A Love Letter to NYC

Dear New York, this is a love letter
To you and how you brought us together
We can’t say enough about all you do

Cause in the city we’re ourselves and electric, too

Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, and Staten
From the Battery to the top of Manhattan
Asian, Middle-Eastern, and Latin
Black, White, New York you make it happen

Beastie Boys, 2004 (“An Open Letter to NYC”)

An Unbreachable Moat

I am not a New Yorker anymore. When people ask me where I live, I don’t lie. I live across the Hudson from New York City, I say, in Jersey City. But then I hear myself telling them, “I live six minutes away from the World Trade Center by ferry.” It still feels strange for me not to be a New Yorker because I lived in the West Village for 20 years and at a memorable time in my life. It is telling that I still feel so much like a New Yorker, although I have spent 50 of my 72 years of my life living outside of the city.

New York City is so near, but now it seems so far. And though I live six minutes away, it feels as though the City is another country, and the Hudson is an unbreachable moat.

Meatpacking in the 1970s

When I look across the river, I remember when I got my first real job there. I found a solo apartment in the 1970s, a tiny and cheap studio in the Meatpacking  District. New York City was the first (and only) place in which anyone pointed a gun at me (long story). New York City was where I discovered historic buildings, cobblestoned streets, and gardens in Greenwich Village. I wandered through Chelsea, the East Village, Downtown, Soho, Noho, the Lower East and Upper West sides, from one river to the other.

I remember spring on Horatio Street, when the cherry blossoms were bursting, and I remember the cold, cold New Year’s Eve when I walked alone while listening to people celebrating in apartments up and down the street at midnight. I never tired of walking, in times both good and bad. Somehow walking in the City always distracted me and then lifted my heart.

A Female Flâneur

I took daily treks to work for years, first from the West Village to Columbus Circle and years later from the West Village to Park Ave. and 70^th Street, crossing through Central Park in blossom, in autumn foliage, and covered in frost.

New York was where I sat with friends dying of AIDs and where I fell in love, got married, and gave birth. I stayed until I couldn’t afford to live there anymore and, after wandering in the wilderness for some years, finally moved to the other side of the Hudson so at least I could lean out my window and see the towers downtown.

Change and Fixed in Time

I haven’t been in the City since mid-February, when the Covid-19 crisis was revving up. I miss going there (or anywhere) because I was so accustomed to taking the PATH or the ferry to New York three or four days a week, perhaps less in the depths of winter when it was too cold to walk or my bum knee was acting up. When the Oculus opened in 2016 my life got easier: I could reach almost any subway through the World Trade Center hub. I could even get to the Q train by switching at 34^th Street—and then the entire Upper East Side opened. And a new West Side downtown number 1 stop appeared, right in the Oculus!

But now I find myself remembering places in New York City as if it has been years since I’ve been there. The Women’s March in 2018 seems decades ago, there’s a haze about visiting a friend for dinner on 13^th Street, Carnegie Hall feels as though it existed in another century (as of course it did; two other centuries, in fact). New York is change, but it is also fixed in time.

The City these days seems like a forbidden fortress with high walls surrounding it, containing so many people I love and can’t see. It is filled with places I visited so many times, and now I realize that I took them for granted—or even complained about them.

Moments Like Frames of a Film

I am remembering past pieces of time: New York City Marble Cemetery on Second Street, founded in 1831; the sesame balls at the bakery next to the IFC film center; the National Ukrainian Home, which was the site of both my wedding celebration in 1990 and a memorial celebration for my brother-in-law in 2015; the reflecting pools with the name of a dear friend killed on 9/11 carved into the marble; the gardens at Jefferson Market Library at the beginning of spring; the chatty lines at Russ & Daughters on East Houston Street. Thousands and thousands of individual moments in time, playing in my mind like the frames of an old film.

Up until now my memories were fueled by past travels and were suffused with nostalgia. I wrote a blog a while ago about how research has shown that our brains are wired to experience episodic memories. These images, sounds, and even smells allow us to mentally time-travel back to a life episode and unearth vivid details about it.

These experiences of episodic memory are basically mind travel. According to neuropsychology professor Lutz Jäncke of the University of Zurich, “We are what we remember, or, more precisely—we are what we remember about ourselves.” He was referring to memories of travel when he wrote this, but somehow my remembrances of my past life wandering New York City are now pushing aside my mind travel in Italy, Spain, or Nepal.

Unimagined and Unimaginable

So, while the distance between the PATH station in Jersey City and the World Trade Center is four miles, now it feels like 400 miles or 4,000 miles. I’m remembering what it was like to elbow my way out of the PATH train and into the Oculus in order to again struggle onto a 4 or 5 train to the East Side. And then another layer appears: I also remember stopping at Krispy Kreme in the same place, but this time it is the old World Trade Center in the years before 9/11. I would grab a donut in order to get myself back across the river.

New York is constantly changing, and sometimes the changes are because of unforeseen—or unimagined or unimaginable—events. Perhaps someday what has happened here will fade in our memories, but I believe that no one alive now will ever forget the moments of fear, shock, and sadness. And right now it feels as if nowhere in the world is safe, on either side of the dark and cold Hudson.