Tom Watson

A Blogger's Farewell

The great Lance Mannion has left us and his passing requires a testament to his gifts and generosity in a venue appropriate to his prolific blogging life. This particular slab of granite will be carved here, upon this ancient turf, this feed, this blog, this Typepad. For this is where Lance lived and created his world of words, where he sowed such a rich wildflower meadow of scents and colors and shapes and stories. His work was a gift to me and so many thousands of others, very lightly remunerated, and yet so consistent that we took yet another wordsmith spring for granted and the sudden killing frost of mortality has wiped the blooms away. There will be no more posts. No more musings on literature and film, television and media, politics and culture.

It was here where Lance Mannion joined the immortals of our game. He ranks with Steve Gilliard, Gehrig's "luckiest man" to that Ruthian loss and - in my view - the Iron Horse of the liberal blogging era, a man who kept going long after all the RSS feeds dried up and Twitter injected its instantaneous meanness of spirit into what now passes for discourse. Those gauzy days of the aughts seem distant now, but they were a time of superheroes - writers who wore their disguises like marvelous capes and masks and costumes. I shudder at their remembered majesty and might. "Lance Mannion" invented himself, because he could. Because we all could. Lance was part Bing Crosby part Jack Lemmon and part Damon Runyon. But he also injected hardcore liberalism into middle American tastebuds, like Peter Parker's radioactive spider. Tolerance crossed with curiosity was his superpower. And so he rambled with the Self-Styled Siren, with the Viscount LaCarte, with Neddie Jingo, with Blue Girl, with Shakespeare's Sister, with M.A. Peel, with Jon Swift, with Majikthise, with Digby, and all the other crazy superhero bastards (including those of us foolish enough to use our real names). Keep your Rat Pack, brother, that was my crowd.

Lance Mannion was the witty guy down at the end of the best bar in town. You walked into the joint happy to see him there every damned night. You left with his jocular Fred MacMurray banter ringing in your ears, smoother than the most expensive Scotch.

Dave Reilly had a harder road.

Lance was my muse, but Dave was my friend. He was a brilliant writer, out of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and a devoted family man who hit some very tough times in late middle life. We went to the Clinton Global Initiative together. We hung around a few Democratic victory parties together. He joined my newcritics blogging venture back in the day. He was a regular at the Hillman Prizes. We marched with the Teamsters at Occupy Wall Street. And then harder times closed in. He had some serious health challenges. And his wife Adrianne - herself a brilliant journalist the very reason why Lance Mannion lionized Lois Lane - became ill. To blog readers, she's the Blonde or Mrs. M. They were an incredibly close couple, and they loved their boys deeply and publicly. But in this time in this country for a blogger and a newspaperwoman, the economic bar was high even without the healthcare crisis.

Dave would always send a Christmas card. Now and again a postcard. My favorite - as he knew - was the one from Hyde Park, after a visit to FDR's Presidential library, a place we both revered. He was a very thoughtful man; I was not always as thoughtful in return. Money was tight. The blog raised a bit, but perhaps not enough. The cracks through which a guy like Dave can fall in our society are too damned wide.

If you read the Lance Mannion blog - and by God, it should be preserved - I recommend the posts about his family. He created "Mannionville" and populated it with people. Pop M. The Blonde. Mom Mannion. His boys, Ken and Oliver Mannion. The barista at Barnes & Noble. The guy at the hardware store. A world where people knew each other and cared. That's where Dave and Lance came together, the place where the blogging superhero took off his mask. They were the same. A loving father, husband, and son. I suspect that's how he will be remembered the best.

But to me, he'll always wear a cape.

NOTE: Dave's family needs your help. Please consider making a financial donation to help them out at this difficult time via this online fundraiser organized by Susie Madrak. 

The Liberal

 

Growing up on Elaine Terrace on the eastern verges of Yonkers, tucked between Mile Square and Palmer Roads just up from the Thruway cut, there were three historic figures always in open reverence in my grandmother's house - one Italian, and two Democrats. The Italian was the Pope; in that time it was Pope Paul VI, formerly Cardinal Montini, the Archbishop of Milan and, as things went in the Curia of those days, a progressive who built churches and respected labor. One of the two Democrats was John F. Kennedy, recently martyred young President and a ghostly presence whose death came when I was 18 months old in the kind of catastrophic and televised spectacle that made it seem years later that I remembered watching it all. Of course, I didn't. I just remembered the endless conversations. The other Democrat was the real deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt - not just the greatest President of the 20th century but a New Yorker, former Governor, and a political leader whose colossal liberal reach touched my own family deeply and directly.

Those were the three famous portraits in two dimensions that overlooked my early years: the Pope and two American liberals. But there was a fourth liberal, a man whose portrait often included a uniform.

That was the other Democrat, Thomas J. Quinlan.

My late grandfather - he died 14 years before I arrived - was a constant presence in childhood despite his absence. His Army Air Corps hat hung from my grandmother's bedstead. His great coat remained in the vestibule between the front porch and the living room. His cigarette case was always in the left-hand drawer of the wide buffet chest in the dining room, along with his lighter and his magnifying glass. His radio remained by his chair, close to the fireplace. The house itself was his, a classic four-square design he'd set with purpose into a Yonkers hillside facing west to catch the afternoon sun on the front porch (the morning sun belonged to the kitchen), built after he returned from France and the American flying corps of the First World War. He was a salesman, in the building supply trade - but he was also a pilot who would serve again in the Second World War. He was the son of Irish immigrants from the southwest of Ireland, and my great-grandfather worked on the New York docks. As a young man, he attended Manhattan College when it was still in Manhattan and worked as a sandhog and later as an engineer, digging the city's subway tunnels for the Interborough Rapid Transit company. When he married my grandmother, he crossed the tracks to do so - to the better side. Her forebears had arrived from Eire earlier, and she came from a family of significant means and called a Murray Hill townhouse home. They lived for time on the Grand Concourse, just below Fordham Road, before decamping after the war for the country air of Yonkers and the start of a family.

My grandfather got involved in Democratic politics early; he came from the labor side of those tracks and knew the challenges of the working poor in America at the turn of 20th century. First, Governor Al Smith and first Catholic candidacy for President in 1928. Smith was the working class crusader, the Tammany man turned reformer after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire tragedy. Then in 1932, another New York Governor - Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By that time, Thomas Quinlan was in his late 30s and ensconced in the 12th Ward Democratic Club, which covered most of the east side of the city. He helped to run the successful Yonkers mayoral campaign of Joseph Loehr, a Roosevelt delegate in 1932, who served in city from 1932-39.

And he basically ran the 12th Ward for FDR and the New Deal.

From what I can tell from the old Herald Statesman news clips, it's clear he was a quiet kind of leader who didn't make too many bold speeches; he worked the back-channel. But he worked it pretty hard. In August 1936, organizing on behalf of New Dealers in the state, he presided over a meeting of the 12th Ward club that put down a revolt against Roosevelt's successor as Governor, Herbert Lehman, a progressive, by Tammany Hall conservatives. Two years later, he was part of a group of FDR men at the state Democratic convention who supported nominating Postmaster General James A. Farley to succeed Governor Lehman (the plan failed, Lehman decided to run again and served till 1942).  And in 1937, he was appointed to the Charter Commission that revamped Yonkers government.

His 12th Ward Democratic Club was hive of progressive New Deal politics and liberal speech-making. "Arrogant" Republicans were not admired. There are a lot examples in old Herald Statesman clips; and they all note who chaired those meetings.

In June, 1936 my grandfather was in the chair when State Senator James A. Garrity "scored the Republican Assembly for failure to paw the Governor's social security program, declaring it necessary to care properly for old people of the state. Discussing national affairs, Senator Garrity declared that President Roosevelt has brought the country out of chaos and into prosperity. He said this is indicated by reports of large industries."

A good, old-fashioned political lashing of Republican callousness toward the more vulnerable in our society, and Thomas J. Quinlan was in the chair.

In July, Lawrence Tasker of Hastings, Roosevelt's campaign manager for Westchester County, ripped into the Republicans again - with Thomas J. Quinlan in the chair.

According to the Statesman, Tasker "urged the cooperation of the members to re-elect Mr. Roosevelt, said that the question facing the voters is whether the policies of the President are a success or a failure. 'There is no use trying to befog the issue,' he said. 'You are for the New Deal or against it. I am convinced—and I think most of the citizens of the United States are— that the Roosevelt policies have put us on the highway of prosperity.' He warned that the Republican Party will concentrate its attack on the cost of the New Deal and will claim that it has cost the taxpayer $13,000,000,000 since Mr. Roosevelt took office." 

At another meeting that year - President Roosevelt's aid to "the common man" was praised by former Alderman Thomas F. Sullivan - with Thomas J. Quinlan in the chair.

It wasn't all speech-making and vote whipping. The political clubs of those days had to deliver bread and circus. So the accounts included some fun and games. In May of 1936, for example, the 12th Ward Club put on a festival, no doubt a fundraiser: "Attractions included Leroy's Circus Side Show include Baby LaFrance, mentalist; Madam Tiny, electric box; Eddie Brown, magician; Mrs. Leroy, sword box; Bob-Bobett; Bedell, with mentalistic dog. Scotty McCrae and A. Lasky on front; Red Nagle and Ernest Truyn, tickets. Prison Show, in charge of Henry (Duke) Hyatt, and Snake Show managed by Joseph Toomy."

Later that year, "nearly 200 persons attended a card party sponsored by the Twelfth Ward Democratic Club last night at the clubrooms, 591 Central Avenue. Forty tables were in play."

That's a lot of Democrats, folks.

And it wasn't just about candidates and politics and counting heads - it was about policy. Through his New Deal politics, my grandfather became a pioneer in public housing in America. He was a co-founder and the first chairman of the Yonkers Municipal Housing Authority, and oversaw the creation of the public agency charged with building affordable housing in partnership with the Federal government. While "Yonkers public housing" later became nationally synonymous with racism and neglect in the 1970s and led to a Federal lawsuit, in the late 30s and early 40s it was the most progressive undertaking in the city's history.

