When I was a child, raised less than twenty miles from Manhattan, the city was mysterious to me, and dangerous. It was the edge of the world from which some people accidentally — and sometimes not so accidentally — fell. I knew, for instance, the worst thing that could ever happen to a young boy like myself was to let go of his mother’s hand or the back of her coat in Macy’s, Penn Station, or the subway.
Consequently, my first visual memories of New York are associated with my mother’s beaver coat and the interiors of certain buildings where it was OK to relax my grip and look around: Radio City Music Hall, huge and resplendent, its long stage a polychrome prairie peopled with blond women in bright red lipstick, smiling and kicking in unison; the Museum of Natural History, a dim and cavernous domain full of schoolchildren like myself, standing open-mouthed before ascending dinosaur bones or staring intently at mummified animals primping and contending behind glass, the signs of a recent kill nearby. And of course the passing vistas viewed from the safety of my parents’ Pontiac: the sweep of New York’s foggy West Side rising quietly and dreamily across the Hudson River; from the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, a nervous glimpse of the United Nations, a monolithic wedge of green ice at the edge of the charcoal city; the SS United States with its two candy red smokestacks, at anchor beneath a sky full of white clouds.
Later on and a few inches taller, I let go of my mother’s hand, and the city quickly claimed me. Afternoons strolling down Broome Street looking for somebody called Chico who’d sell me illegal firecrackers (one hundred cherry bombs, two hundred ashcans). Just walk around, I was told, he’ll find you. Or nights at Yankee Stadium where Mantle, under scorching lights, roamed the shocking green grass of center field. And other nights in a small crowd in Times Square, listening to a thin, pacing man in a white tuxedo, a Bible in his hand and the fires of Armageddon in his eyes. Wanting to argue, to deepen his argument with my own, and hearing a soft, Spanish voice whisper in my ear: “You want my sister? She’s only fifteen. A virgin. Ten dollars.” Stammering, “No,” and stammering it again ten seconds later when a beefy undercover cop flashed a badge and asked me if that guy had tried to sell me sex. Always unprepared for the beauty and sorrow of the city.
Always unprepared, even years later with a camera in my hands, for the midmorning sun slicing down Mott Street and bouncing off the dead eyes of sea bass cooling in a tub of ice; for the midnight snow falling on West End Avenue, where once, in a blizzard, I watched Miles Davis dance a rumba in a long mink coat; for the tall, smiling man in the porkpie hat and the elegant, slightly stained suit who stood in front of the Plaza Hotel and nodded gently at all who passed, saying, “It’s all over.” Unprepared for the warranted glory of buildings that are simply beautiful; for the dog man on Seventy-seventh who jumped off a bench in the middle of Broadway, barking, and scared me witless; for the word of mouth that keeps artists — exiles from small towns in North Carolina and Ohio — alive; for the Sunday Central Park festivals of bared flesh and sweet motion and Pakistani rock-and-roll; for the hint of danger on small paths and the flicking eyes of lonely men; for the nighttime city seen from high rooftops, its avenues blinking like pinball machines with red and green and yellow and occasionally blue lights. And above all, unprepared for the sheer civility of it all, the vast human contrivance that permitted millions to pass each other and not bump, to live high in the sky and not fall.
But that was later. Of greater interest to me now is the ten-year-old boy (a more delicate age) who didn’t yet know these things, whose eyes, figuratively speaking, were only half open. What was he doing at his father’s office in Rockefeller Center in 1953? I don’t remember. What I do remember is that he and his parents were taking the 5:32 commuter back to Westchester, the train his father took home every night — a journey that began when the express elevator opened its silent, bronze doors at the fifty-third floor. Down it went — so quickly the boy’s stomach turned over — and opened onto a gleaming, marble, underground concourse, a river of shoppers and lawyers and secretaries. Caught in the quick, flowing motion of the crowd, the boy and his parents rushed past shining shop windows filled with stacks of soft, leather luggage and male mannequins dressed in dark, flannel suits and mahogany boxes whose red-velvet interiors sparkled with cutlery; and then, without warning, they descended into the grim underworld of the IND subway with its rumbling floors and dirty, white-tiled walls.
Waiting for the F train, the boy leaned over the tracks, hoping to catch a glimpse of flickering headlights down the tunnel — but only for a second, for he remembered that, in New York City, maniacs push people in front of subways. When the train arrived a minute or two later, its wheels screeching and sparking, the boy and his parents wedged themselves into a car stuffed with men reading newspapers four inches from their faces, arms folded like wings. Since he couldn’t quite reach the swaying overhead grips, he grabbed one of the shiny poles, still warm from other hands, and prayed no sudden lurch would throw him against a stranger. Where should I look? he wondered. How can I avoid seeing up close what isn’t my business? Pitted nose, crumbling eyeliner, yellowed fingernails.
