For ten years, I have lived in a neighborhood defined by the Port Authority Bus Station to the north, Penn Station to the south, the Lincoln Tunnel to the west, and, to the east, a thirty-one-foot stainless-steel sculpture of a needle threaded through a fourteen-foot button. Though there are many, many people here, the neighborhood is not a people place. It is better suited to the picking up and dropping off of large pallets. Within this homey quadrilateral are a methadone clinic, a parole office, liquor shops with cashiers behind thick plastic screens, a fancy Japanese clothing store, plenty of pawnshops, the Times Building, drumming studios, seven subway lines, and at least four places to get your sewing machine repaired. A young runaway, emerging from one of the many transit hubs, might find herself—after maybe buying a coffee-cart doughnut and being shouted at for hesitating at a crosswalk, and being nearly hit by a bus—sheepishly deciding to give it one more go back home. There is, though, a lot of office space here. To walk north on Eighth Avenue in order to get to the subway entrance on Fortieth Street is to know what it is to be a migrating lemming.
This is where I have raised my daughter, from birth to her current age of seven. I moved here for pragmatic reasons. I do wonder at times what it means that when my daughter sees someone passed out on the sidewalk, or walking erratically and maybe threatening people with a 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup, she neither panics nor thinks to ask if that person needs help—she just holds my hand a smidge tighter and keeps walking. There aren’t a lot of young children in this neighborhood. She seems at ease with her exceptional state, and will one day be confused, I suspect, to live somewhere with many people her same-ish size.
I realize that it sounds like I’m bragging about my neighborhood. I am never sure where my bragging and my complaining meet up for coffee to agree about their views on the world. Arguably, these blocks resemble the nineteen-seventies New York romanticized in film and on TV. But do we really want ourselves or anyone we love to live in “Taxi Driver”? Until recently, there were dusty and tattered pennant banners announcing the “Grand Opening” of the Big Apple Meat Market on Ninth Avenue, a market that had been open for at least twenty years. I used to see very good-looking, well-dressed people getting professional photos taken there. Also sometimes at an abandoned lot nearby. The photographers have had to location-scout again, however, as the market was torn down not long ago and replaced with a tall and as yet unoccupied glass building. The community complained about the loss of the Big Apple market, where you could buy a gallon of mayonnaise and cheap hot food, so a new, affordable home has been found for the store, a couple of blocks south, though there are no banners or “Grand Opening” sign. I am what I am: I have grown into an adult who likes pumpernickel bread and red cabbage, but there were years when my partner’s young sons longed for Eggo waffles and bacon and Campbell’s chicken soup, and Big Apple was there for us.
I was born, somewhat randomly, in Toronto, and between the first and twelfth grades I lived in Norman, Oklahoma, and after that I moved East. I have lived in New York since 1998. I’ve long held the belief that being a fan or a cheerleader of New York is ethically and aesthetically dubious. Like the Yankees and, for that matter, the Mets, New York needs no more fans. This place is dense with wealth, with cultural capital, with anecdote; it is the setting for too many movies, books, and television shows. To be a vocal fan of New York is like hanging out with the popular kids. Norman, Oklahoma, where so many people I love and admire live—now there’s a place that could use a fan club. Loving New York, which I do, has often made me feel morally compromised, even alien to myself. Moving to the neighborhood, for pragmatic reasons, solved that emotional tangle for me. Almost no one likes this neighborhood or wants to live here. It would be O.K. to cheer for it, if I could learn how to.
At first, we kept our windows open for fresh air, but soon we noticed a pervasive black soot. It turned up on our dishware, our shelving. It was unimpressed with Palmolive and a scratch-free sponge. Was this substance, which was likely lining our alveoli, the kind of character-producing grit for which people move to the city? I have almost never chosen the neighborhood I lived in—it was always determined by external factors, often institutional housing. So I’m accustomed to a time of getting to know a neighborhood, of trying to convince oneself of its unelected virtues.
I went on walks, amid the soot. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, an obese detective who never leaves his apartment and raises orchids, lives on Thirty-fifth Street, according to a plaque there. Bob’s Park is nearby. Bob, I learned, had a pet boa constrictor, wore Scottish kilts and an Indian headdress, and was an adopted member of the Blackfoot tribe. He did a lot of good work for tenants’ rights in his building. In 1992, he was found stabbed to death in his apartment; the crime was never solved. One afternoon, I see Baryshnikov at a bagel place. This neighborhood is full of dancers, I notice. The Trisha Brown Dance Company has an office here. There are also many strip clubs. Now and again, I’ll see a velvet rope I have no interest in being invited to cross. I keep thinking that at any moment I’ll find the durably gentle side of this neighborhood. Instead, I find a stable where livery horses are kept, on levels, like parked cars. The DHL building is kind of cheery, as parts of it are painted yellow.