Under his leadership, the city planned and built a development known as Mulford Gardens. Hailed at its opening in July 1940 by the United States Housing Authority as a "symbol of the American way of living," it was racially integrated and aimed squarely at working men and their families. Sadly, it later became a symbol of neglect, as government moved away from progressive ideals. But at the time, it was greeted as a new model; I was surprised in reading the archives to discover that my aunt, Margaret Quinlan Dermako, had been approved as a tenant supervisor for the project, and that my uncle Tom Quinlan (later, my godfather) had also been involved. And imagine my surprise to discover that my grandmother Gertrude Quinlan had also served on the Housing Commission, after my grandfather went back into the service for a second time in World War II (serving as a Major in the Air Corps, and sadly contracting the illness that took his life a few years later). Progressive politics was the Quinlan family vocation. 

Which is not to suggest that it was a radical lefty household. It never was. This was the practical liberalism of Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, the Kennedys. When I was two, I paraded around the back garden with a giant LBJ button. The liberalism we inherited was pro development, pro jobs, and pro business (my grandfather's work was selling building supplies), and it leaned pretty heavily on American patriotism. But it also rested on the basic belief that government's job was to actively improve the lives of citizens - that it should be heavily involved in the public welfare of the people. My grandfather the liberal Democrat ardently opposed - indeed, abhorred - take-it-all conservatism, mob bigotry, and small government. 

I never met my grandfather Thomas J. Quinlan so I didn't get to hear about his liberal Democratic politics first-hand. But I still had a great source: my grandmother, who carried the brightest torch for her Tom through my entire childhood, and for his brand of practical and progressive government. I knew how she felt alright, because she survived through Ronald Reagan's first term and never hesitated to call the Republicans the "party of the rich." Nonetheless, it's always worthwhile to look back. As we face an existential crisis in America - the biggest threat to our democracy since the Great Depression - I can't help but make the connection to my grandfather's politics of the 1930s, to organizing and supporting Democrats, to encouraging active and communitarian government, and to winning the battle against fascism.

We Shall Fight on the Beaches

I haven't read too much about the source material for Christopher Nolan's seat-rattling bones of war epic Dunkirk, which I finally experienced (and that's the right word) in a late-night Imax showing that severely aggravated my already bothersome Trump Era insomnia. But I was certain that one scene in The Longest Day, the massive 1962 Zanuck production packed with more stars per square inch than Eisenhower's jacket, must have influenced Nolan - whose beautifully and precisely drawn landscapes are vital to the film's success. There's a moment in the Zanuck flick where actor Hans Christian Blech, playing a German major in a bunker at Normandy, witnesses the size of the Allied invasion fleet for the first time as the mist lifts along the French coast. 

 

That look was mirrored by one of the best characters in Nolan's war story: Kenneth Branagh as Commander Bolton, the Royal Navy pier-master during the evacuation. Like Blech's Wermacht officer, Branagh's Commander executes that classic cinematic head-turn of shocked surprise toward the camera (think Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life or Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men). Both are senior military officers serving on the front lines; both are fighting on the defensive, and both will be on the battle's losing side. Yet we know, of course, that one side will win - and so Blech's look is one of horror, the shadow of death over a regime that will fall in bloody combat. But Branagh's expression carries hopefulness and pride. The small navy of private British yachts and steamers has emerged from the Channel fog to rescue 300,000 soldiers who will fight another day - some of them, on the longest day. Either few second of film that can stand in as a visual tweet for the entire narrative of both pictures.

Branagh's turn in Dunkirk - like so many others - is understated. Nolan has created an amazing visual architecture of violence and movement and time (his one big "trick" of an asynchronous but precise timelines was a bit too tricky for me). The dialogue is generally pretty sparse; the actors convey so much through expression and movement. In some ways, it's one of the greatest ensemble portrayals of human fear that I've ever seen. Tom Hardy, playing RAF fighter pilot Farrier, does more with a single eye than many actors do with full anatomy. The sound is demanding and punishing for the viewer, and it sure as hell lit up the fight or flight instinct in my seat (I closed my eyes and covered my ears several times); it was much scarier than any Hollywood horror film. Yet Dunkirk holds down the gore factor in favor of the random nature of warfare - and survival.

Throughout the film, we barely glimpse the enemy. I suspect this is close the experience of actual foot soldiers and sailors under attack submarines. Yet there's a simple message of heroism in Dunkirk that goes well beyond the Churchillian speeches - that of being able to stifle fear and get on with it. Shall we call it resisting fear? I think we should. We need heroes these days, just as we need to find the courage to resist.

The moral rock at the center of Dunkirk is, of course, veteran British actor Mark Rylance, who plays Mr. Dawson, a pleasure boat owner who steers for Dunkirk and danger. He's a middle class character, superbly crafted (the yacht itself is also a star) and accompanied by his son and a local boy. The closeness of existential danger - of the murderous battle itself - to his home and family is deeply etched in the lines on Rylance's face. His lines are few but powerful, and they cover sacrifice and choice: "There’s no hiding from this, son. We have a job to do."

Dunkirk is a technical and visual marvel, one of the greatest action films ever made, certainly one of the best English language war films ever. I suspect it will not be as popular with critics over the long-term (and the awards judges) because of the lack of a cohesive human narrative, or that big star turn, or an explicit social message. The sea and sand and the ships and planes and costumes and sound are the stars. But they do tell a story. And frankly, it's a story that's as right for 2017 as it was for 1940. 

Addendum:

Strongly recommended reading: 

The Miracle of Dunkirk: The True Story of Operation Dynamo by Walter Lord. Many of the stories portrayed in the Nolan film clearly came from this 2012 history. 

Bridge and Tunnel Kid, Part Seven

The Carlyle is one of those New York hotels. Scene of blue-blooded charity dinners through the ages and red-blooded Kennedy trysts (according to legend anyway, but what else do we have really?) the hotel is an elegant and cozy pre-Depression pile on the Upper East Side where the shrimp cocktail costs as much as the monthly rail pass from Babylon and the receiving rooms look like sets out of old Bowery Boys flicks - the kind of fancy joint Slip Mahoney and his pals were always getting tossed out of in some madcap pursuit of a society dame.

It's all central casting in gilt and polished wood. Just off the lobby along 76th Street, there are little lamps on the tables of Cafe Carlyle, a club where FDR is still the President, and the swells in publishing and banking and advertising leave their drivers to circle between Fifth and Madison while they carefully remove hand-crafted cigarettes from hand-crafted silver cases. Yes darling, Myrna Loy just brushed by you on her way to the powder room. William Powell waits impatiently.

The Carlyle is an island, a stitch in New York time. When Buster Poindexter lit up the room on a recent Thursday night during a rave-reviewed week-long run with his swinging (but as yet unnamed) band, I thought for a moment of all the rooms long closed that David Johansen has inhabited in four decades of New York troubador residency. The Mercer Arts Center, Max's Kansas City, Tramps, CBGB, the Ritz, Peppermint Lounge, the Palladium, Danceteria, Cat Club, the Bottom Line, even poor old Ferris Booth Hall up on Morningside Heights, where Johansen's swinging Buster persona owned New York very early in its first run. All gone. But the Carlyle, where you half expect Bing Crosby to slide into the corner booth for the late show, soldiers on in a kind of holy timelessness that lights candles at that New York shrine of the night on the town.

And so does David Johansen, the original bridge and tunnel kid from Staten Island, and a naturally generous performer. During the short-lived but long-eulogized punk era in this town, the accepted pose was swagger and sneer, at least when the lights came on. But Johansen's poses were fun and approachable; he never played the starlet manque despite obvious fanzine comparisons to Mick Jagger (next to Johnny Thunders' waifish Keef from Queens). Johansen played it for fun, for the big night out, for the movement of the music. The glam was great, but the audience was always in on the gag. After a pumping version of Build Me Up Buttercup at the Ritz in 1981 (I think Blondie Chaplin was in that band but I may be wrong), he climbed onto one of the stage front monitors and cracked the big Cheshire grin that turns his eyes into slits of delight. "Mah people!" he crowed. "Mah people!"

The American songbook has always been a big deal to Johansen, from the Dolls days of Bo Diddley and Sonny Boy Williamson covers, to all the Motown tunes blasted out by the David Johansen Band, to the under-appreciated (but in my view, terrific) Harry Smiths material, which plumbed early blues and folk music. Buster moved him into standards, novelty numbers, Latin songs, country, and caberet. At the Carlyle, New York's My Home sent dishes clattering and waiters ducking for cover (Ray Charles and Sammy Davis Jr. would have dug it) and the 1905 music hall number, Nobody was a perfect blend of wry humor and pre-jazz pathos. "Last night I broke the seal on a Jim Beam decanter, shaped like Elvis," he crooned at the start of the George Jones classic, The King Is Gone. And that started another story that linked Nashville to Vaudeville to Tin Pan Alley to Chicago, via the Bowery and Mercer Street and St. George. 

The Artist and I have taken in four shows during the new Buster 2.0 incarnation, and at the end of the latest night on the town we spent a few minutes with Johansen and his wife Mara Hennessey (who is a shining social media presence) in the Carlyle lounge, talking a little local politics and dropping names. Bridge and tunnel kids meeting the original, and chirping happily. Johansen has a reputation in New York cultural circles as a mensch, and he and Hennessey are increasingly involved in progressive causes. "We need more good Democrats," he said.

We were there with two of the well-known Tween brothers - Doug (and his wife Suzanne) and Brian (and his wife Michelle) - a couple of fellow '70s wastrels suited up for the proper Carlyle code. In two of the other shows in this Buster run, there have been former bandmates and bridge and tunnel kids in attendance: lawyers, firefighters, tech whizzes and financial honchos now but still tied by some thread of DNA to those old dance halls and clubs.

