Nicky Hilton (left) and Paris Hilton, with their parents and Michael Jackson, at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway stop during the music-video shoot for “Bad.”
Paris Hilton
TV personality and DJ, born 1981
“My mom and Michael Jackson had been best friends since they were like 13. I grew up around Michael, and anytime he’d have a music video or a concert, he would always invite my family. I literally went to every single video he did.”
Matthew Broderick
Actor, born 1962
“I remember playing in Washington Square Park, all day basically. It was not as finished-looking as it is now—you could play pickup games on the fields. Now I think you’re not even supposed to walk on them. We would play Frisbee around the fountain. We played handball against the arch, and sometimes on the courts that are on Sixth Avenue between 3rd and 4th. We also just walked around and ate slices of pizza—a lot of pizza. And large drinks, though not as large as what they’re up against now. And we ate lots and lots of Blimpies. I guess it’s a miracle we’re all alive.
“As long as I was with friends, we were pretty much left to it. We’d go to Central Park. We’d go ice skating at Wollman Rink or Lasker Rink uptown. We would go to Times Square to play pinball. I should also mention that I was constantly robbed. I don’t know if that still happens. But every now and then, somebody would come up to you and say, ‘I have a knife. Give me whatever—’ and you’d give them your change. That happened a lot to us children. I never would fight. I would always just give—or try to run. Everybody was afraid somebody had a knife. Whether it was true or not: ‘Don’t get into a fight, because somebody might stab you.’ ”
Spike Lee
Director, born 1957
“It’s not rocket science growing up—as a young child, you notice that people of color are poorer than white people. That’s just like the sky is blue. You’ve got to fight for what you want. You learn that by just trying to find a fucking seat on the subway and the bus. I was riding the subway when I was 6 years old.”
Jonathan Lethem (left), with his mother, sister, brother, and great-grandmother on the Upper West Side.
Jonathan Lethem
Novelist, born 1964
“For a child from a quadrant of Brooklyn where every block was a fresh reality zone, no assumption safe to carry over from one to the next, the dark mosaic of neighborhoods and boroughs was the same, writ larger—a Disunited States of its own. My family’s voyages to Manhattan were to Soho and Greenwich Village and Chinatown, to attend gallery openings of my dad’s friends and rival painters, to revisit landmarks of my parents’ lives before children, the folk-music clubs, the Szechuan restaurants. The Upper West Side was terra incognita except for visits to see my great-grandmother, known to me as ‘Omi.’ We’d be dressed up, wearing uncomfortable button shirts and dark shoes. Omi was a refugee from upper-middle-class Lübeck, Germany, where she’d been an opera singer. She landed in a residence hotel on Broadway and Eighty-something, in a small apartment full of lace and Meissen china. She spoke barely any English and expressed her affection for me by running her fingers through my hair while calling me ‘Yonatan’—so, for me, a drive to the Upper West Side might as well have been a voyage to Europe. If we went for a walk, nothing on the street much contradicted this sensation—we’d cross Broadway just as far as the traffic islands between the streams of traffic, there to pay our respects to other German-Jewish refugees sunning themselves on the benches. To be truthful, I still can’t cross Broadway on foot and not be reminded of the Holocaust.”
2016
New kinds of families brought new kinds of surprises.
When Emily Kehe and Kate Elazegui, a married couple, underwent overlapping fertility treatments, they figured that the odds of a simultaneous pregnancy were almost nil. Maybe so, but “almost” is a tricky word: Nine months later, they gave birth to boys four days apart. A year later, happy but exhausted, Kehe admitted that any mommy judginess the couple had had before the kids were born had gone out the window. “We’ve both had to eat some words,” she said. Like what? “Screen time. YouTube Kids has saved our lives.”