Our favorite twenty-four-hour deli, on the corner of Thirty-seventh Street and Ninth Avenue, is owned by a Yemeni immigrant who has been running it for nearly forty years. It has never been closed for even a day. Not through 9/11, not through the blackouts, not through Hurricane Sandy, not through the pandemic. The owner tells me he slept on a cot in the basement during the first six years of the business. Our neighborhood is home for many homeless people, and I’ve seen him give food and drinks to people who don’t pay and I’ve also seen him ask people who are causing a problem to leave. He’s at the register less often these days; instead, we see his children and grandchildren. When I’m tired or overwhelmed, my partner orders me a special treat: an egg-white-and-bacon breakfast sandwich on a toasted English muffin. It arrives home wrapped in thin foil, and tastes like someone taking care of you.
Our apartment overlooks the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, which I estimate to be the source of at least two-thirds of the soot. The traffic is particularly heavy one night. My daughter looks out the window, noticing the long line of red brake lights that distinguishes the outgoing traffic from the long line of white headlights that characterizes the incoming. It’s a beautiful view, she says. A memory comes to me, of a friend telling me how her grandmother, when she visited from New Delhi, used to describe a night scene like this as “a necklace of rubies and a necklace of diamonds.”
The Two Bros pizza at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street sells a fresh, hot slice of cheese pizza for a dollar. There are other Two Bros in the city—there are other Two Bros in the neighborhood—but this one is the best. It is nearly always busy, and it has a fast-moving and efficient line. I fell in love with Two Bros when I was pregnant. I would sometimes step out to have a slice there an hour or two after dinner. You could eat the slice at a table in the back and feel companioned and alone at once. The lighting is like that of a surgical theatre. The Mexican pop music is a reliable endorphin generator. And though the ingredients that go into a dollar slice of pizza do not come from a family farm in the Hudson Valley, these slices are supreme. The clientele, those evenings, was a mix of transgender prostitutes, thin young men, and quiet immigrant families, often with suitcases, headed I have no idea where.
After my daughter was born, I would still get a slice now and again, and, as soon as she was old enough, a slice was a special treat, better than a balloon. By the time she was two or so, she liked holding the dollar and paying for her slice herself. When she was three, she could proudly hold the paper plate with the hot slice on it, and now she can even take that hesitant first bite, where you gauge how hot the slice is and how much of a triangle you can bite off.
Because there are so few babies or children in this neighborhood, when you travel with a baby or a child you and the child are treated like a majestic presence, almost like tigers. My daughter is celebrated at the grocery store, at the pizza place, at the deli, and even on the street. In this neighborhood, crowded with mentally unwell people, and with drug dealers and panhandlers, and with tired office workers and sex workers and fruit venders and psychics and police officers—all these people, nearly to a one, say something tender to a child, whether you want them to or not. I remember once journeying to the idyllic family neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, in Brooklyn, where there were more babies and children than pigeons, and no one seemed interested in my baby at all, and I felt like a pigeon.
I have lived in other New York neighborhoods. For a time, I lived near the Mount Sinai Hospital Complex, on Ninety-eighth Street, right near where the Metro-North northbound train changes its path from underground to aboveground. All conversation would pause when a train went by, as in a running gag in a sitcom. Later, I lived in Morningside Heights, near Columbia University, a neighborhood that some find boring, and none find cool, but, as the city changes and changes and changes, Morningside Heights has a permanent population of thousands of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds. They reside, forever young, alongside a mysteriously eternal elderly community. Time does not pass in Morningside Heights. In my seven years there, I never changed age. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine will always be partially under renovation. The Hungarian Pastry Shop, now owned by a Greek family, will always be crowded and will never have Internet service or music; the outdoor seating is in use even now. I lived briefly in two Brooklyn neighborhoods: Fort Greene and Brooklyn Heights. Both were so pleasant as to make me feel uncomfortable. Maybe because I grew up the daughter of Israeli immigrants in Oklahoma, a neighborhood feels “right” to me only when it suits me in no particular way—when it seems unlikely that I’ll run into another household like my own. If I wear the clothing that might earn me compliments in Fort Greene or Brooklyn Heights, here, near the Lincoln Tunnel, those same clothes make me look as if I’m demented.