The thing about the Buster Poindexter act now is that Johansen doesn't just take you back to the day, he's teleporting everyone back across a full century - with a few jokes tossed in like croutons - and covering songs that tell stories of absurdity, madness, and showbiz strivers. On one level, it's all played for fun, with an approachable goofiness that breaks down the barrier between performer and audience. But I also think the songs are carefully chosen, and that the set has an existential punchline that you don't get till the ride home on the train: it's a hard world to get a break in, there's a bunch of lunatics out there, so let's sing a few songs.

In that way, David Johansen may be the quintessential New York performer of his generation. Why? Because it's an absurd town and always has been. The snap of the fingers, the rasp of the harmonica, the tap of the foot and the band swings into it. It's music that connects my immigrant family past with my punk adolescence and through to our present cultural malaise - music for this city of glass curtain walls and the bigger black and white town of newsreels and archival photographs. And it's the music of a survivor as well - which, unless you're loaded, you have to be in New York to stick around.

Note: The Bridge and Tunnel Kid series has been on hiatus but yeah, it's back. [Thanks to Suzanne and some Broken Bow inspiration.] We may explore some other bits of personal New York history soon. In the meantime, the full series can be found here. Buster Poindexter has a terrific Facebook page, which can be found here. 

Bridge and Tunnel Kid, Part Six

Sister Perry, Baptist Soprano - photo by Beryl Watson, 1983

Celebrity is a strange bolt of cloth. It wraps a mortal being and fashions something more than that, an image or an icon for a idolatrous crowd. When I was young and first walking the avenues in this town, celebrity held some currency as I think it does for most young people in the big city. Yet I find in my second half century that the fame of others, and their crowds, is worth very little and that I see only men and women and not boldface names and famous faces.

Of course, in a small but real way fame is driving this little project. In the limited honesty of recollection this is a chance to gather a few instances of brushing against those names and faces, as anyone who has practiced journalism in New York for thirty years or more surely must. It is a chance to name drop, to align my travels with those of others with more accomplishment, money or luck. And the flinging back of the curtain - what the venture capital crowd called "going open kimono" in the upscale conference rooms of the dot-com 90s - must reveal at least some truth about New York as well. Why? Because millions inhabit streets where the thousands come to make their names. We comprise the giant sifting blade of celebrity and fortune. We are the mecca of fame, and those seeking it turn our way from the infinite points of the compass.

In 1992 in the dank, sweaty hockey arena built on the ruins of glorious old Pennsylvania Station, I stumbled in a crush of credentialed media and well lubricated Georgia delegates toward a belle figure of soul out of Memphis by way of Detroit. Aretha Franklin came down to the floor of the Democratic National Convention after singing the national anthem to a political assembly that would nominate Bill Clinton the next night. The flow of reporters, and delegates, and security guys with assorted ear pieces pushed me toward the great personage. And there on floor below the podium, I gasped a simple line of praise for her performance, which had translated Napoleonic Era martial music into sweet gospel. "Thank you, honey," she said, with a big smile. And then I was swept past.

And that was the moment when I  felt most like any other fan gone weak at the knees. I've never smirked at the crowds lined up outside the Today Show since, or the kids who wait by the player's entrance at the ballpark to beg an autograph, or the middle managers who bid a few thousand at a charity auction to play golf with some politician or athlete. Everybody in this town has his moment of weakness under celebrity's gaze, with the rockets' red glare, and Aretha on the floor of the Garden was mine.

In 1960, Aretha was a bridge and tunnel kid herself (I count airline terminals too - it's my metaphor), courted and signed out of her father's touring church choir by John Hammond of CBS Records. She recorded her first mainstream album in a converted townhouse on East 52nd Street built by the Vanderbilt family, originally as a stables and later as a guesthouse. It later became the first graduate school of the Juilliard School, before being converted to studios by CBS during the height of the pre-war record-making boom. The liner notes for Aretha: With The Ray Bryant Combo tell the truth as few liner notes ever have: "She doesn't just open the door - she breaks it down."

In truth, many break it down and this is the place come to do it. What they don't realize about fame is its sandy quality - and not the wet sand down by the surf either, the dry sand up on the dunes that runs through your fingers when you squeeze a handful. I can sit in the sun of these middle years and honestly say "son, I've seem 'em come and I've seen 'em go" but it's an old story, and somewhat shopworn. I don't value fame. Walking these streets alone, I often pass packs of paparazzi photographers waiting on a name I'll only dimly recognize in front of Manhattan hot spots that didn't exist a decade ago. They're waiting on a couple of Escalades and a posse of hangers on, the security guys and the flacks, for the brief "availability" that the famous person bestows: a moment of photogenic glory and perhaps an autograph or two before being swept into a higher tier of worship. I don't wait to catch a glimpse. I do not care. I walk on. I whistle an old song.

Then too, there are the professional responsibilities that require the currency of fame to make them work; these are the precision Swiss clocks of charitable endorsements and policy appearances at conferences in support of worthy causes. I've had a lifetime's fill to go with a thousand pounds of warmed over catering hall chicken, though I will admit there are exceptions to the rule. Some meetings have been interesting. The Al Smith dinner at the Waldorf comprises an annual gathering of New York's Catholic clans, people who used to be reliable Democratic voters when social justice mattered to the faithful in the last century but who now generally lean Republican, weighed down perhaps by the jewelry on obvious display and too many generations of financial remove from the hard benches of Ellis Island. One year, as I've mentioned in a previous installment, I actually waited on the receiving line to meet Barack Obama. Two years earlier, I was hanging around a post-game party in a suite upstairs packed with politicians and those who want to meet them. Game 7 of the National League Championship Series was on the television by the bar (they'd famously lose with Carlos Beltran frozen at the plate by an Adam Wainright curveball) and I was watching the game with my brother Chris. Tim Russert, Andrew Cuomo and Chuck Schumer were working the room. I was heading back from the bar toward the Mets game when I was caught in a political scrum by the windows overlooking Park Avenue. And suddenly, there was Hillary Clinton at my elbow - and despite the callouses of fame met, fame interviewed, and fame easily dismissed I felt the shiver up my leg that Chris Matthews got two years later for her Democratic opponent. Hillary was a month away from squashing former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, a Republican who I knew from covering his major waterfront revamp for The New York Times, in her reelection campaign. At the time, Clinton was a very popular Senator, a political fact that has been eclipsed by her 2008 match with Obama and subsequent success as his Secretary of State. In the Waldorf suite, we chatted briefly about the race, and about the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, a month earlier. That conversation stayed with me for years because my experience ran exactly counter to the celebrity Hillary Clinton I knew only through the media. The public figure I encountered was warm and charming, with a quick laugh, and she paid close attention to the conversation. She was a good listener.

Ed Koch was not. Yet he didn't live up to his public billing either. Sure, on television he was abrasive, confrontational, nasally bellicose. And in the politics I observed in the late 70s and early 80s and covered in the last half of the decade, Koch was aggressive and towering. In the film NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell, Koch famously declared - several times - of political adversaries in that landmark mayoral race: "my attitude was...fuck 'em!" Koch played for keeps, and he didn't hesitate to run the other guy down. In the late 80s, his administration proposed 1,000 units of middle income housing next to John F. Kennedy High School  in Kingsbridge, a massive development that would have overwhelmed an already crowded urban landscape. I was the deputy editor and political reporter for The Riverdale Press, which covered Kingsbridge and Marble Hill in addition to more sylvan districts up the hill in the northwest Bronx. The Mayor had already declared his intentions to crush local opposition thusly: "You know how it is in Riverdale, don't you? It's last one in shut the door!"

Amidst that level of discourse, Koch invited the Press editorial board to lunch at City Hall. The delegation consisted of co-publishers Buddy and Richard Stein, and me. The paper, in those days, was probably the finest local independent newspaper in New York City, and among the very best in New York State. We were strongly liberal, strongly preservationist, and strongly dedicated to free speech; the editorial page was a must-read for citywide politicians and Bronx wannabes, and it boasted an incredible range of opinion. In those years before the Bloomberg bullpen, the Mayor ran a small dining room beneath his office, complete with a kitchen and staff. The diners included deputy mayor Stan Brezenoff and Dan Wolf, founding editor of the Village Voice and major domo of Koch's kitchen cabinet. The lunch was very civilized - though I recall Koch defending subway shooter Bernie Goetz, strangely enough - and the Press continued to oppose Tibbett Gardens, the giant housing project. But something else stuck with me: Ed Koch's manners and civility. When the gathering was being seated, I was uncertain where to drop myself as the most junior guest at the table, momentarily flummoxed by the deference due both my bosses and the city fathers. "Tom," said Koch, "you sit here by me."

A couple of years later, when the Press was firebombed by terrorists with links to Iran (or so the FBI told us), Koch spoke at a public rally for the paper, in the last year of his Mayoralty and a third term that was - to put it kindly - a disaster. Yet he rose to the occasion:  “Mr. Mayor,” a reporter asked, “hasn’t this newspaper been very rough on you on their editorial page?”

“Sure they have,” Mr. Koch replied, “but I don’t respond by throwing bombs, I write letters to the editor!”

Koch's successor, David Dinkins, was an all around nice guy who you'd want to be seated next to at any New York function you might find yourself attending. When he was running against Rudolph Giuliani to succeed Koch, he bumped into fellow Press reporter Larry Dublin at a Riverdale fundraiser. Larry, a great friend who was filling in on the political coverage in a busy season but really hounded the public schools beat, told Dinkins that I'd interviewed him a few weeks earlier and would be following up for a series of formal sit-downs with the major candidates. Dinkins didn't miss a beat at the mention of my name: "Great guy!" he effused, though in truth the connection must have been tiny in his recollection. It's a big city.

