In the Midst of Manhattan

I was in Manhattan last week for the first time, and I was surprised to discover how familiar the place felt. I've been in a number of great cities, but have always had the joy and wonder of discovering them upon arrival. It was different with New York. It was like I already knew it, like I already had an accumulated memory of the place from all of the thousands of things I've read in books, seen on television and in movies, heard in songs... and throughout the week, as Esther and I wandered around town we kept knowing things, identifying landmarks, that we hadn't seen actually seen before. At one point, we were walking up 5th Avenue, when Esther told me to look back. There was the Flatiron Building. We had just walked right by it.

It's impossible to look at the Statue of Liberty in the distance from Battery Park without thinking of ten-year-old Vito Corleone staring through the window of his quarantine cell in The Godfather Part II. Or Perry and Jack Lucas lying on their backs "cloud-busting" from the Great Lawn in Central Park in The Fisher King. Or the Brooklyn Bridge without thinking of Isaac and Mary watching the sun come up in Woody Allen's Manhattan. Or any of hundreds of locations from the the Woody Allen oeuvre or, more recently, Sex in the City.

Our hotel was in Midtown, a block from the Empire State Building, and we must have passed it three or four times a day, and every time I looked up I wondered at the scale of King Kong, or the ill-fated meeting of Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember, on the observation deck eighty-six flours up.

While in the Metropolitan Museum's Temple of Dendur exhibit, I thought of Harry asking Sally to dinner. Come to think of it Holden Caufield, from Catcher in the Rye, spent some time looking at the mummies and "toons" in the Met, too. I definitely thought of old Holden in Central Park, urging his little sister, Phoebe, to ride the carousel.

"I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don't know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could have been there."

In Greenwich Village I imagined Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs haunting the cafes, jazz cellars and stoops, drinking cheap wine out of gallon jugs and heading back to their cold-water flats to eat Benzedrine, write and listen to jazz all night from a transistor radio. I walked under the awning of The Village Vanguard and thought of John Coltrane and Charlie Parker shaping their sound, and birthing the only truly original American art form and emerging onto the street at dawn, probably without a much of a clue as to the significance of what they were doing.

Being in Manhattan somehow makes you feel like you've become a part of all that, part of all of that history, those lives, those stories, part of the mythology of the world's greatest city. Maya Angelou said she became a writer so that she could live more than one life, and that's kind of how I felt in New York.

And I guess you could take the high road and thumb a nose at this, say that its corrupted and inauthentic. I've heard the lament, for instance, that Times Square has been Disneyfied, that Broadway is dead, that it has become a tourist trap in line with the showiness of Las Vegas. But I was awed by the talent on display at Sweeney Todd, in which the ten actors played multiple characters and multiple instruments each... and did all the set and costume changes without a hiccup!

I think New York City has always aspired to be a mythical place, and all of those moments, remembered or otherwise, only served to make the place more magical, magnanimous and mystical than it already is.

I, for one, am thankful for every writer, filmmaker, artist, actor or citizen of Earth that has contributed to the collective memory of The Big Apple.