I am sitting in the waiting area at Penn Station in NYC, waiting for an 11:05 train home, after having boarded one in Union Station at 3:15 this morning for my day trip to Netroots New York, where I was on a panel about education.
I am thinking about New York, a city from which I moved 40 years ago, to which I return perhaps once or twice a year at most.
I'm thinking about what a city can be, sometimes despite its political leadership.
I was born in the city, and for the 1st two years of my life lived in Manhattan, but I grew up in Westchester County. Still, even duirng those years through high school I knew the city well - my grandparents lived in the San Remo on Central Park West. We often came in for concerts and plays, and until I was in junior high school my father worked at the flagship Macy's - where to get to his office I had to walk through the toy department, which was so painful. My mother practiced law, first in a family law firm at 51 Chambers Street, then in the State Office Building where she was an Assistant Attorney General. My father remarried after she died at the end of my senior year of high school, to a Brazilian diplomat, and when that did not work to another lady. He moved to the Upper East Side. And until I returned to Haverford in 1971 as a 25 year old junior, New York City was again my home, living at various times on the East Side, the West Village, the East Village, Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, and Kew Gardens. I was at home in this city.
I remember that when I was about to return to Haverford I had to go get a driver's license - I had let mine lapse because I never had occasion to drive a car. I could get anywhere I needed, at any hour, by subway and bus or if needed by the occasional cab.
Often I would walk, as I on occasion have on visits back to the city - I remember once walking first from Katz's Deli on E. Houston Street to the Strand Book Store on 4th Avenue, then to Times Square where I caught up with my fellow social studies teachers - it was our "in-service" day and we had decided to spend it in Manhattan doing various things.
The scope of my visit this time has been limited. I arrived at Penn Station and took the A Train to the Fulton Street Station and walked the few blocks to Pace University where NNY was meeting This evening a group of us walked from there downtown to the Tribeca Cafe, on E Broadway near I think Monroe. From there I walked two blocks to the Franklin Street station and caught the 1 train back to Penn Station.
Yet even in that brief time I remembered what I always loved about this city, and how much it has changed - for the better - in the four decades since I moved away.
In the late 60s SoHo was just beginning, and what we now know as Tribeca was a warehouse district usually deserted at night Now both are vibrant late into the night, in the city that truly never sleeps.
I'm not saying I would want to move back to New York. Were I to move from my current residence in the Virginia portion of the original District of Columbia, it would be either to Capitol Hill so my wife could walk to work, or to the countryside, perhaps near Charlottesville.
Yet on visits even as short as this I remember why I loved the time I lived here. There is a vibrancy. Much of it is accessible without a car, which is good, since it is so expensive to have one here.
I remember when the fare for the subway was a token that was $.15 - for that fare one could ride from one end of the city to another, from far north in the Bronx to Coney island. Now a single fare is $2.50. But remember this - the subway runs all night, not like Metro in DC which shuts down.
Places that were part of the landscape of my younger years are no more, some having disappeared even while I was here - for example, the chain of mens ware stores under the label Robert Hall. Bars and restaurants that seemed eternal are no more - no longer can one go to Rattner's on Delancey and get insulted by a septuagenarian waiter, an experience I made sure Leaves on the Current experienced - ONCE.
The pace of New York makes even the intensity of Washington DC seem tame. The sheer amount of humanity must seem overwhelming to people from lesser cities.
And then there are the urban canyons and the towering buildings. I can remember freshman year my roommate and I drove a classmate from rural Oregon up to the city - he was in awe of the scale of the buildings. Some cities have a few such buildings. In Manhattan they cover much of the landscape
I could look at the window at Pace at the roads leading to and from the Brooklyn Bridge. Had I wanted, it would have taken me but a short while to walk across to Brooklyn Heights, perhaps my favorite neighborhood in the city, the place I most enjoyed living. I called one friend who lives there, but she was 100 miles east on Long Island, so I avoided the temptation of hopping a cab to my old neighborhood.
This city constantly remakes itself. In a sense, that is emblematic of our nation. People may forget that at one point New York was a financial basket case. Now it is renewed, not for the first nor for the last time. It survived 9-11, it will survive Michael Bloomberg.
Cities should be accessible. Cities should be livable. Perhaps in some ways the sheer scale of New York is intimidating, but there are parts that are very different - strongly ethnic neighborhoods where if your only language is English you are the alien. Places of big leafy trees, and not just in the major parks. Beaches - Coney Island is on the Atlantic Ocean, and it is in the city.
New York can be very expensive. Yet if one adjusts and lives more like a New Yorker, even with its expenses it is very livable. One does not have to live in Manhattan to have it easily and relatively inexpensively accessible.
I will probably never move back here. I will probably only visit once or twice a year. As older relatives have passed I have fewer reasons to come up to see them one more time, although there are still cousins, there are friends from high school, there are classmates from college.
And there are those I have met during my working years, both in computers in New York, but also teachers whose lives have crossed mine.
Now I have former students who live here, who work here, or perhaps further their educations.
I am still connected.
That will never change.
I am grateful for each visit, even one as brief as today's.
I thought I'd say so.
Peace.