You'll notice the hypocrisy of names baldly dropped in a chapter that claims little affinity for fame. In part, that's the nature of New York and its centrality to the machine that creates famous people, nourishes them, and either spits them or protects them from decades. I am not immune to the famous face or the great accomplishment, and there is a small shiver to be obtained - still - from proximity to a great artist or world leader. Yet, they are all to be glimpsed as easily as street trees and mounted cops in this town and everyone has his own A list, ignoring (for the most part) everyone else. The other factor is the sheer glut of celebrity provided by New York. There is an over abundance in the market that depresses the value of fame, and unlike the manufacturing sector that vanished in the last generation, the fame factories are still working double shifts, enriched by the digital age of sharing and linking, and drugged up by the vile lattes and bitter, burned brew that passes for actual joe from the invasive "green" northwestern franchise that has stamped out the once vital New York coffee shops. Vanity Fair can hardly keep up. TMZ is everywhere. Instagram runs the DIY shift on the late nights, and Twitter is young flack's dream.

And it is all so fleeting. When I was a young political reporter, the celebrity and power of Ed Koch held some value. But I also remember the names of the day who were regularly in headlines, but won't be all that deeply remembered. Andrew Stein. Liz Holtzman. Stanley Steingut. Jay Goldin. Ruth Messinger. Names from the Green Book. Big deals at the time, all

Sometimes the shooting star halts in mid-flight. I was taken recently with a chapter in Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs last year's collection of essays by my friend James Wolcott. The story recalled the turbo-prop career of television host Stanley Siegel, who fronted a show called A.M. New York in the late 70s. Writing for the Voice 35 years ago, Wolcott predicted: "He's going to  be a megastar on TV, not only because of his ebullience, impudent charm, and spacey wit, but because the way he waves and unfurls his personality like a toreador's cape is perfect for the therapy-junkie seventies."

I remember Siegel from that era, a super-caffeinated nerve ending on the morning show of high school sick days. But it didn't happen. "His comet went cold," recalled Wolcott, and Siegel "seemed to dematerialize into the Phantom Zone."

Which is, of course, what happened to me. Oh certainly, I yearned for a larger audience, for followers, for recognition, for standing. I found some alleyways of brief renown, some circulation, a few arguments, the bylines along the way, and some smaller moments with a lav mic hooked to my jacket. Yet we're all mostly Stanley Siegels among the bridge and tunnel crowd, slinging guitars and laptops through the years, blathering on about the outrage of the moment, putting our talent and social currency at risk. But most of us find the Phantom Zone.

It's the nature of the city, the game. Fame is too common, celebrity too present. In the late 90s I was scheduled for a meeting at Sony, and Jason Chervokas and I killed some time in the lobby up on 57th Street, fooling around with the new game systems they were developing and showing off for the public. I was playing a stock car themed racing game, and quickly crashed the virtual vehicle.

"OK, son," said a voice at my elbow, in the booming drawl of a southern sheriff. "Step away from the vehicle and keep your hands where I can see 'em!"

I walked away from the video game, and Jason filled me in. Do you realize who that was? No, says I. Robin Williams, he said. And sure enough, there he was - and improvising humor exactly as you'd expect. That's New York. I walked though a location set of Hannah and Her Sisters and was a block away before I realized the guy on the milk crate was Woody Allen. I laughed at Jimmy Breslin as he filmed a commercial for Piels on Broadway, mocking the "good drinkin' beer" tagline. I watched Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd film Ghostbusters on 116th Street. Mayors, Governors, Presidents, CEOs. They all came here looking for work, as Maggi Waters used to say in the Riverdale Press newsroom.

Fame's currency vanished for me as a journalist; I won't follow anyone around anymore. New York levels us, the famous and the rich. The boldface names get sick, drink too much, feel lonely at times, and put on their pants a leg at a time. New York, wrote E.B. White, "makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin - the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled." That commonality knocks down fame, in a way. You can be well-known for a while in this town, but you still can't hail a cab at 4 pm when it's raining.

Bridge and Tunnel Kid, Part Five

The phrase "during the war" played an out-sized role in my suburban New York upbringing, and it meant only one conflict - not the Vietnam War, which raged for my entire childhood, producing casualty counts nightly on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, waning only in adolescence; not the Korean War, which produced several veterans who became parents of my school mates; not even the Great War, during which my grandfather flew planes that were little more than canvas kites with machine guns strapped to them.

No, "the war" invariably meant the big one itself, the Second World War, which transformed society at almost every level, made the United States into a superpower, and scattered American culture to the far ends of the Earth, where it took root, for good and bad. World War II was New York's war, of course - directed by a New Yorker who traced his roots to Dutch immigrant Claes van Rosenvelt, whose farm covered the portion of midtown Manhattan now occupied by the Empire State Building, Madison Square Garden, and Macy's. It was the center of shipping, the terminus for railroads and troop trains. Brooks Brothers switched clothing production to uniforms. The Brooklyn Navy Yard employed 10,000 men and plenty of women too, and it produced both the USS Missouri upon which the Empire of Japan surrendered to Douglas MacArthur, former commandant of West Point who served at St. Mihiel with my grandfather in the previous war, and wood-planked PT 109, which turned a gangly Massachusetts lieutenant, whose family lived in Riverdale and Bronxville while the patriarch raked in millions in the city, into a national hero and future President.

Pre-war and post-war in New York are generally real estate descriptors, or at least they were before the latest building boom or two. The war changed the landscape. It made New York a world capital, center of post-war American commerce, headquarters to the United Nations, financial capital of the global conflict's sole undamaged victor. Public housing exploded, and slum clearance accelerated. Robert Moses really became the Power Broker under unofficial war powers - the Throgs Neck and the Whitestone bridges went up with war looming; with victory won, Moses had virtual cart blanche to build highways through the 1960s.

My own arrival in the post-war world was 17 years after Hitler's suicide and the dual atomic bombs, incubated as they were at 270 Broadway, with technical facilities at Columbia, tested in the western deserts, and immortalized as the Manhattan Project. In our suburban precincts, "the war" in the 60s meant either Europe or the South Pacific. My grandfather, a fighter pilot in the Great War in France, trained new fliers in the rural south, ruining what remained of his tenuous health. Four uncles wore the uniform in World War Two. His oldest son Thomas Quinlan, my Godather, served a Stateside Army stint. Gus Ryan was a tanker in Western Europe, and I remember the old dud shells used as door-stoppers and the German field glasses on the porch at Lake Mahopac. Lou Dermako out of the coal fields of Pennsylvania was a front line Marine officer fighting island to island in the Pacific, and George Quinlan a Navy petty officer driving LSTs to the those same bloody beaches. They met on a homebound troop ship after the war, future brothers in law.  None of them talked about the details of the war very much. 

In the 1980s, I interviewed a survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He lived with his wife on Tibbett Avenue in Kingsbridge, just north of West 231 Street in the Bronx. It was a neat little apartment and family photographs covered one of the tables in the living room where we sat for an hour or so. He'd been assigned to the Army Air Corps base at Wheeler Airfield near Honolulu, and when the Japanese attacked, he helped to get a small contingent of fighter planes into the air despite the devastation on the ground. At Wheeler on December 7th, 33 were killed and more than 70 wounded and much of the air wing destroyed on the tarmac. He returned to work for the Transit Authority in maintenance for forty years. He told me the interview was the first time he'd talked about Pearl Harbor in any detail, not even to his children. I asked him why he's risked his life to run across the field to get the few remaining planes into the air and his answer has stayed with me since that afternoon in Kingsbridge. "They were killing my friends. What else could I do? They were killing my friends."

During that same period in Riverdale, writing stories for The Press, I got to know Stuart Elenko, a history teacher at the Bronx High School of Science and founder of the Holocaust Studies Center there. Stuart had assembled an important collection of artifacts from the European cauldron, including uniforms, propaganda, posters, Nazi insignia, and Jewish stars. He taught a generation of students to remember the brutality of the past and its grave lessons of man's inhumanity to man. I joined the Board of Directors of the Center and did what I could to promote its mission. During the time, I met quite a few residents of the apartment towers and garden homes of Riverdale and Kingsbridge who still carried tattooed numbers on their arms. One day, I asked Stuart (who was a child during the war) why he spent so much of his life creating the collection, building the center, and working with young people to understand the horrors of Nazi Europe, and Stuart's answer was so similar to the Pearl Harbor survivor's - "they killed my people."

Yet there was also a sense of glamor about "the war" in the New York I grew up in. Part of that related to popular culture and recent memories - Sinatra and the bobby soxers, the Stage Door Canteen, war bond rallies, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army, and VE and VJ Day celebrations in Times Square. And part of that living memory in New York was related to World War Two's permanent status as "the good war" in a era of decidedly bad U.S. military policy. As "the war" receded in actuality, replaced by gauzy memories in black and white, it competed with New York's Vietnam era protests, book-ended by the take over of Columbia's campus by militant students and  the infamous Hard Hat Riot of 1970 in lower Manhattan, in which two hundred construction workers armed with pipes and wrenches and other tools of their trade set upon a thousand or so high school and college kids protesting the war, callow bridge and tunnel kids mainly, carring signs and chanting against Nixon. Later, of course, I covered all manner of anti-war protests as a journalist - most were pretty tame and you came to know the familiar lefty faces - and finally marched on my own against the Bush Administration's disastrous and brutal adventurism in Iraq.

Despite its popular caricature as a hotbed of liberalism, New York is not anti-military. Quite the contrary. New York loves the American armed forces, celebrates the service of men and women in uniform, and - speaking in the kind generality that get sociologists in trouble - I think it's fair to say that in part, New Yorkers love the U.S. military because of its reputation as a meritocracy, a leg up for those newly arrived or living below the poverty line. This quality was not always there, of course, and I remember well interviewing Roscoe Brown as a reporter for The Riverdale Press. Dr. Brown was then the president of Bronx Community College and one the borough's most respected public figures, but as a 21-year-old college kid he became a pilot in the 100th Fighter Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group, also known as the Tuskegee Airmen. He told the story of becoming the first American pilot to shoot down one of Germany's advanced jet fighters, in a battle for the skies over the Ploesti oil fields. Years later as a consultant, I worked with my friend Karen Davis on a campaign to raise funds and awareness to preserve Moton Field in Tuskegee, Alabama as a national monument. 