Catching the Grand Central shuttle at Forty-second Street, the boy and his parents climbed a flight of stairs into the terminal itself, where thousands of crisscrossing commuters scrambled for trains and clusters of sporty out-of-towners formed circles around their luggage, their expressions wary and vigilant. As they crossed the immense pavilion, his mother’s high heels a steady ticktock beneath the booming reverberations of the PA, the boy’s head swiveled like a puppet’s, trying to take it all in: blue zodiac ceiling, its thousands of stars blazing; winding stairways with curved balustrades and brass railings; arching windows sixty feet high. And yes, of course, the largest photograph in the world, a Kodachrome slide blown up as big as a movie screen, back lit and hanging high in the dusty air — a flashy glimpse of Alpine ski slopes or the painted red hills of Wyoming.
Passing the information booth — topped with its shiny, golden-globed, four-faced clock — in the middle of the terminal, they headed straight for the north wall of ramps, where impatient men in blue uniforms waved them into the dim and slightly eerie railroad underworld. Here long, gleaming trains hummed on their tracks, biding their time and blowing steam. “New Rochelle, Larchmont, Mamaroneck!” cried the conductor, and after they climbed on and settled in the smoking car, the boy pressed his nose against the window, trying to make sense out of the dimly lit wilderness of tracks and cinders and sad exhalations.
But soon they were hurtling through the tunnel under Park Avenue, pitch-black except for the red and blue lights streaming by like tiny comets — and suddenly an apparition: lit by the fierce, blue-white light of a blowtorch, a welder in monstrous mask and gloves (an Arthurian warrior lost in the shades?), staring blankly at the speeding train. And then to explode into the sudden quiet of early evening, high on elevated tracks that spanned Harlem, high enough to clench the boy’s heart and send through his body a twitch only his mother could see. The train, he feared, was about to plunge off the track and fall to the street below; it was already listing to the left, too heavy for this erector-set contrivance. Yet his father kept reading his newspaper and his mother hummed a tune: good signs — good enough, anyway, to bring the boy back to the real world where only jerks imagine trains fall from viaducts.
Nonetheless, if he found himself dizzy at the edge of the sudden drop, how to describe the unexpected altitude of his own life as the train clattered past a seemingly endless world of soot gray tenements and somber brownstones? Looking down into the dim and shabby cross-town streets filled with teenagers and shoppers and men idling on corners, the boy realized that none of them had white skin. For a second it seemed as if he’d just found something out, something terrible: that people who weren’t white had to live in this part of New York City. Nothing had prepared him for this. Yet now, as the train pulled into the 125th Street Station, straddling the great uptown avenue, he realized that New York City was not one city, but two: on one side of the tunnel, the towering magical city of Rockefeller Center and Grand Central; on the other, this low, second-class, run-down city with hand-lettered signs in store windows and marquees missing light bulbs and stone buildings that were just like the ones his relatives lived in, only sad and grimy and ruined.
Of course, the boy hoped nobody in the low city would get wind of him, sitting high in the air behind a sealed window, gawking. They might ask, angrily, What are you looking at? And what would he say? That he was looking at something he hadn’t yet imagined? Well, how come? The question was too large for him, but at least now he knew it was there to be asked. That was something. Also something was the impression of ramshackle beauty rising out of all this dilapidation, this perilous, makeshift arrangement of people and streets and signs and colors — as if a tropical bird had escaped and was flying through the train, bright blue wings flashing through cigarette smoke.
But he, too, was escaping (blessing and curse!), soon rushing through the East Bronx past hundreds of uncurtained second-story windows exposing bare kitchens lit by dangling bulbs, and a hundred windows filled with the arms and shoulders and faces of women in housecoats and men in T-shirts, leaning out into the gray city air, their expressions caught and lost in a fraction of a second. Who were they? Were these the “have-nots”? Was he a “have”? Were these poor people dangerous? Would they march someday, thousands of them, into Westchester and take his nice white house away? But they looked only sad, not angry, leaning on their windowsills.
Soon enough, the vast human presence thinned out, the passing streets emptying as tenements gave way to attached houses painted in bright colors — pink and yellow and occasionally aquamarine — and then to little homes sitting proudly in their little rectangles of suburban space. Until there was only the train and the dark yards, and porch lights, and the blue dot of a television flashing between curtains — sad to the boy, even then. And behind him, the packed jamboree of the world.
This essay first appeared in New York, New York: Recent Cityscapes, organized by Huston Paschal and published by the North Carolina Museum of Art.
— Ed.