When my yearning for a sense of softness and sanity in the neighborhood really soars, I go to Esposito’s butcher shop on Thirty-eighth Street. A handful of businesses have been in this neighborhood for decades, and the butcher shop has been here since 1932. When I go in there, the staff ask me about my kids. They ask everyone about their kids, or their dogs, or their parents, or whatever there is to ask about. In the ten years I’ve lived here, the owner has been there every operating day, six days a week, working alongside his staff. One of the butchers is strikingly handsome. He always smiles and says it’s nice to see me. He says that to everyone and gives everyone that smile. Still, it retains its power. It took me years to realize that the floor on the butchers’ side of the glass display case is elevated by about six inches; the butchers look like gods on that side.
Esposito’s has a take-a-number ticket dispenser. The slips of paper come out like interlocking Escher frog tiles. Of course, my daughter loves to pull those numbered papers. When your number gets called, it’s heraldic. With that take-a-number ticket in hand, I get something I very rarely get—a felt connection to my childhood. I pulled this same kind of numbered ticket at the Skaggs Alpha Beta, in Norman. I would wait, with my mother, to be called on. My mom would ask for Muenster cheese “very thinly sliced, please.” Sometimes the deli-counter worker had trouble with my mom’s accent. You could measure the deli person’s character by how thin he sliced the Muenster. That was my mother’s thinking, and I guess it’s mine, too. To this day, a thick slice of Muenster signals an uncaring soul. These Thirty-eighth Street butcher guys would slice the Muenster very thin, I’m sure of it, even if I no longer like Muenster, and recently for the first time heard it called the children’s cheese.
It was my daughter’s reaching toddler age that began to alter my relationship to this neighborhood. For the first years, my heart had been open to it. I had been proud of its lack of charm, as if this were a consequence of its integrity. I had gone so far as to mildly dislike the perfectly clean and inoffensive “short-term luxury-rental” building that went up on this otherwise rough block—the Emerald Green. The complex planted ginkgo trees all along the block’s sidewalk. The trees were thin and pathetic and nearly leafless at first. In winter, the building’s staff lit up the trunks of the trees by wrapping them with white Christmas lights. In summer, they planted tulips in the enclosures in front of the entrance. As it grew cold, they planted some sort of hearty kale. We don’t need this! I remember thinking. This is even less charming than the lack of charm! Now I worship that building. My daughter and I both wait with anticipation for the November day when they wrap the ginkgo trees in those white lights. In fall, the ginkgo leaves tumble down as elegant yellow fans. The Emerald Green employee who hoses down the sidewalks every single morning, always pausing as we approach—he has my heart.
A recent pandemic afternoon, in socially distanced line yet again with my daughter for two dollars’ worth of Two Bros pizza, the normal sonic atmosphere of honking and Mexican pop music is augmented by more shouting than usual. I can’t make out what’s going on. Two fashionably dressed Japanese teen-agers start singing Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York.” There’s a fight going on. We cross the street. One of the shouting protagonists tells us that he’s glad we crossed the street, that there’s a guy with a wrench over there and he’s crazy. It’s unclear who provoked whom, and in the end the only violence involves thrown soda bottles—though, another recent night, someone was stabbed to death on this corner.
It’s not the violence in the neighborhood that makes me, at times, really hate living here. If anything, it’s clearer than ever how safe my family and I are, relatively, except from maybe being hit by a car or dying of lung disease. But the neighborhood used to feel to me like a rough part of a softer place, and nowadays the roughness feels more general, and this makes it harder to cheer for a neighborhood that is so loud and dirty and uninterested in or unfit for human life. It feels fit for delivery trucks and construction dust and as a postcard of man’s inhumanity to man. Years ago, under the Port Authority crossway, there was some sort of shelter—or at least meal, phone, and shower service—provided, and there is no such thing there anymore, only lots of people with substance-abuse and mental-health problems wandering around with a memory of this being a place where one could find help. There’s also a ubiquitous day-and-night smell of pot. Some people love that smell. I don’t. I complain about it to my partner one day, on the sidewalk. My daughter says, What smell? Of skunk, her dad says. What does skunk smell like? she asks. Do you mean that smell that is like burnt mushrooms with lots of spices? I don’t like spicy food, she concludes.
Twelve years ago—before my time!—the fifth floor of our building was often lit up with red lights. The street at night was crowded with limousines and S.U.V.s. This was the side effect of an improvised and lucrative business run by a man known as Big Daddy Lou. He and his wife made nearly a million dollars in ten months running a sex club favored by bankers and lawyers. For building-code purposes, certain small rooms were designated for recording books on tape. Big Daddy Lou paid at least two hundred and sixty thousand dollars in a no-jail-time plea deal that barred him from strip clubs and similar businesses. He could recently be seen on Twitter, posting about voter suppression in Georgia. A custodian on the second floor said that he hadn’t known about the club, but that he had “seen many pretty girls coming through, and no one caused a problem.” Judging by the movies and TV shows I see advertised on posters, this is precisely the kind of caper that millions of Americans dream of being near. I am living the dream, or almost.