There are World War Two monuments all around New York, but they seem muted compared to the statues from the 1820s and the Civil War and up through the Great War. One of the most moving is the memorial to the Merchant Marine service, in Battery Park looking out toward the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. On spring days when I worked down on Broad Street, I'd sometimes wander over to eat lunch in the sun by the water, near the bronze figures created by sculptor Marisol Escobar on the rebuilt stone breakwater. To my eye, they seemed to be looking out to see for brothers who would never return from the waves. 

In most office pre-war buildings in midtown, there's a simple bronze plaque dedicated to those who died in the conflict. A few years ago when I was working in the old Daily News Building - also known as the Daily Planet in the first Superman movie; that's Christopher Reeve's Clark Kent coming through the revolving doors on East 42nd Street - and I stopped to look at the memorial on the wall next to the newsstand. The lobby is famous for the huge, slowly turning globe set in the floor with lines on the floor running to imaginary points around the world. There's also an anemograph that displays wind speed and direction from instruments on the roof. When the tabloid's founder, the ultra-conservative Colonel  Joseph Medill Patterson, heard about plans for the weather station, he famously scoffed at the designers: "Weather charts! What the people want are murder charts - some kind of map of the metropolitan area where the latest crimes could be chalked up." I enjoyed walking through that lobby almost every day I worked in the building, and the plaque itself was contrast to the ambitions of a newsaper's bold public space (a newspaper, I might add, that had long since moved to the far West Side and a drab box near the highway). There were the names of typesetters, and copy editors, and ad salesmen, and compositors like my father. I imagined the returning Daily News veterans stopping to look at that simple memorial and remember as they picked up cigarettes at the newsstand. And I thought that it was these returning veterans who really built the post-war New York that was so familiar to me.

They were all men of course, but their impact on the landscape - physical, intellectual, political - can't be understated. Anthony Dominick Benedetto, later known as a Tony Bennett, whose Central Park painting studio aerie Steve Manzi and I visited one morning during a campaign to create a new public high school for the performing arts in Queens, was a member of the 63rd Infantry Division in France and Germany. Hugh Carey, 51st Governor of New York and the man who saved New York City during its fiscal crisis in the 1970s, an enlisted man who rose to the rank of colonel in Europe, who I got to know late in life through his generous and whipsmart daughter Susan Carey Dempsey, long my colleague and co-conspirator. Lew Rudin, head of one of New York's famed real estate families, who I met several times through his son Bill (our landlord at 55 Broad Street), and who was a real builder of the city who led a coalition to partner with Gov. Carey and avoid the city's financial ruin, was a returning U.S. Army sergeant. David Dinkins, the most gentlemanly of the Mayors of New York City that I've known and interviewed, a returning U.S. Marine who refused to let racial quotes block his way into war-time service. 

These were men who didn't focus on "the war" very much. Like my uncles, they quickly moved to build new lives. But that service, that war, was still just there, right along the lines in the pavement, one of the largest communal enterprises in the nation's history, and a focusing event for a huge city emerging from the Great Depression. It threatened death and destruction, and killed tens of millions; but not here. In the American story it also offered opportunity and enforced discipline and a sense of common purpose in a generation of young men and women. That created the New York landscape I grew up in, a landscape that began to crumble in the 1970s to be sure, but one that retained a permanent outline sketched by the war years.

One aspect of those times that David Weiner's Mad Men captures so well (despite its other faults) is that restlessness of those veterans to build and to move and to create something different. When Roger Sterling talks about "the war" he could easily slide into a dinner conversation at my grandmother's house in Yonkers. Thirty years on, with another war raging, it was still a presence - just like the black and white photographs of men in uniform on some of the walls, and the old Army Air Corps major's cap that hung on a corner of my grandmother's bed.

Bridge and Tunnel Kid, Part Four

In his 1946 essay Why I Write, George Orwell fused a writer's development with his personal experiences, and in particular, the times he has lived in.

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.

Orwell was only partly right, of course. Not only should a writer not seek to escape all early influences - it is impossible do so, shy of serious brain injury. The energy used in attemping to flee the past (and I speak of childhood, family, friends, and places) is wasted, and the writing is flat and little more than advertising copy. That kind of forced detachment simply denies too much; it denies biology and experience and living memory, and it denies faces and smells and visions and dreams. It flattens the landscape. It ruins the work.

No writer doggedly spending decades in New York committing millions of words to paper, Linotype machines, newsprint, and various hard drives and blogging platforms can hope to achieve anything while annuling the past. In New York, the past may be the remnants of meal consumed at dawn that has been spectacularly regurgitated upon the downtown subway platform at Union Square. Or it can be the spot just up on the street corner above the station, where the body of President Abraham Lincoln passed in review down Broadway, as young Theodore Roosevelt watched from a window in his grandfather's house just above the procession. In my wanderings in that same vicinity, the deli at 213 Park Avenue South offers more than a quick meal - it's the former Max's Kansas City, headquarters for stripped down rock and bands that never made it big, but certainly made it loud three decades ago. That pungent memory, which may still grip the staircase on the left side as you face the building, cannot be detached from the rows of Snapples and chips. After all, the great Cheetah Chrome once sat slumped on the curb right there.

Around the corner to the west on Broadway is the giant home goods emporium, ABC Carpet and Home, where my wife worked for many years in the antique furniture department and where the Santa Claus who patroled the first floor in those early years wore a regal and very real Yuletide beard. During her time on those wide old factory floorboards, she worked with a team of brilliant Polish carpenters, canny antiquties importers, and decoraters to the stars. And sometimes the stars themselves: DeNiro, Springsteen, and Streisand all darkened her door. Down the block on 18th Street is the Old Town Bar, where I passed an enjoyable evening just last week with journalists and labor organizers, taking a lively discussion organized by the Sidney Hillman Foundation to a tavern that opened in 1892, when Teddy Roosevelt was a civil service commissioner. The too-youthful ghosts of regulars Frank McCourt and Seamus Heaney lingered nearby: "between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests."

This is a neighborhood of regulars: well-worn native paths and favored spots at the bar or in the dining room. On 16th Street just in from Broadway is the Union Square Cafe, the mid-80s reinvention of New York cuisine by Danny Meyers. It remains an unfussy and crisply professional restaurant with the best ingredients served simply, and in the far corner table by the front window is the spot one those regulars, a place where I have met Andrew Rasiej for quite a few lunches. Andrew is a restless autodidact, an entrepreneur who is drawn to civic engagement and driven by his own curiosity. In classic New York terms, he is a good man to know because he knows everyone and remembers his friends. Not long after my father died, we sat in that corner table discussing our particular stage in life and the pain of losing a family member and he said something I've thought of often since, just simple advice quickly dispensed but also wise: "It never goes away, Tom, not really. Just carry it forward and keep it with you." And so I have.

Like me though in more prominent fashion, Andrew has had several discrete New York chapters - founding companies and nonprofits, running for public office, and serving as a public intellectual - and we've known each other since the mid-90s and the time when the city's technology sector grew from a few tiny scattered digital seeds. But in an earlier era, he ran Irving Plaza, the former Polish-American veterans hall across the park at Irving Place and 15th Street that became a rock venue in the late 1970s. In 1981, I was standing outside on the line to get in, when the evening's headline act walked down the block greeting the waiting kids. Jim Carroll was tall, thin, and had the lean and austere cheeks and penetrating eyes of an aschetic poet from central casting - which, in many ways, he was. The author of the The Basketball Diaries, his tale of playing ball and hustling in an earlier uptown Manhattan, Carroll had formed the Jim Carroll Band the year before at the suggestion of Patti Smith, and cut Catholic Boy, a truly classic album of verse set to a driving rock beat. Its big hit was People Who Died, the tale of picaresque New York characters who'd passed on, in mostly violent ways. So here came Carroll walking along the line of fans, a semi-reluctant rock star and a punk hero to all the Catholic books lined up in black jeans and sneakers. In the words of his editor Gerry Howard: "Tall, slim, athletic, pale, and spectral as many ex-junkies are, Jim was a vivid presence in any setting. He was a classic and now vanishing New York type: the smart (and smartass) Irish kid with style, street savvy, and whatever the Gaelic word for chutzpah is."

When Carroll died in 2009 from a sudden heart attack at age 60, still productive but worn down by the hard years, I wrote a remembrance that his editors kindly included on his website: "For a bridge and tunnel kid in 1980 New York...check that...for a Catholic bridge and tunnel kid in 1980 New York, Jim Carroll's Catholic Boy was canonical, a bass-charged liturgy of the word - if the word descended from the Beats and Allen Ginsberg, its bearer transfigured into a poetry-pouting punk rocker with an angry hit record. ... Jim Carroll Band shows always brought out the punk royalty, from Patti Smith to Stiv Bators to Richard Hell. At least in my (somewhat gauze-wrapped) memory, they were real events and Carroll - who couldn't really sing per se, but still knew how to sell the story - was treated like an archbishop. And based on that one record, it didn't seem too much to bend and kiss the ring." Thinking about these New York paths and those who have traveled them, I looked into Carroll's verses again recently and was struck by these lines from New York City Variations:

I have walked these streets so often I could
forge the shadows of skyscrapers as they fall
to rest between the sculptured air of midtown.

