New York

Matteo Pericoli's view from Phillip Glass'
window

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is it possible to only ever go somewhere in your imagination?

My fiancée is in New York for work, leaving the cat and I to enjoy London’s early summer.  She travels a lot and we always have grand plans that I’ll tag along, that we’ll take advantage of a free air fare to explore a corner of the world, but unfortunately it’s never quite works out like that.  This trip was booked only a couple of days ago, making it unrealistic for me to shift myself across the Atlantic let alone afford it. 

Other ventures have coincided with work deadlines of my own, weddings, stag dos, a million other parts of real life bumping along next the glamour of business class travel.  This one is particularly disappointing, though, because I’ve always wanted to go to New York and never have done. 

I spent a lot of the tail end of last year thinking about New York.  It was around the same time Lou Reed died, and I was reading Edward St Aubyn’s Bad News set in Manhattan.  Neither of which really represent the New York of today and I wonder if that would all be a disappointment to me.  I don’t think the city in my head exists anymore – if, indeed, it ever did.

New York, to me, is the city of Reed’s scuzzy, druggy songs, the danger of seventies and eighties cinema, when the crime rate suggested it might go the way Detroit has done, graffiti splattered subway trains, oil drums burning fires for the homeless, kids sitting on the fire escapes to escape the summer heat, a mugger on every corner and an adventure down every boulevard. 

It’s not that I thought any of this would be an attractive tourist destination, but this is the dreamscape that’s pushed itself into my imagination over the years.  Obviously, if I were there, I’d be in the Guggenhiem, up the Statue of Liberty and on Ellis Island not trying to buy smack from a guy lurking behind a dumpster on one hundred and ten street.

Everything I read about the city tells me that it has cleaned itself up, just like London.  It is the playground of wealth now all the rich have moved back into cities from the suburbs.  It’s probably full of graduates on internships supported by Mom and Pop, scrubbed and shiny bars, restaurants and another artesian Deli selling truffle stuffed olives replaces a 7-11.

Which begs the question, should I even go?  Or would the changes just be a disappointment?

By coincidence, I am sitting at my desk thinking about what will go into this post.  PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea is playing and it occurs to me, that the City is New York.  It always is.  Gotham, in the Batman mythos, is New York.  Whenever a City is just a city, it’s always New York underneath, or wants to be at any rate.

It’s the scenes at the beginning of Bonfire of the Vanities, the oozing wealth of Sherman McCoy, but more vividly, the subway.  You can taste the fear from the page as the characters tip over the edge and into the city’s underworld, dark, threatening, tagged, dirty and stinky.  It’s the Martini lunches of Mad Men, and the cluttered stagger along the skyscraper strangled streets.  It’s the flat rooftops of brown brick apartment blocks, tattooed by iron staircases and the teenagers hanging out amongst the old wooden planked water towers and the steaming air con units.  Yellow taxis and gumshoes, jaywalking and scotch in a brown paper bag, hip hop thronging ghetto blasters and tipped over fire hydrants with kids skipping through the spouting water, the Marvel superheroes I read in comics as a kid, Spiderman swooping from rooftop to advertising hoarding and away over the horizon, Brooklyn brownstones and never going to Harlem after dark.

These clichés remain in another time, but they also belong to the city in my head.  I know none of this really exists anymore, in the same way that London isn’t populated by cheeky cockneys, bomb damaged streets, derelict warehouses, punks in squats, eel and mash shops on every corner or pubs selling only warm bitter.  It’s an endless, timeless, place of myth which never evolves, never gentrifies; there’s a romance to the dirt, but then it is kind of made up.  It’s always Lou choking out Coney Island Baby as the ferry chugs across the Hudson and the sun setting over a grime filled skyline that promises tomorrow.    

Maybe it’s just easier to stay here after all.