Musing About New York City
On last week’s A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor did one of his usual bits when the show is on the road: singing “Hush Little Baby Don’t You Cry” with lyrics made to contain a boatload of references to local sights and activities. It always gets a good reaction from the local audience, and this version, coming from the Town Hall on West 43rd Street in New York, was no exception. But this one left me a little cold and perplexed, because I didn’t know half the things he was referring to. On the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t have imagined that I ought to. Deane and DeLuca? I had vaguely heard the name somewhere; I had to look it up. Duane Reade? Never heard of it. Looked it up. The Rose Planetarium? Whatever happened to the Hayden Planetarium? I have always wanted to go there.
I have long had a conflicted attitude about New York City, mixed abhorrence and fascination. I was born, grew up, and spent the first quarter century of my life in New York State, but the first time I ever set foot in NYC—and then only briefly, for a day—I was more than a year out of college. (And on that day I didn’t see any of the usual sights; my wife and I were attending the wedding of one of her college friends in Greenwich Village.) When I was growing up, culture, via television, came from NYC. The Ed Sullivan Show was my window on it. But my parents, who lived into their eighties, were born, lived, and died in New York State, and to the best of my knowledge neither of them ever laid eyes on the City.
And “the City” was what it was called by the people with whom I went to college/university, most of whom being from either the City itself or the metropolitan area. For them it seemed to be the center of the universe; indeed, there was nothing else worth considering in the universe. Sometimes it felt as if they beat me around the head with it, like a truncheon. (I asked my freshman roommate what a bagel was, having never experienced one. He said it was sort of like a soft pretzel. I had never encountered one of those, either.)
A couple of days after Keillor’s program I got an email from one of the mailing lists I have somehow got on, by a writer for Hay House books, a New Age/self-help publisher, about his New York City Holiday adventure. He and his Californian family had spent Thanksgiving week in NYC, and he detailed the eight or nine things they had intended to do, almost all of which they accomplished in spades. They included “watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, visiting the Natural History Museum, walking around Central Park, attending a couple of Broadway plays, seeing the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, tasting real New York Pizza, exploring the 9/11 Memorial Museum, ice skating at Rockefeller Center, and just enjoying the sights and sounds of the city.”
And I thought: I have never done any of those things, with the possible exception of the “sights and sounds”, which I experienced in one brief, two-hour ramble around the middle of Manhattan in March 1975, including walking around part of the lower border of Central Park, walking around the base of the Empire State Building, walking past the then-closed Radio City Music Hall, and so on.
I also thought: this trip must have cost a bundle. I do not have a bundle, just a small packet, pretty much all of which is obligated for paying bills.
I was in New York City for about five days in the summer of 1995, doing a training session for the then-current-and-oh-so-urgent agency initiatives. It was held in a hotel in Flushing, Queens, and what I saw of NYC was… Flushing, Queens. The sessions were so exhausting that I had no energy left at the end of the day to do anything more than find something to eat, stroll around the local neighborhood (which seemed to be almost entirely Chinese) a bit, and collapse in my room. On one evening the nominal “trainer” for the group led an expedition into Manhattan, and I think they went to Little Italy. I was too tired to go. But on the shuttle flight into the city I had got a good look at the Statue of Liberty from the air, on a nice clear day. That was neat, a first and, perhaps, a last for me.
I’ve read about New York, of course. I read Pete Hamill’s book Downtown, about the history and geography of lower Manhattan. I’ve recently read Dave Van Ronk’s memoir about the early folkie days in Greenwich Village, and I’ve read detective novels by astrologer/writer Mitchell Lewis, which contain a lot of local color about Manhattan. These help my education. In recent months I’ve seen references to the Highline and DUMBO, and, not having any idea what these were, looked them up on Wikipedia. They sounded interesting.
And one day, before I die, I still hope to see a Broadway show, on Broadway. I’d like it to be something that I really want to see, not just any random play. I’ve always been interested in the stage, and I spent a summer at Oxford doing a course of modern British drama, during which I saw Shakespeare by the RSC at Stratford and plenty of theatre in London’s West End. I’ve seen road show performances in Washington, but never Broadway. There was an opportunity once, back when I was in college taking a summer course in Modern Drama. The teacher had organized a one-Saturday trip to NYC to see a Broadway and an off-Broadway show, but I didn’t go because Martha was working that summer as an elderly woman’s companion with only every other weekend off. That was the weekend.
Still I have hope; one day. Maybe when the weather is warmer, and if I feel I have enough money and energy. Things these days are never simple. But one day, before I die.
