On Saturday, if you live near Houston Street in the Village, you might as well not try to sleep. Until near dawn the kids drive along the street, east to west, west to east, whooping and hollering and beeping their car horns. They’re partying, for no better reason than they are where they are. In Fun City.
I know, because I spent the past three winters in various rented rooms in lower Manhattan, writing my first novel, and then trying to think of a second. Writers can live anywhere, but I chose there as the place to attempt a late career change, because New York is a city created by the optimism of generations of immigrants, and I hoped the optimism would rub off on me. I chose it because, to my mind, it was more than fun – it was a joyous place, the Paris of our time, stylish, frivolous, affordable, and wonderfully hospitable to dreams. It is the one place I know where personal transformation is the general goal and applies to everyone of any age and gender and class, from the boy from a dusty crossroads in Guatemala who delivers the groceries, to the face-lifted and tummy-tucked women who cruise Tiffany’s efficiently while their husbands wait at the bar of the Harvard Club. Manhattan is not monumental and self-important, like Washington, and it doesn’t manufacture, like Chicago, and it isn’t intellectual, like Boston. Its industries are the light ones – publishing, fashion, advertising. It knows it is light, and it sends its own light New Yorkness up.
Twice when I was there the place indulged itself in mass hysteria: when first a hurricane and then a blizzard were forecast. It is true that the pedlar streets around Chinatown were weirdly empty of fake-Prada handbag sellers for a day, and the sky went black, and a hot wind whipped along buildings I had never seen barricaded before. But that was as bad as the hurricane got. Afterward, there wasn’t the slightest embarrassment at the overreaction to the weather warnings, or any apology. Manhattan had been playing a game called frightening itself. It never seriously believed the Apocalypse was coming. But now, butterfly Manhattan is pinned under the nets of vicious forces, though viciousness is wholly alien to its spirit.
The island narrows to the width of three fields, down where the Trade Center towers stood. It has a unique atmosphere, that district, where you can almost touch one side of the city from the other, and there are glimpses of vistas as watery as Venice, and the stocky buildings are lightened by brisk, marine breezes full of sparkle and light. At night its narrow streets are taken over by dimly gleaming seabirds who come down to scavenge the fast-food wrappers the office workers leave behind when they pour out of their offices and hurry home. The beginnings of the city are here, at what was once the tip of a scrub-covered peninsula, where the slow sheets of water from the East River and the Hudson River succumb to the bright expanse of the great harbor. I lived down there for a while: a block from the ferry to Ellis Island in one direction, two blocks from the World Trade Center in the other. I was lent a place high up in an ornate building which was once offices and is now apartments for singles working across the way in Wall Street – a short, curved street that follows the line of the log wall the first European settlers put up to defend their settlement against the people they had dispossessed. Their native enemies slipped up and down along the trail they’d made in the wilderness – a trail that the Dutch settlers called Burgh Weg, which became the word, Broadway. On the floor above me, young men and women in expensive sports gear toiled on the treadmills in the gym, where clerks in celluloid collars once stood at their ledgers.
Investors were trying to make the financial district into a neighborhood, but it hadn’t really caught on. The place lost all its urbanity in the evenings. The bars and cafés closed when the offices did. Even the sex club closed early. Chauffeurs dozed in their limos outside expensive drinking clubs waiting for the last broker or banker to come out, wiping his lips, to be driven to the suburbs. The streets were empty and very quiet. But because the island is so narrow at that point and so many subway lines enter Manhattan there, just below the surface, the moaning and clanking of the trains filled the air all night long. It was as if huge demons were trapped down there, under the earth on which the skyscrapers stood.
There was a notice in the bookshop at the foot of the World Trade Center building one day – a man who’d written a book on the birds of Manhattan would lead a bird-watching tour from there, all welcome. The ten or so of us who showed up were a typically motley, eccentric, socially inexplicable group of New Yorkers. One old man had a sola topi on, and some of the others wore sturdy shoes and carried binoculars, though we were following the walkways and piazzas directly under the towers, and looking for our birds in the plantings in pebble-dash troughs and dank beds that divided the expanses of concrete. Several of the bird-watchers had water bottles fixed to their belts, though I don’t suppose we were ever more than a hundred yards from refreshments. But the repartee was loud and funny, and as we mooched along towards Battery Park we actually did see more than a dozen different kinds of bird pecking at the thin grass, or going about their bird lives under the municipal laurel bushes, behind the roller skaters and cyclists and baby buggies and the courting couples entwined on graffiti-covered benches.
“What bird,” someone asked, “is the official bird of New York?”
No one was sure.
“It should be the bluebird,” a woman said dreamily, “because the bluebird is the bird of happiness.”
“Don’t you believe it, honey,” a woman in full makeup, wearing a long lace dress and a huge backpack, said. “No one ever came to this city to be happy.”