Oh, I know your neighborhood, a man I was interviewing for a journalism piece once said. He was a scientist who was working on robotics that could land, and then rove, on the moon. He said he had worked in a space not far from Penn Station. He loved it, he said. He said that the company used a fine red Mars simulant dust, and that the dust had caused troubles, as it sifted down onto the silk-tie-manufacturing business that was one floor below. The problem had been resolved, and the two businesses had mutually admired each other’s work.
For my daughter, this neighborhood is dense with magic and love. This is her childhood. I will give you an example, one that involves the Lot-Less store that we pass on the way to the subway. In this memory, she is three years old, and we are headed to her preschool. My daughter is supposed to bring in her blankie from home, to be used for nap time for the rest of the year. My daughter has always been very interested in fulfilling these sorts of expectations.
On the sidewalk that day, I realize that I’ve forgotten the blankie. I suggest that we go into this Lot-Less store, that maybe we’ll find something. “I want a Minnie Mouse blanket,” my daughter says, in probably the most clearly enunciated sentence of her life up to that moment. She used to watch “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” every time she stayed with my mother, and her love for Minnie Mouse mirrored the depth of love between a grandmother and a granddaughter. I try to say that we may not find a Minnie Mouse blanket, but that we shouldn’t cry or panic or worry, etc. As it turns out, there is only one blanket on sale in the Lot-Less. It is a Minnie Mouse blanket.
I know the neighborhood so well—know the old Hartford Courant building, the countless vape shops, the Hamed Fabric, with its clearance sale, the Money Change/Weed World/NY Gift & Luggage, and Daytona Trimming, with its boas—on account of the carrying, and then the strollering, and then the very slow walking, and then the normal-paced walking of these same streets year and again with this child of mine. When she was a baby, the only way to reliably get her to fall asleep was to push her round and round these blocks in her stroller. Amid the honking, shouting, and backfiring, and the music coming from the Wakamba bar, her eyes would close, then stay closed.
She began walking. I was made aware that every tree enclosure and every concrete border was an irresistible balance-beam challenge. To get from our door to the corner took twenty minutes. Each challenge needed to be met, step by careful step, whether coming home or leaving. Some of the enclosures were flat brick. Some were curved metal. What a playground. She knew she could run up to the barrier near the parking garage but then had to wait to pass by it. In any month on any day, she might ask when the ginkgo leaves would turn yellow, when the Christmas lights would go up, when the illuminated snowflake would be hung over the intersection of Ninth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street. When we neared the corner butcher shop, she would sing a little made-up tune about the butcher, Bobby Esposito (though he goes by, and we always call him, Robert). The tune has a nineteen-forties cadence that I think she picked up from her Irish grandfather.
One afternoon, when we were on a tree-lined, picturesque block of Brooklyn Heights, near where I had once lived, with clean sidewalks and elegant buildings and gaslit lamps and no smell of garbage, my daughter turned to me very seriously and said, “This place is spoooooo-ky.”
“It is?”
“It would be terrible—terrible!—to live here.”
I do my best to adopt her view of our not beautiful neighborhood. After all, what is the Staples store but the enchanted red place that had a sequin notebook in the window for sale? Here is the 7-Eleven, with its bounty of stuffed animals and key chains, where on her birthday she got to pick out, after long deliberation, an owl Beanie Baby. The fruit man, whom I find slightly “off” but who is cheerful and always gives her an extra banana whenever we buy anything—where has he been since March? The hat-and-glove sidewalk vender called her Madam President when he gave her that double-bobbled hat which was pretty but itchy. Near that large sculpture of a needle going through a button, there appeared, in a plant enclosure, a metal sculpture of the head of a woman. It looked odd, unlabelled, just that head. I told my daughter that I thought it was someone named Emma Goldman, maybe, but the next time we passed by the sculpture was mysteriously gone.
One day, I have my own experience of magic in the neighborhood. A rack of plastic-wrapped dresses is being wheeled across the street. Its bars are wrapped in tape labelled “Hjelm, Hjelm, Hjelm.” That is very near to the name of the family who lived across the street from me as a child, who were a second family to me. There are so many stories there, but that is not where my mind goes. I realize in that moment that I have been walking, all these years, on the same streets I walked as a seven-year-old girl. These fabric shops, these button emporiums, these sewing-machine-repair shops, even the sparsely populated Ben’s Kosher Delicatessen, which is so large and hard for me to believe in: is it possible that this was exactly where I was once or twice or three times before? With my aunt ordering cheesecake for dessert and taking only a bite and leaving me with the burden of trying to eat the rest out of politeness?