I feel that way on these blocks, and there on Irving Place where I shook Jim Carroll's slim hand as a young Catholic boy ("Redeemed through pain/And not through joy") the shadows are long ones, even if the building heights are more modest than in midtown a few blocks north. Greatest among those is the Knickerbocker himself, Washington Irving, for whom the short avenue between 14th Street and Gramercy Park was named in the 1830s by developer Samuel Bulkley Ruggles (who drew up plans for the entire neighborhood, including Union Square, which he owned) while the famed author, perhaps New York's most revered personage, was still living. Ruggles is one of the great forgotten New Yorkers. He was born in 1800 in Connecticut, went to Yale, and made a successful law career in New York, working as a developer and part-time politician and serving in the State Assembly, as a trustee of Columbia, and on the Canal Commission governing the Erie Canal. He was a friend of Irving's, as well as philanthropic industrialist Peter Cooper, and it is Ruggles who is responsible for the keys that govern entrance to the still private Gramercy Park, but also the trees and paths of Union Square. He was the Robert Moses of an earlier century, blending public interest with his own Whig politics, proclaiming, "Come what will, our open squares will remain forever imperishable. Buildings, towers, palaces, may moulder and crumble beneath the touch of time; but space - free, glorious, open space - will remain to bless the City forever."

The Irving Place environs had a literary pedigree from the start. While Irving himself never lived there, his nephew did and he certainly trod its cobblestones. Up on Gramery Park, the Players Club was founded by a group of glitterati headed up Mark Twain and Edwin Booth, with a promise to promote "social intercourse between members of the dramatic profession and the kindred professions of literature, painting, architecture, sculpture and music, law and medicine, and the patrons of the arts." Later in the century, the prominent lesbian power couple of actress-author Elsie de Wolfe and theater agent Elisabeth Marbury - dubbed "The Bachelors" by catty scribes down on Park Row - hosted a literary salon on 17h Street that attracted regulars like George Bernard Shaw, Sarah Bernhardt, Ethel Barrymore and Oscar Wilde.

Next door, my good friend the journalist Pamela Parker hosted her own salon in a postage stamp apartment with a huge terrace festooned with whimsical gargoyles overlooking Irving Place in the early 2000s. At one gathering thick with bloggers and techno geeks, Jason Chervokas and I used the music sharing service Napster to dial in a virtual mix that was heavy on old school R&B, 70s soul, and sides by the Ramone and Beastie Boys, who used to hang out at Carmelita's Reception House, a former bridal reception house turned hipster bar, around the corner at Third Avenue and 14th Street just above the Disco Donut. I met Pamela when I was an adjunct professor at the Columbia J-School and she was a student, and she later worked for Chervokas and me as a skilled and prolific assistant editor for @NY, our Internet startup in the 90s. When she met a young Scottish lad named Michael Caird she thought was a keeper, I snarkily wagered that if they married, I'd wear a kilt to the wedding. Happily, I lost the bet and donned the tartan.

Just down the block after the turn of the 20th century, former banker William Sydney Porter of North Carolina built a new persona after a five-year stretch for embezzlement in Ohio. He wrote under the name O. Henry, lived at 55 Irving Place and (perhaps apocryphally) wrote his best-known short story The Gift of the Magi in a booth at Kenealy's bar, later known as Pete's Tavern, one of New York's oldest watering holes and the spot where my lifelong friend Doug Tween had his bachelor dinner in an upstairs room two decades ago and more. Porter was a drinking man (he drank himself to death) but he liked company and not darkened empty streets. “Pull up the shades so I can see New York," he wrote. "I don't want to go home in the dark.”

The oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, The Nation, a bastion of the American left, is published on Irving Place these days, across the street from Washington Irving High School. The redoudtable editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel looks down on Ruggles's old lane, carrying - if she will forgive me for observing - a name that would slide with ease and authenticity into the Knickerbocker tales of the street's literary namesake. In Irving's time, two bedrock institutions graced the southern terminus of the block. Tammany Hall opened in 1868 on East 14th Street, the home of New York's regular Democratic organization, a post Civil War successor to the old downtown Tammany and controller of city elections until Jimmy Walker was forced to resign the Mayoralty in 1932. Across the street was the Academy of Music, a grand opera hall that seated 4,000 people in its heyday and later scandalized the city's upper crust with the "French balls" held by the Cercle Française de l'Harmonie, which featured partially clad courtesans mingling rather closely with men in Victorian dinner dress. The opera house gave way to a large movie theater under the same name, and that Academy of Music was later renamed the Palladium, which became a prime venue for rock and roll, where I saw sold out shows by Elvis Costello, Warren Zevon, Squeeze, and others.

"Hey where’d you get that beat?" asked Sylvain Sylvain on his eponymous post New York Dolls record in 1979. "I got that beat on 14th Street." That Sylvain should pen the anthem to the street, which crosses Manhattan at its widest part - from Stuyvesant Cove on East River to the Hudson sixteen long blocks west - is somehow fitting. Born to Egyptian Jewish parents, Sylvain Mizrahi fled anti-Semitism and arrived in New York City via Buffalo in the 1950s. He formed the New York Dolls with David Johansen, Johnny Thunders, Billy Murcia and Arthur Kane in 1971 and when the Dolls went the way of all flesh and most rock bands in 1977, he became a solo act as well as the omnipresent raconteur of the city's homegrown rock scene. Sylvain's 14th Street Beat opened with the squealing sound of the subway train under Union Square, to this day perhaps the loudest stretch of underground track in New York, where a curve in the Lexington Avenue line forces a grinding of wheels and brakes that makes platform denizens hold their ears to stave off the pain.

Union Square itself is not named for either the labor movement or the American republic of states, though it has served as both a headquarters for labor rallies and blue-backed Union troops in its history. The name actually has more rural origins, from the days when urban New York lay well to its south and walls and fields and the occasional house and hostelry graced the neighborhood. It is merely the intersection - the union - of two main roads, the Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway) and Bowery Road (now Park Avenue South and Fourth Avenue). The public square part came from Sam Ruggles, who also foresaw the real estate benefits of building elegant houses around the parkland. The layout these days owes its landscape architectural bones to the work of Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1870s, when Union Square lay a block east of Ladies Mile and featured some of the city's most expensive homes on its edges.

In the late 1970s when I first ventured through its paths, drawn to the music scene at Max's and other venues, Union Square Park was something of an outdoor drug supermarket, in the evenings a place of occasional menace or opportunity (depending on your viewpoint or habit), very much like Washington Square Park to the south and Bryant Park to the north. The northeast corner was a biker hangout in summer, with rows of motorcycles lining the pavement. That block between Park Avenue South - the former Fourth Avenue, renamed by value-seeking real estate boosters after the Second World War - and Broadway to the west should carry some recognition for the artist who walked it often. Between The Factory in the Decker Building near Broadway and the back room at Max's on the east side Park Avenue, Andy Warhol trod between salons of his own creation and influence.

"Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life," wrote Warhol in 1975, and I believe that's true. A small episode in the Union Square Barnes & Noble, next door to the old Factory headquarters, has stayed with me this last decade or more. In 1999, I went to see the great author Patrick O'Brian read from his latest novel Blue at the Mizzen at the Union Square store. To me, O'Brian was no more a nautical writer than Jane Austen was a society writer. Like Austen, his literary hero, O'Brian worked in human relationships. That those relationshops are set amid a constrained, regimented social order - British warships in the age of sail - was his greatest homage to Austen, who also set her stories within a tight social order. At their heart, O'Brian's volumes in the 20-part Aubrey-Maturin series chronicle a deep friendship, one that is not the cartoonish type usually found in historical series, but a detailed, nuanced, portrait - to my mind, one of the finest in English literature.

O'Brian's rapidly-expanding popularity in the last decade of his life, and the posthumous depiction of his characters in a raucous Hollywood epic, may lead the unitiated to relegate his work to that of the pulp paperback writer or the creator of historical pageantry. It is not to insult those genres to say he was neither. Indeed, when I briefly met O'Brian before his last public appearance in New York, browsing quietly amidst the ground-floor shelves in Union Square before the reading, it felt to me like shaking hands with Charles Dickens. O'Brian had a strong sense of time and the nearness of history, of the paths and routes traveled only very recently but seen by contemporaries as very old. "The tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value," he wrote in one of his introductions, "and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more.” 

And we are closer to the culturally formative Knickerbocker days of Irving than we feel, more proximate to the great political rallies of organized labor and radicals and Fenians in Union Square than we think, and nearer to the art scene of Warhol and the punks at Max's than we realize. And much, much nearer to the massive missing persons bulletins of September, 2001 that grew along Union Square's southern edge in the aftermath of horror when much of the city south of 14th Street was closed off for recovery of the dead. Union Square was the closest large public space still open, and the statue of George Washington - the first erected by New Yorker since the one depicting George III was toppled in 1777 - became a locus for missing persons flyers bearing the faces of New Yorkers who would never return home. Those posters quickly grew into a spontaneous memorial of flowers and candles and home-made art of the kind that now graces every public tragedy. I remember both the concentration of grief at that site, and the unity of those brief times, when "New Yorker" became a badge defiantly worn. Never has the communitarian impulse that binds millions to live so closely together been more evident to me.

Last year, I was walking to the subway station after teaching my class at New York University's graduate school of fundraising and philanthropy with Marcia Stepanek and Howard Greenstein, and saw the crowd across 14th Street. I walked across and worked my way through the crowd. In my reporting days, I carried a press pass issued by the NYPD allowing me to "cross police and fire lines wherever formed." But now I was merely an intinerant blogger, consultant, and part-time professor seeing what was going on - scoping the latest in the legacy of protest that constitutes so much of Union Square's political and cultural history. As I turned and shifted through the hundreds pressed in tightly by the park's south end, I recognized the woman holding a microphone, which was plugged into a portable loudspeaker. It was Trayvon Martin's mother. "My son did not deserve to die," said Sybrina Fulton.  "Our son is your son."

I was transported along the pathways and karmic lanes to the mourners of a decade earler. Orwell was right; we are determined by the age we live in, and if we writing, that work is not detached but rooted in fields ploughed by others, along ways worn down by our younger footsteps. Nowhere is this more evident than in New York, where so many come to find their way, make their case, write their story, sing their song, find their justice.

