Piecework

I suppose that 30 years from now (as close to us as we are to 1958), when I’ve been safely tucked into the turf at the Green Wood, someone will write in these pages about a Lost New York that includes Area and the Mudd Club and Nell’s, David’s Cookies and Aca Joe and Steve’s ice cream. Someone might mourn Lever House or Trump Tower or the current version of Madison Square Garden. Anything is possible. But if so, I hope that at least one old and wizened New Yorker will reach for a pen and try to explain about our lost glories: and mention spaldeens and trolleys and — if he can make it clear, if he has the skill and the memory — even Willie Mays.

NEW YORK,

December 21-28, 1987

THE SECRET CITY

Every day, we move through the giant city on the sad or preposterous or exhilarating errands of our lives. Most of the time, we see little. We are New Yorkers, after all, and I it is our pride that we think we know the city. Certainly each of us is outfitted with an interior map, a template of the city’s geography. The sun rises in Brooklyn and sets in New Jersey. The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down. We know where the bridges are, and the tunnels; we understand how they lash together the stony islands of the New York archipelago. We are aware of the great markers — the Empire State Building and Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall, Wall Street and Yankee Stadium, all those and a few dozen more. We are filled with information about our restaurants, theaters, museums, bookstores, music, scandals, celebrities, gangsters, and home-run hitters. We are from here. We know.

And yet, if we stay around long enough, if we try to see without the blinders imposed by work and fear and habit, we discover one terrible fact: We know almost nothing. New York can serve as home, workshop, prison, or bazaar. It can dazzle or defeat us. But it never yields up all of its secrets. In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.

Obviously, all attempts at imposing symmetry are doomed. But it can be said with some modest confidence that for each of us there are two New Yorks: the city we think we know and the Secret City. The first is inhabited by friends and enemies, relatives and acquaintances, and to some extent by the public figures of the time; we understand its rules and protocols; we discuss it at dinner or on the telephone or in bed.

But the Secret City is barely glimpsed. Often it is as different from the familiar city as the New York of Louis Auchincloss is from the New York of John Gotti. There are some doors in this city that are forever closed to strangers; some are among the satrapies of the Upper East Side; some are in Ridgewood. You see a New Yorker who has established dominion over one of the great Wall Street firms; he has done his work with honor and responsibility, and now he and his family lead gilded lives. In the precincts where he works, he is treated with respect, a certain awe, and even, among those who depend upon him for advancement, a small amount of fear. But his accomplishments, his reputation, his existence mean nothing at all to this other New Yorker, a good carpenter from Fort Greene, who makes objects of wood that might be around long after the first man is dead. For each man, the other lives in the Secret City.

Each day, the citizens of these hidden worlds pass one another in the street and almost never connect. Here we are on West 47th Street on a Tuesday afternoon plump with spring. Out on the sidewalks are the grandees and supplicants of the world of diamonds, gold, precious stones; they deal, trade, bargain with one another; they decode fresh news from Antwerp and the Urals. And moving among them is a professor of Romance languages, now turning, abruptly adjusting his stride, then angling through traffic toward the Gotham Book Mart. He sidesteps the elated young accountant from Forest Hills who is carrying on his shoulder a brand-new VCR from 47th Street Photo.

As he enters the splendid old bookstore, he is brushed by the messenger from the commercial-art studio, rushing to pick up photostats. He doesn’t even see the professional wrestler who is going to consult his back doctor. All inhabit separate worlds, different cities. And if it’s impossible even to know 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth, how could anyone ever hope to know the great sprawling anarchic city itself?

One can’t. Sometimes I wander the city without plan or destination, cooling out after a prolonged bout of work. And if I’m now too old to be surprised, I can be intrigued. More than once, I’ve found myself on West End Avenue, staring up at the old pre-war buildings. They are like vertical neighborhoods, the most obvious symbols of the vertical city, with their penthouses snug and distant at the apex. And I try to imagine the lives lived within their walls.