But they did. Where we were walking – a stone’s throw from where bloodstained dereliction now begins – is tear-stained land, but the tears were tears of joy. That’s where the immigrant ships tied up, before there were entry controls. That’s where the blacks and the Irish fought it out for waterfront jobs – tough jobs, but better than anything they could have had, ever, where they came from. Europeans escaped the limitations they had been born into, when they walked down the gangways and out into the pullulating, raucous, no-holds-barred city. I went to Manhattan for that – to be an immigrant. I wanted to try something new in a city that was created by wave upon wave of adventurers trying something new. I lived most of the time in a bedsitter on 3rd Street. But I used to go back to the bottom of the island because I loved the way you can see the layers of experience the city is composed of down there. I might have been in the vicinity of the World Trade Center towers to use the central post office beside them, or to mooch around Century 21, the greatest designer discount store in the world. There were always Irish voices in there, calling to each other about La Perla bras in an unfortunate red, or Moschino jeans for half-nothing but only in dwarf or giant sizes. Walking home from south to north I would be following the immigrant trail again, towards a new life, a welcomed future.
I have two sets of friends who live very near where the towers were – lived, they’ve been evacuated now. On the night of the last presidential election there was a party and the windows were open onto Chambers Street because our hostess is English, so smoking was allowed, and our cheers and laughter must have disturbed the druggies and the homeless having a sit-up sleep in the all-night burger bars. At some point, the exhausted presenter on one channel announced that the whole thing was a mess and it might be days before we knew who had won the presidency.
“OK – I’m going home,” I said, finishing off my wine. “I’m happy, and I want to stay that way.” And I walked home, humming.
I set my course so as to keep in view the Chrysler building, ahead of me in Midtown, because its scalloped roof is so beautiful. Just as I always kept the WTC towers in view when I walked south. Often, the clouds were lower than the top floors. At evening time, especially; the ranks of lights high up in the dark, behind moving shreds of cloud, were lovely, glimmering, silver things. And there was a pink-neon furled umbrella on the facade of the second tower. It was vaguely amusing. I have friends who have a newsstand/café on Hudson Street. The husband strolled out his door and looked up after he heard the first bang. He is a gentle man, a music lover, a man who agreed that the two of us could leave the Met after just one act of Tristan and lsolde because it was so overwhelmingly moving. He stood on the pavement outside his building, and witnessed his fellow human beings as they jumped to their deaths. They jumped past the pink umbrella. When will he be whole again? When will my friend who works in J.P. Morgan in Wall Street be untroubled again? She can’t ever go back there, she says: the smell of death got into her that day. My friends in publishing are mainly Jewish. How long will the U.S. protect Israel, they must be asking themselves, if this is the price it is asked to pay? And is there anywhere at all in the world they can be unafraid? My best friend asked me a few months ago whether I thought it was safe for her to go to the Jerusalem Book Fair. Now, Jerusalem is everywhere that beautiful, formerly sanguine, young woman walks.
I made some money from my novel, and with it I arranged for semipermanent access to the innocent high spirits of Manhattan. For the price of a house in, say, Crumlin, I put a deposit on a space in a warehouse just beside the Holland Tunnel. The idea was that by next year, maybe, the warehouse would be turned into apartments. Whenever I thought of the winter months I might be going to spend there, I imagined walking the lively streets and hurrying in from the sharp, blue-skied cold to talkative meals in restaurants, and then the payoff – being able to do hard work because of being so carefree. Now, I can imagine nothing.
My plan, of course, doesn’t matter at all in itself. But I mention it because it matters that the gift of hope, which has been Manhattan’s gift to millions throughout its existence, and was its gift to me, has been snatched from its grasp. It matters that the spectrum of intangible things I valued Manhattan for is the very spectrum that has disappeared. The myth that Manhattan had of itself has been murdered. Its harmless obsessions with fashion and celebrity and being where it’s at have been massacred along with everything else. A society that never imagined itself being anything but envied – that could not imagine being hated – must now find dark and uncertain ways of being.
I take it that there is dust everywhere on the building I was going to have my space in. There must be dust all over lower Manhattan. Consider what must be in that dust, since hardly any whole bodies have been found. If ever I look down at a smudge on my hand there, I’ll know what I’m looking at. But – leave Manhattan? Turn away from it? Would you turn away from a beloved woman because she had been brutally raped? Wouldn’t the love still be there, though now it accommodates pain and division and sadness? I’m an old hand – I knew that here we have no abiding city. I knew that there are really no Fun Cities. But it is sorrow of a new kind, for those who loved Manhattan’s sassy self-belief the way one would love it in a child, to see that suffering is turning the child, even as one looks on, into a wary adult.
The Irish Times Magazine, September 22, 2001