New York, New York, It Used to be a Wonderful Town . . .

Every few days there’s an article or essay in the media about why someone is thinking about leaving New York City, why they’ve already left, or why they think their friends should leave. This is nothing new: the complaining has been going on for years, but at first, when the wealthy pushed out the poor, people said, well, maybe it’s not so bad, now there won’t be as much crime and I won’t have to feel guilty about all the homeless sleeping on the streets. Now that the wealthy have succeeded in pushing out the middle class, the complaining has gotten louder.

I decided to go see the city for myself on what I figured would be my last visit. Mark’s uncle Bernie, the “favorite” uncle, died at the end of the summer after suffering many years with Alzheimer’s. His daughter, Marian, who lives in Los Angeles, and his son Jamie, who still lives in Greenwich Village, asked the family to meet in NYC for an informal memorial: spread Bernie’s ashes, talk about our relationships with him, and have a party with some of his former colleagues and students (he was a professor of psychology at New York University).

The last time Mark and I had been in New York was to see Marian and Jamie’s mother Lorrie, who was dying of lung cancer. Bernie had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and Lorrie was heroically trying to get him into an assisted living facility before she died. If that wasn’t depressing enough for Mark, just walking from 22^th Street, where Bernie and Lorrie lived, down to Jamie’s condo on 10^th street, was more than he could handle. (Bernie and Lorrie had only recently moved to their overpriced apartment on 22^th Street after he retired and they were forced to vacate their NYU apartment on Bleecker Street.) None of the ethnic restaurants Mark used to frequent were still there. None of the record stores or bookstores were still there (not that they’re anywhere). New dorms and office buildings owned by NYU towered over the apartments where lower and middle class people used to live.

Mark was born in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg. While his family moved out of the city when he was very young, he came back often to visit his grandmother, who remained in Williamsburg, to visit Bernie and Lorrie in the Village, and to briefly live on 2^nd Street between Avenue A and B, the lower east side. Those were the days when bathtubs were still in the kitchen and Thompson Square Park was the center of the heroin trade. How he ended up in rural New Mexico is a story unto itself, but he observed the changes to the city on his forays back and joined the chorus of complainers lamenting its lost soul.

So I knew my visit was going to be a bag of mixed emotions, and it was. Getting there set the tone: my early morning flight out of Albuquerque was cancelled and while running to get on another flight I left my cell phone on the TSA conveyor belt. Ten or twenty years ago, flying all over the country or to Mexico or Europe, I managed to do just fine with no cell phone. This time, I panicked. The phone numbers of everyone I was meeting in NYC were in my phone and I knew none of them by heart. Fortunately, I do know my kids’ phone numbers so when I got to Phoenix (I know, I was going the wrong direction) the airline let me use a courtesy phone and I called Jakob, who called Max, and they called and e-mailed Marian and my brother-in-law Mike to let them know I was going to be late.

It took me two hours to get from JFK airport via bus and cab, to Spring Street, in Soho, where we had rented an AirBnB. If you had asked me what an AirBnB was a year ago, I might have guessed it was some kind of gun that shoots air instead of BBs? (Which would have been a nice switch for the Florida State University football players who’ve been running around shooting real BBs at people and property.) But now I know it’s an apartment that Marian had rented online, to house Mike, his partner Betty, Marian and me during our stay in the city. It was actually quite lovely, just below street level, fully furnished with two bedrooms, large living room, kitchen, and bathroom, except that the toilet didn’t flush all that well, there was no hot water in the kitchen, and on Friday and Saturday nights, our first two there, every hipster in Soho was out partying. Marian and I, trying to sleep in the rooms closest to the street, ended up wearing our iPod ear buds with pillows over our heads (after dropping a few Valium as well).

Was it really that long ago that the streets of Soho or Noho or Lodo—I have no idea what distinguishes these neighborhoods from one another—were lined with factory warehouses sheltering a few galleries and lofts where struggling painters set up shop? People were already starting to complain of gentrification back then, but my friend Lucy Lippard got a great deal on a loft that, if I recall correctly, cost under $10,000.

There was a real estate office a couple of doors down from our apartment. As out-of-towners are wont to do, we looked at the prices of places listed in the window. Now, I remember being flabbergasted by prices in Telluride, Colorado, and Point Reyes, California, but let me tell you that in the Spring Street window there was no listing for anything less than a million dollars. Actually, the lowest price there was $1.4 million for a 450 square-foot condo. Four hundred and fifty square feet. That’s the size of my living room in El Valle.

Onward to Brooklyn.

 Bernie grew up in an apartment on Driggs Avenue, in Williamsburg. On Saturday we took the subway into Brooklyn and found the apartment, still there although no doubt renovated, at the juncture of what appeared to be a Latino neighborhood and the beginnings of gentrified Williamsburg. As we walked further along we entered a re-creation of Soho: bars, restaurants, twenty and thirty somethings out on the street partying down. At a bar we bought cocktails for $13 and small, finger foods for significantly more. It all tasted great, which it better, in what must be a cutthroat market.

Bernie and Lorrie first lived together in Crown Heights, on the far side of Prospect Park from Park Slope, headquarters of the baby industrial complex and the authorial Jonathans. That’s where we headed on Sunday, to scatter Bernie’s ashes comingled with some of Lorrie’s that their kids had held onto. The scene in the park could have been anywhere USA: ducks begging for handouts from kids on shore; couples holding hands; joggers with kids and dogs. When I’m in these environments, though, full of people who obviously have lots of money, I wonder who they are, how they got there, and what they have to do to stay there. One of the complainers who wrote an editorial in the Daily News had a different take, however: The ones jogging in the park and feeding the ducks are probably doing the only fun things they can afford instead of going to Yankee Stadium or Madison Square Garden or the Met or out to eat because all their money goes towards paying their rent and buying food.

We ended the day at a lovely Italian restaurant that Bernie and Lorrie used to frequent, around the corner from their apartment on Bleecker. There, colleagues and former students told stories and shared memories, and the family sat around afterwards with our own stories. The trip home wasn’t much easier than the one going, but the cab driver who took me to Grand Central Station to catch the bus to JFK found out I was from a rural village in New Mexico and asked me all kinds of questions about what it was like: Did I grow things, did I have animals, how many people lived in my village, etc. And every time I answered he sighed and said, “Oh, that’s so nice,” or “Oh, I wish I could live there.” I asked him how long he’d been in New York: 40 years he said.

I had to wait until the next day to get my phone back from the TSA people who had it at their headquarters in Albuquerque. Then I drove home, and as the cab driver had put it so simply, it’s so nice—damn nice—to be in El Valle.