Piecework

If I’d grown up in another city, I almost certainly would have become another kind of writer. Or I might not have become a writer at all. But I grew up in New York in the 1940s, when New York was a great big optimistic town. The war was over and the Great Depression was a permanent part of the past; now we would all begin to live. To a kid (and to millions of adults) everything seemed possible. If you wanted to be a scientist or a left-fielder for the Dodgers, a lawyer or a drummer with Count Basie: well, why not? This was New York. You could even be an artist. Or a writer.

As a man and a writer, I’ve been cursed by the memory of that New York. Across five decades, I saw the city change and its optimism wane. The factories began closing in the late 1950s, moving to the South, or driven out of business by changing styles or tastes or means of production. When the factories died, so did more than a million manufacturing jobs. Those vanished jobs had allowed thousands of men like my father (an Irish immigrant with an eighth-grade education) to raise families in the richest city on earth. They eagerly joined unions. They proudly voted for the Democratic ticket. They put paychecks on kitchen tables, asked their kids if they’d finished their homework, went off to night games at the Polo Grounds or Ebbets Field, and were able to walk in the world with pride. Then the great change happened. The manufacturing jobs were replaced with service work. Or with welfare. One statistic tells the story: In 1955, there were 150,000 New Yorkers on welfare; in 1995, there were 1.3 million.

With the jobs gone, the combined American plagues of drugs and guns came to the neighborhoods. New York wasn’t the only American city to be so mauled; but because it was at once larger and more anonymous, a sense of danger bordering on paranoia became a constant in the lives of its citizens. This wasn’t a mere perception; it could be measured. Throughout the 1950s, New York averaged 300 murders a year; by 1994, the city fathers were ecstatic when the number of homicides dropped to 1,600 after years hovering around the 2,000 mark. In my time, even the poorest New Yorkers learned to triple-lock their doors and bar the windows against the relentless presence of the city’s 200,000 heroin addicts. The middle class (children of all those factory workers) began to hire private cops to patrol their streets. They avoided subways late at night. They paid for parking lots to protect their cars against the patrolling junkies. They bought very large dogs. After a while, they stopped sending their kids to the public schools, which had begun adding metal detectors to their doors. Finally, many of them began to move away.

These pieces reflect the yearning of an entire generation of New Yorkers for the city that changed forever when we weren’t even looking. We’re the New Yorkers who remember the city when it worked, in every sense of that word. No matter how we live now, we are hostages to that time when each of us lived in a neighborhood that was an urban version of the American hometown. My hometown was in Brooklyn, across the East River from haughty Manhattan; there are men and women who remember their hometowns in the Bronx and Queens and parts of Manhattan the way I remember mine. Some live on in the city. Others have scattered around the country. I know from my mail that they still measure all places by the New York they knew when young.

As I write, New York seems to be reviving again. The engine of this latest revival is the wave of new immigrants. We are in the midst of the greatest immigration wave since the turn of the last century, and the new arrivals have one huge advantage over old New Yorkers: they are free of the curse of memory. They might yearn for the countries they left behind, but they couldn’t care less about the Dodgers or Luna Park or the street games of 19 51. In their New York, they live in the present tense, working at the hardest jobs, but they have visions of the future. Everywhere a New Yorker turns, he encounters Koreans, Pakistanis, Dominicans, Palestinians, Russians, Mexicans, Haitians. And it was the places they remember that propelled them to New York. Back in their hometowns, the hope of a decent life was insupportable and so they chose exile. In New York, they drive the city’s cabs. They wash the dishes of the city’s restaurants. They sell the city oranges at midnight. They empty bedpans in the city’s hospitals. They open little stores and small businesses and at night, exhausted, drained, they ask their children if they have finished their homework. Someday, the children of the newest immigrants also might write pieces like these, full of inconsolable memories. I hope I last long enough to read them, just to see what I had missed.

THE LOST CITY