"My heart is in pain," said Travyon Martin's mother into the microphone. And the crowd responded in solemn unison amid the ghosts of this city.

"You are not alone."

Bridge and Tunnel Kid, Part III

Columbia University has for years used 854-1754 as its main telephone number, and it is the line that shows up when student volunteers call alumni to seek donations during the dinner hour. It is, I suppose, a clever reminder that Columbia was founded  in 1754, twenty-two years before American independence, as King's College in what was then still a relatively young British colony. It is the fifth oldest university in the United States, one of the original nine chartered colonial colleges and it has achieved a global aura of prestige and exclusivity that could never have been imagined by anyone who attended Columbia College in the 1970s and early 80s, when it had no endowment and some of its facilities were ramshackle wooden death traps (Baker Field, several miles north of the main campus in Inwood on the nothern tip of Manhattan, in particular).

Outside of the lecture hall that bears his name, there is a statue of Alexander Hamilton, the bastard son of a Scottish laird born in Nevis, West Indies and the first self-made immigrant to the United States, a King's College man and the first Treasury Secretary, a liberal Federalist who created the central government that has endured for two hundred years and constitutes the largest economic and political enterprise ever created by human beings.

On a rainy night in 1983, I raced past the statue and around the corner of Hamilton Hall toward College Walk and the gate on Amsterdam Avenue. An all-night Strat-o-matic baseball tournament raged around the table upstairs in Livingston, and I'd drawn the assignment of meeting the delivery man from Hunan Balcony. The campus was partly closed, heavily circled with police and campus security because of a series of large-scale protests organized by students to protest the University's continued investment in funds that did business with the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa. It wasn't exactly 1968, Vietnam and Mark Rudd, but the crowds had been sufficiently boisterous - and University officials talked vaguely of trouble-making "outsiders." 

It was dark and chilly, and I jogged around Hamilton and ran directly into one of those feared outside agitators, who I immediately recognized. "Hey, hold up," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was carrying a megaphone at the head of a dripping contingent of perhaps a hundred protesters. The weather had clearly held down attendance. There seemed to be more cops than activists. The crowd moved toward Amsterdam Avenue and I moved with it. The signs demanded that Columbia divest itself of all South African investments, in order to stem the flow of capital to the white ruled country and pressure the Apartheid regime to give up its racist hold on power.

Divestment began as a liberal strategy to pressure South Africa as far back as 1962, but it came of age in the early 1980s and Columbia became the first hotbed of university action (which was ironic, given its paltry endowment at the time). Divestment extended the Sullivan Principles, developed by a minister who was also a board member of General Motors, which demanded racial fairness in corporate dealings. The pressure point was institutional investors, particularly universities, municipal bond issuers, and public pension funds. At Columbia, the Committee Against Investment in South Africa grew rapidly, and included the great student leaders of my time, Danny Armstrong and Stuart Garcia, as well as a young Hawaiian transfer student named Barry Obama. 

There is no ex post facto case for my own activism in the divestment cause (I was no leader), but I did attend several rallies after that night and I did walk around campus a few times with signs, mainly because I liked the people who were involved. Stuart Garcia had been my partner in the lab section of a behavioral psychology course taught by Eugene Galanter, who was a protege of B.F. Skinner, and we had a gas locking each other up in the Skinner boxes and tallying reactions to stimuli the experiments demanded. I met Stuart in 1980 at freshman orientation, and introduced the young Texan and a few other out-of-towners to the wonders of Max's Kansas City, Danceteria, and the Peppermint Lounge in partnership with my native bridge and tunnel tribesmen, Doug Tween and the two Toms, Kissane and FitzSimmons. As I've written before, Stuart was one of the early casualties of AIDS, dying only two years after graduation, in 1986. He was a natural politician, had the common touch. Short, friendly, with a shock of thick straight hair that levitated when he walked. There is no doubt in my mind that he'd be a figure in American politics had he lived, either in his native Texas or somewhere else. He was open, not shy, a friend to all - my opposite, in those years, really. And he was 23 when he died. But in 1983 he was gloriously alive and marching, and some of those he marched with carried signs with pictures of Nelson Mandela on them.

To those of us who frequented New York's musical clubs in that era, Mandela came to us in song as well as image. The Specials were a great British ska band with a sound that moved, they played all the clubs in New York when they were in town, and ska ran second only to over-driven punk rock (and vintage Motown, if truth be told) on the big jukebox downstairs at Max's. As Columbia students marched, the Specials released a protest song with a hook so damned big you couldn't help but sing Nelson Mandela's name all day long. Free-ee-ee-ee Nelson Mandela. At the time, of course, Mandela was still in prison for this efforts to overthrow Apartheid; he'd serve another six years for a total of more than 27 years. His body abused, but his mind is still free. You're so blind that you cannot see. The song was everywhere. And the Specials were cool.

A few years ago, I found myself chatting briefly with Illinois Senator Barack Obama in the receving line at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Dressed uncomfortably in rented white tie and tails - required get-up for the dais at the annual Al Smith Dinner - Obama stood next to Cardinal Egan, who in turn stood next to Senator John McCain and his wife Cindy, in the traditional show of bi-partisanship and Catholic elan that defines the famous occasion during Presidential election years. Obama looked tired and not entirely comfortable, but I waded in anyway. We talked a little bit about Columbia days and sitting on the steps in front of Low Library in warm weather. And then I told him I knew he'd been in the divestment marches, part of that movement. "It was formative," he said, in that professorial tone we've all come to know, with the clipped mid-western "r" he uses. We shook hands and I moved on, somewhat concerned that I'd left the impression that I was a college rabble-rouser and not the campus Strat-o-matic champion.

A year later, in the same Waldorf setting, I found myself standing next to Steve van Zandt, the Bruce Springsteen sideman and Sopranos actor, at another charity dinner. Strangely enough, the subject of Apartheid came up again, and I praised his work in the effort. Van Zandt had led a coalition of musicians in the recording of Sun City in 1985, a year after I left Columbia. The song called on artists no to play the Sun City resort, then a whites only casino enclave for wealthy South Africans. In addition to Springsteen, Van Zandt had rounded up the likes of Lou Reed, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Joey Ramone to take part. Twenty-three million can't vote because they're black. We're stabbing our brothers and sisters in the back. It was another great song that stuck with you.

Obama was right. It was a formative time, and the figure of Nelson Mandela and twenty-three million countrymen denied basic human rights did tend to stick. The divestment battle and the rallies to push the United States to do the right thing in South Africa made a different. Winning victories, says my friend Al Giordano, an organizer with a Vince Lombardi mindset, is what drives real citizens movements: "Mandela will always be one of history’s great role models in the art of building public opinion to win victory, instead of suffering defeat after defeat."

On that rainy night on Morningside Heights, I did finally find the delivery man on Amsterdam Avenue. But I think I found something more as well, and it was linked to man in a jail cell thousands of miles away. I had no role in that struggle at all, but I saw the art of building public first hand, the power of the story in the cause. And the protest songs had big hooks, besides.

Bridge and Tunnel Kid, Part II

Of all of New York's public buildings, the one I have spent the most time in by far is connected to bridges and tunnels to the north, from the Bronx all the way to the rural Harlem Valley in the east and Franklin Roosevelt's Dutchess County duchy to the west. The passenger railroad lines that end in Grand Central Terminal - that's terminal, not "station" for all you bumpkins - carry nearly 300,000 riders every weekday, spilling men in gray flannel still, and commuters of every shape and background into one of the world's finest public spaces.

Grand Central opened in 1913 replacing the smaller station on the same spot, built by the New York Central Railroad during the days when train travel in America still involved helping to build the fortunes of transportation barons. E.B. White's "unexpungeable odor of the long past" in New York certainly covers the vast spaces in Grand Central, competing perhaps with the simmering vats of chowder in the Oyster Bar, the fresh bakery counter at Zaro's, or the less savory smells of lost people sleeping on benches or floors in any given decade of my experience there.

Before we walk along the platform, through the sliding green doors to the great, open concourse of North American imagination and commercial energy - tracing in reverse the footsteps of Cary Grant in North By Northwest - let's take a moment to consider the start of the journey less than twenty miles away (about thirty minutes on a rush hour express) because that's where the story begins. I was born across the street from the commuter rail station in Bronxville, arriving in Lawrence Hospital during another February snowstorm in a month of February snowstorms that year, the day after John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. My grandfather bought a new camera for the occasion, launching a productive late life avocation that eventually earned him an international photography prize for his portrait of the Matterhorn.

In truth, I was born into what became a central hub for my life, a quintessential patch of inner ring suburbia that still attracts movie location scouts and investment bankers. I still see the hospital where I was born every time I take the train into Manhattan. I also see the former offices of William H. Watson Real Estate, which stood next to Bob's Cup and Saucer on the ground floor of the Station Park Building on Parkway Road, directly opposite the southbound platform. Just to the south is the block where the filling station once managed by my uncle Augustine J. Ryan stood, just around the corner from the little bowling alley where my brother and I rolled many a game on the earnings from a neighborhood snow shoveling business up the hill in Yonkers.

The Bronxville station house was opened in 1916 and its distinctive Spanish architecture matched the glamor of the Gramatan Hotel, which sat on the village's highest downtown hill, and opened in 1905 as the vision of real estate developer William Van Duzer Lawrence, whose planned suburban community created some of the sprawling Norman and Tudor mansions that aim to emulate the charm of Grand Tour Europe before the apocalypse of the first half of the 20th century. The most important event in the history of the grand Gramatan took place in 1958, when my parents celebrated their wedding in its ballroom. The hotel came down, sadly, in the 1970s and was replaced by condos now showing their age, but a lower row of storefronts along Sagamore Road survives and includes the barber shop that cares for my thinning pate and the Mexican restaurant that welcomes some of our largest birthday fiestas with a giant sombrero and a blast of the Beatles' Birthday. Down Kraft Avenue on the northbound side of the rail line is the movie theater, once a single screen where I remember feeling the terror of Kirk Douglas's performance in Jules Verne's bizarre pirate tale The Light at the End of the World, fronted by several Mr. Magoo shorts, somewhere around 1971. Some years later, I had the opportunity to inquire about that film to an older Kirk Douglas in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton; he nodded pleasantly and signed a book to my father, who attended Bronxville High School and hiked with its Scout troop.

