Ghosts of New York
Pete Hamill gives a tour of Manhattan in 'Downtown'
By Todd Leopold
CNN
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| | FACT BOX | Some of Pete Hamill's favorite New York movies:
- "On the Waterfront" (1954): "Though it was made in New Jersey."
- "King Kong" (1933): "The greatest New York love story. It's why we all care about the Empire State Building -- it was 'humanized' by the giant ape."
- "Mean Streets" (1973) and "Taxi Driver" (1976): Two gritty Martin Scorsese films.
- "Midnight Cowboy" (1969): For showing New York at a time of decay.
- "On the Town" (1949): The classic Gene Kelly-Frank Sinatra musical.
And one of the worst:
- "Texas, Brooklyn and Heaven" (1948): "It was made in my neighborhood. When I saw it, I knew it was one of the worst things ever made."
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(CNN) -- Pete Hamill's Manhattan never gets old.
Ghosts -- of people and buildings and stores and theaters -- exist side-by-side with subway lines and coffee shops and a mass of inhabitants forever in motion.
At the New York island's southern tip, Dutch settlers and British colonials crowd the Battery with customs house clerks and Wall Street stockbrokers. Greenwich Village teems with pamphleteers and black-clad, paint-spattered artists. Fifth Avenue is forever a boulevard of both Victorian mansions and monolithic skyscrapers.
And Times Square, grim, glittery and glorious center of the world, is -- by turns -- a carnival of lights, an eyesore, a Disney World.
As Hamill writes in his new book, "Downtown: My Manhattan" (Little, Brown), "The city is, in a strange way, the capital of nostalgia. ... Neighborhoods are cleared and buildings hauled down and new ones erected, and all that remains is memory."
Memory was one of the reasons Hamill, 69, wrote the book, he says in a phone interview from (of course) downtown Manhattan (Tribeca, to be precise).
"What I wanted to do was just put down what I know about the city while I'm still here," he says. "I have a 6-year-old grandson and I'll be 70 this year, and this way, in 20 years or so, he can pick it up and say, 'So that's what the old fart was talking about.' "
A view of 'Oz'
Hamill, who's been a reporter and columnist for almost every New York newspaper at one time or another -- not to mention a first-rate novelist, sometime TV commentator and occasional raconteur -- was also prodded by the writing of his last book, the novel "Forever," which starred a character granted eternal life as long as he never left Manhattan.
"At the end, I was still frustrated," he says. "There were things I knew I could talk about in my voice but not that of the character's. So it's kind of a companion to 'Forever.' "
In "Downtown," Hamill chronicles New York through its history -- from the 17th-century Dutch founding (as New Amsterdam) to the British takeover to the molding of the 1811 grid plan and on to the present day -- and his own memories.
As a boy from Brooklyn, he looked upon Manhattan as "Oz," a golden place of tall buildings and amazing riches. Later, when he actually crossed the East River to live there in the 1950s, he found a different, more polyglot island, with its Bowery alcoholics, dim jazz and folk clubs and decrepit (but cheap) apartments -- along with the bright lights of Broadway and striding towers of Midtown.
A curious man, he asked questions about the names and places of the past -- Peter Stuyvesant, P.T. Barnum and his American Museum, the Rialto, Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) -- and told the stories of New York's many peoples. It's the people, he adds, who form the strength of the city -- the "New York alloy."
"The alloy is the nature of immigration itself," he says. "I think the true alloy draws in all available metals ... [the people] can all learn from each other."
Besides, he says, with New York's density, residents really have no choice. The impact of immigration is all around, from the multitude of cuisines to the music of language on the subway. To outsiders, he observes, the crowds and clatter can make New York seem like a rude place, but nothing is further from the truth.
"It's just not true," he says. "Abrupt, maybe, but not rude."
A city of 'will'
Hamill misses some of his old stomping grounds -- a map in "Downtown" includes labels for a couple restaurants, his first Manhattan apartment on E. 9th Street and the now-defunct Lion's Head tavern in the West Village -- but he accepts that change is inevitable in Gotham. Indeed, it's the passage of time that's given him the perspective to write "Downtown."
"It's the kind of book I could not have written when I was 30," he says. "I had to have lived there for a long time to see the cycles."
But the lack of attention paid New York's history gets under his skin.
"Too many people take New York for granted," he says. "The primary reason is that history is not taught. That's outrageous in a city where the past is still visible. ... [And] it's not even well marked. I find that appalling."
Look around, he says. Look at the 19th-century architecture of SoHo or the cobblestones that peek out from under the asphalt. Look at what nature has left behind, even today: In "Downtown," he describes Jimi Hendrix's effort to build Electric Lady Studios in the basement of an old theater. Underneath the theater's foundations, Hendrix's architects found the old Minetta Brook, a stream from the days when the island was still a bucolic outpost.
And then there's the expense of the place. When Hamill moved to Manhattan, he recalls, his rent was $65 a month, split with two roommates. Now closet-sized apartments, even in once forbidding parts of the borough, go for thousands. At those prices, young people -- particularly artists -- can't afford Manhattan, and then "we're less of a place," Hamill says.
But he remains optimistic. After all, there were days not so long ago when commentators predicted the city would not survive. But it turned around, and even after the shock of 9/11, is determined to stay vibrant.
"It needs will," he says. "That's what [former mayor Rudolph] Giuliani represented in his first term. ... It was a vivid shift. And once you have will, then you need the boring bureaucrats, the kind of people who put together the anti-crime strategy, to say, 'This is how we will do this.' "
He refers to 42nd Street and Times Square, that much-maligned thoroughfare and its core intersection, as an example. The area has gone from song subject to crime-ridden neighborhood to rejuvenated entertainment district, and though some people lament its "Disney-fication," Hamill sees meaning.
"There's a vivid sense of life in Times Square now because it's not a part of the degradation," he says. To turn it around, "to have that kind of optimism attached to will, makes change anywhere possible."
Little, Brown & Co. is a division of Time Warner, as is CNN.
