Photo Credit Victoria Roberts
Sixteen years ago, on the winds of enormous debt and general disenchantment, I left New York. I had lived there for nearly a decade but was so broke from student loans and other indulgences (like paying rent) that I convinced myself I had no choice but to move to the Midwest. The plan worked. I spent several years in Lincoln, Neb., got out of debt, and then moved to Los Angeles, where I lived for another 13 years.
Now, it seems, I am back. Not on the winds of Hollywood fortune, as is the fantasy and cliché, but on the bitter gusts of marital collapse, which I suppose is a whole other kind of cliché. For kicks, I brought along my St. Bernard.
Like just about everyone else, I find the city as bracingly energetic as it's always been and even more oppressively expensive than it used to be. I love the garrulousness of the citizens, the way conversations with strangers can strike up as easily as flicking a lighter and then extinguish themselves just as fast (not that anyone carries lighters anymore). I love the graceful choreography with which New Yorkers move between personal space and public space, the elegance with which they can share knowing glances with a fellow subway rider and then look away and never look back. I appreciate the silent solidarity with which everyone wants to murder the automated voice in the CVS self-checkout machines. (Don't tell me what to place in the damn bag!)
Continue reading the main story I don't love the big-box stores or the chain restaurants or the slow (or has it actually been blindingly fast?) disappearance of the creative class — and the working class or middle class or even upper middle class for that matter. Minivan taxis with sliding doors depress me profoundly. The TVs inside the taxis enrage me. I do, however, appreciate the credit-card consoles with the built-in tip options. No more rides spent watching the meter while working out a continuous math problem.
Except I hardly ever take cabs anymore. I take the subway everywhere and at all hours, and it's a different scene than it was in the 1990s, especially at night. Back in the days before changes in policing, among other various factors, made the streets expo nentially safer than before (at least for some), and daily subway ridership was about half of what it is now, people pretty much assumed they would be mugged eventually. Platforms were often desolate. Riders knew to hide their jewelry, keep a tight grip on their bags, and try to get in the conductor's car so as not to wind up the lone passenger. So many nights, I remember traveling alone and white-knuckling it all the way home, hoping at least a handful of other passengers would be riding with me, praying that some strung-out dude strutting between moving cars (this didn't become illegal until 2005) wouldn't decide to linger in mine.
I know better than to romanticize the city's more dangerous eras and, believe me, I appreciat e not feeling nervous on the subway. But I find myself longing for the sense of wildness that permeated the city back then. There was a real magic to walking along streets that were crowded not just with masters of the universe but also punk-rock youths with mohawks (real ones, not fauxhawks) and cross-dressing hookers outside the Port Authority and Rastafarian guys whispering, "Smoke, smoke," all over the village. To a person who had come from some far away place or even just the nearby suburbs, that "smoke, smoke" solicitation was more than just an offer to buy marijuana. It was proof that you'd arrived — not only geographically but also existentially.
Today, the person who comes from the suburbs is likely to feel right at home in many parts of New York City. I am well aware of the unoriginality of this lament, especially given how common it is in certain circles now to romanticize the city's grittier, graffiti-covered past. But New York has always been a city whose dominant emotional chord is nostalgia. It's a place where people come when they're young, usually end up leaving, and then spend the rest of their lives reminiscing about in ways that probably bear little resemblance to how things were. Some version of the same pattern also plays out for those who stay. No matter how good the present is working out, the past was always better. And in New York, that means rougher, dirtier, scarier at night.
But in the past, we were always younger, which means the present can't win. Since being back, I've wondered countless times if the fundamental blandness the city seems to exude (though of course it's an energetic blan dness) is a function of its safety and cleanness, or if I've simply become bland and boring. Honestly, how could I not have? I'm 45, not 25. I rarely stay out late. My friends have children and jobs and co-op board meetings. We tend to meet for drinks at 6 p.m., and then only after the requisite rounds of rescheduling. Mostly I walk around my neighborhood with my dog. I don't remember there being this many dogs back in the '90s. Maybe they've driven the rents up, too.
In a strange way, I think what disturbs me most about New York's slightly altered brain chemistry is the way it's created an almost compulsive need for the city to reassert its street cred. A common advertising campaign strategy, especially in subway and bus ads, seems to involve trading on New Yorkers' mythic negativity by reminding them what curmudgeons they still are . "New Yorkers love us and they hate everything," an ad for Oscar health insurance says. "Over eight million people in NYC and we help you avoid them all," the food delivery app Seamless says. It's as if New York, now softened by safety and affluence, is in the position of trying to sell itself back to itself. Don't worry, we're still a bunch of jerks! It's as if we need constant convincing that it's still possible to feel like a New Yorker, even if New York doesn't feel the way it used to.
As for how I feel, I haven't been back long enough to really know. Los Angeles has its absurdities, but over the years, I've come to love it, mostly because of its divine honesty about itself (or what people now call authenticity). Unlike the self-congratulating San Francisco, a city I've taken to calling "the Brooklyn of California," Los Angeles doesn't try to be anything other than what it is. For all the striving that goes on among some of its citizens, the town itself emanates a contentment that is soothingly contagious. New Yorkers will say that is because Southern California weather lulls people into complacency, and they hide in their cars rather than interacting face to face, but that's too easy an answer. For me, the golden-blue late-afternoon light is a near-daily tonic. The wildness is literally wild. Black bears dip into suburban swimming pools, coyotes cross major thoroughfares, and mountain lions dart across isolated stretches of freeway. It's all a sign of environmental apocalypse, I know, but it thrills me nonetheless.
Still, the word thrill seems to have been invented for New York City, and it often comes in the form of the kind of "I can't believe this is my life" moments that sustained me when I was young here. I still get those from time to time, but if I decide to stay, I should probably start dealing with today's New York on its own terms. That would mean not measuring it so unforgivingly against the New York of my youth, not holding it to the impossibly high standards of my nostalgia. The problem is those standards are pretty much the standard of living here.
On the plus side, at least I'm not broke anymore. But I'm working on it.