Bronxville was and is a fairly wealthy place, perhaps the archetype of the tony Westchester villages that grew up around railroad stations and sent their mainly male white collar workforce into Grand Central on a daily basis. We were not wealthy, and aren't still, but the orientation of a Yonkers family toward the planned village of the Lawrence clan was partly a cultural nod to its leafy and less urban ways, as well as the product of family commerce and geography. When I was a child of school age - grammar school to young Catholics of that time - my mother drove the same route down Palmer Road, through Bronxville, up Tanglewylde Hill (where we'd almost always point out the pocket manse of Candid Camera announcer Durwood Kerby - now there's a star for you), along to White Plains Road and on to the Immaculate Conception School in Tuckahoe, where my mother taught and we collected catechisms, writing skills, and lifelong friends. The reverse commute back to Yonkers meant stops in Bronxville for important errands: the WPA-built post office with its distinctive mural by John French Sloan (The Arrival of the First Mail in Bronxville, looking more like a scene from a cinematic adaptation of Dickens, which fits Bronxville to a tee, if you know Bronxville), Woolworths, and the A&P, where the big thrill was pulling the level on the grinding machines churning Eight O'Clock coffee beans into aromatic grist for the percolator on my grandmother's stove.

For me, as well as being a hub of family activity - the funeral home has seen its share of related wakes, I said my first Hail Mary on my knees in St. Joseph's Church, and enjoyed my first book signing in Womrath's bookshop - Bronxville has long been the stepping off point for "the city." The train took adolescents to Madison Square Garden for The Who, the Allman Brothers, Springsteen marathons, and the No Nukes shows and to the clubs of the Lower East Side, and then later to college on Morningside Heights. Still later, a decade of daily commutation from the same platform, stomping out the cold on dawning winter mornings and fighting for a seat, while wearing a suit and tie. 

And every single time, after each short sprint down the Harlem Line, Grand Central itself was a wonder. Yes, buildings can thrill and this one did and does through the sheer space it creates and the life that teems through that space and the light of its tall windows every day. With Pennsylvania Station demolished in my childhood, the 1970's citizens campaign to preserve Grand Central leveraged its most glamorous partner in the public interest Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (the Kennedys had once commuted from Bronxville, too) to successfully defeat a plan for more slab-sided towers above the concourse. The effort preserved a work of genius, and a keystone to what makes New York.

Built by the Vanderbilts, designed by the firms of Warren and Wetmore, and Reed and Stem in the Beaux Arts style, Grand Central is perhaps the most beautiful railway station in the world. Yet what makes Grand Central such a marvel isn't just its soaring stand-alone beauty, but how it connected and inspired the midtown Manhattan that grew up around it - from the creation of Park Avenue to the north, to its surrounding necklace of archictural gemstones with great diamond of the Chrysler Building at the center. They're all there because Grand Central is there, because of the path of millions of people through that hall and through those doors decade after decade.

When you stand on an Atlantic beach and look out at the ocean, its vastness and timelessness make you feel small and humble, but at the same time, part of something much greater than yourself, much longer than the confines of your life. In New York, only Grand Central Terminal can evoke those feelings - and it has for me as I walked the same paths as millions of others, through the many years, like never-ending waves on the shore of the city.

Where those doors lead, inside and outside the terminal, down the streets of New York, into the subway tunnels, and through those many years - we'll see where it goes.

Bridge and Tunnel Kid

There is a spot in Yonkers near a curve on Palmer Road, just up from the intersection of Mile Square Road, high on the hill above the Dunwoodie Golf Course, where on a relatively clear day you can peer from the red Chevrolet station wagon and glimpse the towers of midtown Manhattan about 16 miles to the south.

"Look, there's the city!"

And the city it was to my brother and my sister and me, and our parents too, a postcard of a foreign land of skyscrapers and lights, like the distant backdrop of our movie set lives in the near suburbs. Of course, we lived in a city - two hundred thousand people with its own hardscrabble downtown where my father worked in the composition department of the daily newspaper. The Herald Statesman was founded in the middle of the Civil War as the Yonkers Statesman, later merging with the Yonkers Herald to form the afternoon paper where Dad worked. He took the bus down Palmer Road past the golf course every day, and must have looked south to the Empire State Building a thousand times from that bend in the road.

And unquestionably, he thought to himself: "Hey, there's the city."

I am past the curve in the road at the top of my own life , and I can see "the city" now from a different vantage point. New York was an exotic and little-visited neighbor in childhood, but it became a furtive destination in adolescence, the backdrop for college and my early journalism career, headquarters for a couple of business concerns, one end of the daily commute for two decades, and my intellectual and spiritual home forever. I have never lived any place else, nor have I ever really wanted to.

Looking back through my dirty life and times (to borrow a line from Warren Zevon, the muse of a very different American city across the continent) means looking back through my New York, a phrase I don't employ lightly, tapping these words as I am only a mile or so from the childhood home of E.B. White here in Mount Vernon - another of those small cities ringing the big one, urban places like New Rochelle, Yonkers, Union City, and Hoboken where people stood along river banks or high on a hill and said, "look, there's the city."

"New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact area the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant," wrote White in 1949. "It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings."

Those queer people and undertakings reverberate for me now but unlike White, I don't feel the need to say "here is New York" but rather, "here was New York" - at least over the past four decades, a time when the city shifted, and leaned, and heaved, and groaned, and suffered, fell and rose and bronzed in the sun of forty summers - and changed. New Yorkers often bemoan the changes. We can be a sentimental lot. The past in New York always seems more vital, more real, more alive - even in black and white - than the present in this town. There's too much building, too much of the municipal eraser at work scrubbing away the past, tearing down and building something shinier. But it's been that way since they filled the public cess pit just north of the old northern walls and built City Hall back in the 1820s. Yet I think that in this New York, with its vast unbridgeable distances between the wealthy and everybody else, and the limiting of actual residency among the middle class to the very edges of Manhattan and the swelling, refurbished outer borough hubs, there is a sense of something lost.

It wasn't that way when I was the skinny bridge and tunnel kid in green sneakers, tight Lee jeans and an old dungaree jacket skulking past the door at Max's Kansas City or CBGB, or gaping at the massive public festival of lewdness that was Times Square three decades ago, or splitting fries in the old railroad diner near the West Side Highway before taking that bridge back to the suburbs at night. That was famously grimy time, now celebrated in costume exhibitions underwritten by billionaires at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - itself a secret palace of the people, where my artist true love and I paid a self-suggested admission of a buck apiece for the privilege of browsing Winslow Homer and Cezanne before a cozy cup of coffee and a shared danish in gorgeous  Greek court cafeteria that once defined the classiest place in New York to eat lunch off a plastic tray. All gone, of course. The Met now has a spiffy new public dining concourse in the basement with myriad ethnic food stations and an endless array of niche bottled beverages; it could be Peoria.

A few years ago, I looked up at the ceiling above the bar at McSorley's Old Ale House down on 7th Street and saw perhaps a century and a half of accumlated filth, stuck stubbornly to the little artifacts and items the timeless saloon keeps up there. In some city bureaucrat's office, there must be a waiver. Along with Houdini's handcuffs, there are dozens of dusty wishbones  that may carry the teeth marks of Melville and Whitman. That kind of layered grime, like the bacteria-infused growth rings of New York's massive family tree, is rare in today's city. Does that melancholic nostalgia touch me in middle age? Yes, I find it does. "Circumnambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon," wrote Melville. "Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries."

We're still fixed in those reveries, even if New York's docks are generally limited to tourist boats and commuter ferries. While everyone else on this continent looks toward New York at one time or another, we lose ourselves in thoughts of elsewhere - and it's not merely reveries that drive those without seven figures in their investment portfolios away from the city. It's the reality of economics. Thence by Whitehall northward brings you past Bowling Green to lower Broadway, and two years ago that route led to the encampment of a leaderless protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street. There were minstrels in that camp. It was entertainment and street threater and urban camping, an ad hoc committee of this generation's bridge and tunnel kids, white middle class young people in the main, staging small dramas and forced marches, sometimes rather bravely in the face of police truncheons, pepper spray and plexiglass shields, against cops who were unions members acting against their own economic and social interests to please the bosses in the towers that overlooked Zuccotti Park.

There were ghosts there as well, souls from the tallest towers that once overlooked that park and almost every public space for miles. And I felt those ghosts keenly during those times when I walked through the rag taggy Occupy troops and sampled their rhetorical wares. They were the ghosts of office workers, and cops, and firefighters who left New York in the blaze of one blue morning when I too was at work in a New York office building.

These were all stories to be told, and since those early days at my father's side in visits to the Larkin Plaza newspaper offices just up from the old Hudson River pier in Yonkers, visits I remember best by the smell of the melted wax used for paste-up and the crush of my father's big hand, I have felt the urge to tell those stories under my own name, in a place where other people might read them. A few weeks ago, I spoke to a class of Syracuse University writing students under the able tutelage of my old blogging buddy, Professor Lance Mannion, and one them asked "why do you blog?" 

Because I'm compelled to, I answered, almost by obsession. And by blog, I mean write - a not-so-silent sentinal. So this is a start to a circumnambulation of my New York, a journey I may need to capture for myself with stops in Yonkers, Flushing, the Lower East Side, Morningside Heights, Riverdale, Broad Street, GrayBar, and in watering holes all around the town. We'll see.