Downtown: My Manhattan

by Pete Hamill

  I never see streetwalkers anymore either, not even down by the meat market below Fourteenth Street, where they once gathered in cartoony profusion. Each evening at dusk, they jangled their immense earrings and their chains and offered themselves for a price to cruising suburbanites. The hookers were almost all junkies, but they could laugh at the New Jersey men in their cars with the blue license plates, calling them “blue bozos.” There were few laughs on their street corners as they plied their joyless trade. Most cops and judges shrugged at their presence in years when the city was rife with more savage crimes. It seemed streetwalkers would be among us forever, a part of New York since the early nineteenth century. And then, as the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first, the streetwalkers vanished.

  I’m not sure where they went. Some surely went to the graveyard. But I hope the living found the secret place where they’d be free of smack and pimps and disease. As I write, the true Manhattan streetwalkers now are cigarette smokers, banished by law from restaurants and bars and dancing places, gathered in shivering knots on nights when the temperature is in the teens. Their voices carom against the surrounding buildings, waking families from exhausted sleep. They make up a new floating population of noisy narcissists in a time when the city fathers insist that even drunks must be healthy. One thing is certain: Nobody in power seems to remember the lessons of Prohibition.

  Meanwhile, the island is vivid with energy. In that sense, Times Square has once again become our most perfect symbol: noisy, plural, brash, vulgar, shifting, slightly dangerous. We have other symbols. The Statue of Liberty. The Empire State Building. The Chrysler. But all are static. All are remote from the people themselves, too often these days closed to visitors by security guards. Even in the age of terror, Times Square, like the city itself, is open to all.

  That openness is essential to living here. It is based on choice. You can choose to look at the Vermeers in the Frick or walk around Chinatown. If you live downtown, uptown is also yours, a subway ride away. So are all the places in this book and more. The wanderer in Manhattan must go forth with a certain innocence, because New York is best seen with innocent eyes. It doesn’t matter if you are young or old. Reading our rich history makes the experience more layered, but it is not a substitute for walking the streets themselves. For old-timer or newcomer, it is essential to absorb the city as it is now in order to shape your own nostalgias.

  That’s why I always urge the newcomer to surrender to the city’s magic. Forget the irritations and the occasional rudeness; they bother many New Yorkers too. Instead, go down to the North River and the benches that run along the west side of Battery Park City. Watch the tides or the blocks of ice in winter; they have existed since the time when the island was empty of man. Gaze at the boats. Look across the water at the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island, the places to which so many of the New York tribe came in order to truly live. Learn the tale of our tribe, because it’s your tribe too, no matter where you were born. Listen to its music and its legends. Gaze at its ruins and monuments. Walk its sidewalks and run fingers upon the stone and bricks and steel of our right-angled streets. Breathe the air of the river breeze.

  And look up: There are falcons in our sky again, safe at last from the perils of DDT, returned to full life after a long hard time. They can be seen moving through the upper stories of the tall downtown towers, those spires of the magic city, where they also build their nests and teach their children. They fly over the places where the Dutch once lived and the British watched plays in powdered wigs and Africans insisted upon their humanity on streets where they were owned by others. On explorations uptown, the falcons can see the spires and the bridges and the endless roll of rooftops moving north and west and east. Their movements might at first seem aimless. But be patient. Near the end of day, with the sun heading for New Jersey and the sky suddenly mauve, you can see the falcons wheeling and turning, heading downtown, heading for home.

  Suggested Reading

  THIS ESSAY IS based on memory, reporting, and reading. Much reading, over decades. My own library contains more than five hundred books of New York City history, along with memoirs, novels, and works of journalism set in New York. I own many books of New York photographs, along with extensive files of newspaper and magazine clippings. There were other books too, over the years, many of them now lost. They have contributed in some way to this essay, but it would be impossible to list them all.

  Certainly, every student of New York must consult several key books: The Epic of New York City by Edward Robb Ellis, Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, The Encyclopedia of New York City edited by Kenneth T. Jackson, The New York Chronology by James Trager, The Iconography of Manhattan Island by I. N. Phelps Stokes. These, along with the diaries of George Templeton Strong and Philip Hone, are indispensable. All can be found in bookshops or libraries.

  But there is a growing list of other books on New York City; many of them were of great help in writing this volume. Each has something new or original to add to our understanding of the city and its people. All provoke the two responses every writer longs for: “I didn’t know that,” and “I never thought of it that way.” I am grateful to all of the authors, living or dead. They helped me see my native place.

  Here is a partial list:

  Adler, Jacob. A Life on the Stage. Translated by Lulla Rosenfeld. New York: Applause, 2001.

  Alpert, Hollis, and Museum of the City of New York. Broadway! 125 Years of Musical Theater. New York: Arcade Books, 1991.

  Amory, Cleveland. Who Killed Society? New York: Harper, 1960.

  Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press, 2001.

  Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of New York. New York and London: A. A. Knopf, 1928.

  Auchincloss, Louis. Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time. New York: Viking, 1971. In addition to his many superb novels, short stories, and essays set in New York City.

  Augustyn, Robert T., and Paul E. Cohen. Manhattan in Maps, 1527-1995. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1997.

  Bascomb, Neal. Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

  Bender, Thomas. The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea. New York: New Press, 2002.

  Berger, Meyer. The Story of the New York Times: 1851-1951. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951.

  Bianco, Anthony. Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America’s Most Infamous Block. New York: William Morrow, 2004.

