Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Pete Hamill says:
“The New York version of nostalgia is not simply about lost buildings or their presence in the youth of the individuals who lived with them. It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same. Tuesday turns into Wednesday and something valuable is behind you forever. An ‘is’ has become a ‘was.’ Whatever you have lost, you will not get is back; not that much-loved brother, not that ball club, not that splendid bar, not that place where you once went dancing with the person you later married. Irreversible change happens so often in New York that the experience affects character itself. New York toughens its people against sentimentality by allowing the truer emotion of nostalgia. Sentimentality is always about a lie. Nostalgia is about real things gone. Nobody truly mourns a lie.”
Pete Hamill is one of the reasons I became a writer. I read his work (newspaper columns, the novel “Flesh and Blood") in my teens and was inspired by the blue collar lyricism. The above quote is from his latest book, “Downtown: My Manhattan.” A must-read...from where I sit.
For the scoop on the book from where his publisher sits, please click on “more” below.
In “Downtown,” Hamill leads us on an unforgettable journey through the city he loves, from the island’s southern tip to Forty-second Street, combining a moving memoir of his days and nights in New York with a passionate history of its most enduring places and people. From the Battery’s traces of the early port to Washington Square’s ghosts of executed convicts and well-heeled Knickerbockers; from the Five Points, once the most dangerous and squalid slum in America, to the mansions of the robber barons on “the Fifth Avenue”; from the Bowery of the 1860s, the vibrant heart of the city’s theater world, to the Village of the 1960s, with its festival-like street life, this is downtown as we’ve never seen it before. Hamill weaves his own memories of Manhattan with the liveliest moments from its past, and points out the hints of that past living on in the city of today, fueling the ever-present nostalgia of its inhabitants.
Hamill introduces us to the New Yorkers who have left indelible marks: Peter Stuyvesant and John Jacob Astor, Stanford White and George Templeton Strong, Edith Wharton and Henry James, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, W. H. Auden and Allen Ginsberg, Boss Tweed and Fiorello La Guardia, Jimi Hendrix and Thelonious Monk, and scores of others. And he takes us to the eateries, saloons, theaters, movie houses, bookstores, and street corners they-and he-once frequented, whether still standing or existing only in memory.
Through the city’s transformations, the pulse of Pete Hamill’s brilliant voice melds with the pulse that drives New York - that mixture of daring, greed, anger, rebellion, hope, entrepreneurialism, and longing that never fades. Written by native son who has lived through some of New York City’s most historic moments, “Downtown” is an extraordinary celebration of the magnificent, haunted place that Hamill continues to call home, and that people from all over the country and the world have come to call their own.
Copyright © 2005-2007 Mickey Z.