My aunt, who lives in Sydney, Australia, used to come to New York—to these same streets—to buy fabric for her line of clothing for young women. She used to give me leopard-print jeans and crop tops and clingy polyester dresses that no other kid in Oklahoma had. When my aunt went to New York, sometimes my mother and I would fly out to see her.
We are in the back rooms of the third and fourth floors of these buildings. These are my earliest memories of seeing the suits and hats of Orthodox Jewish men. We are being shown bolts of fabric. We are told that they are very special prints, and that not everyone gets to see these. My aunt has introduced my mother as her “assistant,” and my mother holds a notebook and pen—not something that I have ever seen her do. Usually she holds large stacks of computer code printed on that old dot-matrix computer paper with those side strips you can tear off. My aunt tells the men that she has seen better prices, and that the fabric pills, or tears, or something. We leave, maybe we return, I don’t remember. Later, there is matzo-ball soup with matzo balls of unfathomable scale and fluffiness. These trips are also marked by the marvel of my aunt, her four-inch red fingernails and her resemblance to Tina Turner. It makes the most sense to meet her in New York, or sometimes Los Angeles, since why would she fly all the way out to the Will Rogers World Airport, in Oklahoma City?
I’ve lived my adult life so far away from my childhood, away from whatever madeleines might return it to me, and yet here I am, in some sense having never left this neighborhood. Time has and hasn’t wrought its transformational power. Now it’s my aunt’s children who shop for fabric. They don’t come to these streets; they go to Guangzhou. There are still fabric stores here, but there’s something nostalgic and aspirational about calling the area the garment district. If you look up, there are magnificent Art Deco buildings, one after the other, but in the windows you see dusty stacks, sometimes mannequins, and very little that looks as if it had been moved in years. These are a thousand Miss Havisham stage sets, though before the pandemic there was some trend of expensive, often “organic,” “Made in NYC” brands settling in the area. Here and there, one would see a beautiful person. Café Grumpy, of trendy Greenpoint, had opened a branch here. And Pacific Trimming had recently remodelled, so that if you walked by on Thirty-ninth Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, even the least crafty among us might be filled with a desire for rickrack, for zippers in thirty-six colors, for shank buttons. Shortly before the pandemic made itself credible to New Yorkers, in early March, a fancy food court was opening across the way from Pacific Trimming, the kind of place where one could pay as much for a cup of coffee as you might ever dream of, where three soft tacos could be sixteen dollars. I wonder what will happen to that food court.
So much has closed, and now there are no crowds to navigate up Eighth Avenue in the morning. The pandemic has revealed that, apart from all my grousing, this neighborhood was working very well. It lacked sweetness, sure, and hygiene, but it had office space, and it had office workers, and it had breakfast carts and restaurants, and it even had—I saw this three times—unremarkable-looking pedestrians who, seeing someone slumped over in a crosswalk, in the line of traffic, would pick that person up and help him onto the sidewalk. There may be little or no sunny side to the prostitution in this neighborhood, but there’s something cheering about walking by the Holiday Inn park benches at 7:30 A.M., and seeing the tall, long-limbed sex workers in leggings and false eyelashes, sitting together over a coffee, chatting, laughing, adjusting their bras, their hair.
I know it would be wrong to get romantic about it, just as I know that the people on the sidewalk near Fortieth Street who shout at me that they love my hair and where do I get it done are just hawking their salon on the second floor, but what can I say? It sometimes feels as if these chaotic crowds were here because we were all inside the velvet rope to the one club that would interest me, the one where we all belong.
I used to wonder about people who were born in New York and who still lived here. Did it not annoy them that any block they walked down, any business they passed, was liable to bring up a ghoulish or irritating memory? Even good memories can be exhausting. Maybe especially good memories. For this reason, I pitied the New York natives. And envied them, naturally. Lately, I find myself awake in the middle of the night in a panic, wondering, Why am I here? Where are all the people I have known? My mother lives only two miles away, but I still sometimes think, Where is my mom? Where is my black-sheep stuffed animal? Now my child is a native New Yorker. The pandemic will be over one day. She will again make her way up a very crowded Eighth Avenue. New businesses will open. Maybe, years from now, she will wonder what happened to these irreplaceable days. ♦