  Birmingham, Stephen. Our Crowd. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

  ———. The Grandees: America’s Sephardic Elite. Harper & Row, 1971.

  Bliven, Bruce. Under the Guns: New York, 1775-1776. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

  Breines, Paul. Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of America Jewry. New York: Basic Books, 1990.

  Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917; Penguin, 1993.

  Carlson, Oliver. The Man Who Made News: James Gordon Bennett. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942.

  Chapman, John. Tell It to Sweeney: The Informal History of the New York Daily News. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977, 1961.

  Churchill, Allen. Park Row. New York: Rinehart, 1958.

  Cohen, Patricia Cline. The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Knopf, 1998.

  Diner, Hasia R. Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

  Diner, Hasia R., Jeffrey Shandler, Beth S. Wenger, eds. Remembering the Lower East Side. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

  Dunlap, David W. On Broadway: A Journey Uptown Over Time. New York: Rizzoli, 1990.

  Finson, Jon W. The Voices That Are Gone: Themes in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Song. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

 
; Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Crack-up. Edited by Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions, 1993.

  Folpe, Emily Kies. It Happened on Washington Square. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

  Fox, Dixon Ryan. The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York: 1801-1840. New York: Columbia, 1919; Harper and Row, 1965.

  Fried, Albert. The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. Revised edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

  Gilbert, Rodman. The Battery. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936.

  Gilfoyle, Timothy J. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.

  Goldberger, Paul. The Skyscraper. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1982.

  Gordon, Michael A. The Orange Riots: Irish Political Violence in New York City, 1870-1871. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.

  Grace, Nancy. New York: Songs of the City. New York: Billboard Books, 2002.

  Gray, Christopher. New York Streetscapes: Tales of Manhattan’s Significant Buildings and Landmarks. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003.

  Hale, William Harlan. Horace Greeley: Voice of the People. New York: Harper, 1950.

  Harlow, Alvin F. Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street. New York: Appleton, 1931.

  Harris, Luther S. Around Washington Square: An Illustrated History of Greenwich Village. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

  Head, Joel Tyler. The Great Riots of New York: 1712-1873. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.

  Henderson, Mary C. The City & the Theatre: New York Playhouses from Bowling Green to Times Square. Clifton, NJ: James T. White, 1973.

  Homberger, Eric. Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in the Gilded Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

  ———. New York City: A Cultural and Literary Companion. Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2002.

  Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976.

  James, Henry. New York Revisited. New York: Franklin Square, 1994. Also the novel Washington Square (New York: Vintage Books, the Library of America, 1990) and other essays and fictions available from Library of America.

  Koeppel, Gerard T. Water for Gotham: A History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

  Landau, Sarah Bradford, and Carl W. Condit. Rise of the New York Skyscraper: 1865-1913. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

  Lockwood, Charles. Manhattan Moves Uptown: An Illustrated History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.

  Lopate, Phillip. Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan. New York: Crown, 2004.

  Moody, Richard. The Astor Place Riot. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958.

  Morris, James McGrath. The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003.

  Morris, Jan. Manhattan ’45. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

  Motley, Willard. Knock on Any Door. New York: Prentice Hall, 1947.

  O’Connor, Richard. Hell’s Kitchen: The Roaring Days of New York’s Wild West Side. Philadelphia: Old Town, 1958, 1993.

  Patterson, Jerry E. Fifth Avenue: The Best Address. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1998.

  Pritchett, V. S. New York Proclaimed. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965.

  Reed, Henry Hope. Photographs by Edmund V. Gillon Jr. Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York: A Photographic Guide. New York: Dover, 1988.

  Revell, Keith D. Building Gotham: Civic Culture and Public Policy in New York City, 1898-1938. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

  Rosenberg, Charles E. The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, 1866. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

  Sanders, Ronald. The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

  Sante, Luc. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991.

  Schoener, Allon. Portal to America: The Lower East Side 1870-1925. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967.

  Shaw, Irwin. Short Stories: Five Decades. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

  Silver, Nathan. Lost New York. Expanded and updated edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967, 2000.

  Spann, Edward K. The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840-1857. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.

  Taylor, William R., ed. Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

  Traub, James. The Devil’s Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square. New York: Random House, 2004

  Turner, Hy B. When Giants Ruled: The Story of Park Row, New York’s Great Newspaper Street. New York: Fordham University Press, 1999.

  Wald, Lillian D. The House on Henry Street. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1915; New York: Dover Publications, 1971.

  Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson. Father Knickerbocker Rebels: New York City During the Revolution. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1969.

  Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance: An Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, Touchstone, 1998. In addition to her many works of fiction, including Old New York, all available in Library of America editions.

  White, Samuel G., and Elizabeth White. McKim, Mead & White: The Masterworks. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2003.

  Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

  Wolfe, Gerard R. New York, a Guide to the Metropolis: Walking Tours of Architecture and History. New York: McGraw Hill, 1988.

  About the Author

  Pete Hamill has been editor in chief of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News. In his writing for these publications as well as the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Newsday, he has brought the city to life for millions of readers. He is the author of previous bestselling books, including most recently the novels Forever and Snow in August. Currently, he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

  *In most histories, Verrazzano is spelled with two z’s. Only the bridge named in his honor uses the single z. Go figure.(back to text)

  *For a way into this rich history see the classic Black Manhattan by James Weldon Johnson and Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto; Negro New York, 1890-1930 by Gilbert Osofsky. Or start with the Harlem chapter in New York City by Eric Homberger. And the novels of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray are indispensable.(back to text)