new. It all seems to change from week to week. If I leave for the weekend, when I come back, I can’t wait to walk downtown to see what’s different. Something always is.
As lovely as it sometimes is to visit bygone days, I’m not ready to live there yet. There is still too much that’s new that I want to see. Yes, it’s painful to watch a beautiful old building be torn down but that’s been happening since we first started piling branches together to protect ourselves from the elements. A new generation’s response to New York is not always easy to take but it’s endlessly fascinating.
Okay, enough of this. I have to take a shower and then walk downtown. The sun just came out. Something’s new out there, and I want to find it.
"165-square-foot apartment" -- Hoy cow! I've spent the previous 12 years living in 240 sq. ft (8 X 30) travel trailer (a period of time I've mostly no nostalgia for. I moved last year to space that's about 3X larger.) I can scarcely imagine living in a space that was 1/3rd smaller.