Eleanor Lerman's Blog
January 10, 2023
THE FIFTY-FIVE MINUTE CITY
THE FIFTY-FIVE MINUTE CITY
by Eleanor Lerman
FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD
That was the headline of the New York Daily News on October 30, 1975, referring to then-president Gerald Ford’s refusal to help rescue New York City from a fiscal crisis that threatened to drive the city into a catastrophic bankruptcy. The Republican-led federal government looked at New York City and decided that this bastion of liberal politics, with its free city university and concerted efforts to provide services to its neediest citizens, deserved no help from the rest of the country. Eventually, the city managed to get itself out of the hole with the help of the state, the city’s labor unions, and debt management assistance from its banks, among other measures. But it seems that the first thing outsiders gleefully tell the city when it encounters financial, social, or other problems is something along the lines of See, we told you so, you liberal crybaby lefties; the party is over and we hope you’re down for good this time.
I’ve thought about that Daily News headline many times during the past few years, first during the worst of the pandemic when the pundit class—most of whom live outside the five boroughs and their environs—once again declared the city dead. “Everyone” was fleeing they said, though it was clear that “everyone” actually meant only those with the financial means to decamp to their summer homes in the Hamptons or who had a bank account hefty enough to support buying a house in the suburbs. Businesses would never come back, these same pundits declared. New York City would be an empty island of silent, vacant skyscrapers waiting to collapse under their own weight.
Really? What I’d like to ask these naysayers now is whether they’ve seen the city lately. If so, they couldn’t deny what a joyous place it was, for instance, during the recent New York City Marathon or the Thanksgiving Day Parade. And how vibrant and busy it is on any given weekday when once again, commuters are back to work in the city, tourists are wandering around Times Square, and you need a reservation to get into the Children’s Zoo in Central Park because so many parents want to take their kids to pet the animals. The pandemic is not over but the out-of-control fear of it has mostly abated and it is being dealt with in a realistic manner, without panic, and things, in general, are looking up.
Or they would be, if now the city was not once again being written off as unlivable, this time because of crime and violence. That’s pretty much what the New York Post recently said with an article titled, “American Horror Story is right—New York City is a terrifying hellhole.” The Post was referring to the new season of the FX series which, the newspaper declared, correctly depicts the city as “awash in actual, palpable dread.” Well, no, it’s not. What the city is, is a big, urban metropolis with big, urban problems that are real and often heartbreaking. The rents are impossible, the subway can be dangerous, decent healthcare is unavailable unless you have expensive insurance, there are many people living in the city’s neighborhoods under terrible conditions and without hope for better days. The list of things that need to be fixed, as always, goes on and on. New York can be a tough and unforgiving place. And yet, to me—and I’m sure I’m not alone—it’s still Wonderland. It’s still Oz, still the shining city on a hill and it always will be.
I was born in Manhattan, grew up in the Bronx, and spent the late 1960s—my teenage years—in Rockaway, when that peninsula sticking off the end of Queens was not a surfer’s paradise dotted with taco stands and expensive condos but rather a genuine hellhole, devastated by unrealized plans for urban renewal that left it a beachfront wasteland of empty lots, horrific nursing homes, and housing projects built to be dumping grounds for the poor. I watched Rockaway recover from afar, because in 1970, when I was eighteen, I decamped for the Village, where I lived for many years. My first apartment was in a crumbling tenement in the East Village (not far from East 7th Street where my father had lived as a boy with my immigrant grandparents), and the monthly rent was $50. I soon moved to the West Village and lived in a tiny apartment above the harpsichord kit workshop where I was the manager. I was fleeing a difficult family situation and left home with barely a high school diploma; the way I got hired was by answering an ad for “someone to sweep up and do odd jobs” in the place. My intention was to be a writer, so I followed the trail of the Beats and the Hippies and all the artists who went before me, certain that I’d find my way. I did, though that way turned out to be a very long and incredibly hard. Still, I did manage to survive on very little money and with very little formal education. I do understand, though, that the life I lived back then is probably not possible anymore. Nowadays, you need money—lots of it—to live in the city and romantic dreams of being an artist with a studio in Soho or a cozy garret in the Village are unrealistic. The city is not the same place that it was when I was running around in the 70s and 80s—but it was dangerous back then, too. Crime was rampant, the subways were covered in graffiti, Times Square was a dungeon of porn shops and triple-X movie theaters, and police corruption was rampant. (In the Village, rumor had it that the cops could be bought off with packages of steaks and chops from the meatpacking district when meat actually was the main business being conducted around Little West 12th Street.)
There were also other dangers. I well remember the looting and riots during the city-wide blackout in the summer of 1977. It was frightening, listening to the radio and hearing what was going on further uptown, but I felt safe on the streets of the Village. I walked over to the Christopher Street pier where people were playing music and stargazing; because it was so dark, the night sky was lit up only by the stars and it was astonishingly beautiful. Yes, scary stuff was going on but the sky was decked out in diamonds and the denizens of Greenwich Village were sitting on the pier with their friends and their dogs, asking each other the names of the constellations.
I am 70 years old now and I live in Long Beach, on Long Island, fulfilling my own need to heal my personal hellhole years in Rockaway by making my home in a beach town where most of the time, peace reigns. Where I have a happy marriage and the time and space to go on writing. But until a few years ago, I took the fifty-five-minute journey in to the city on the Long Island Railroad every day to my job as an editor in mid-town Manhattan. I don’t go into the city on a daily basis anymore but that fifty-five-minute train ride is still an important and often-used connection to what, for me, remains the best place in the world. When I travel into the city now, I feel like I’m checking up on an old friend, and as far as I can tell, my friend is still doing fine. Yes, there are lots of really bad things going on and there are lots of reasons for that, most hardly endemic to New York City alone. But the city is an easy target; it’s easy to write catchy headlines about its supposed decline, it’s once-again imminent collapse into chaos and ruin, but I don’t believe any of it. Maybe that’s only because I still remember walking back to my apartment that summer morning in 1977 and looking uptown and downtown, then east, towards Queens, watching the lights come on again all across the city.
Write all the headlines you want, fellas. Tell us we’re dead and gone, and what you’ll hear back is laughter while we turn the lights back on again. That’s what we do here in our tough, pugnacious, diverse, ugly and beautiful and much beloved city, our friend to the end.
When it’s dark, we look to the stars. And when the lights go on, as they always will, we carry on.
__________
Eleanor Lerman is the author of numerous award-winning novels and collections of poetry. Her most recent book is a collection of short stories entitled “The Game Café: Stories of New York City in Covid Time” (Mayapple Press, 2022).
by Eleanor Lerman
FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD
That was the headline of the New York Daily News on October 30, 1975, referring to then-president Gerald Ford’s refusal to help rescue New York City from a fiscal crisis that threatened to drive the city into a catastrophic bankruptcy. The Republican-led federal government looked at New York City and decided that this bastion of liberal politics, with its free city university and concerted efforts to provide services to its neediest citizens, deserved no help from the rest of the country. Eventually, the city managed to get itself out of the hole with the help of the state, the city’s labor unions, and debt management assistance from its banks, among other measures. But it seems that the first thing outsiders gleefully tell the city when it encounters financial, social, or other problems is something along the lines of See, we told you so, you liberal crybaby lefties; the party is over and we hope you’re down for good this time.
I’ve thought about that Daily News headline many times during the past few years, first during the worst of the pandemic when the pundit class—most of whom live outside the five boroughs and their environs—once again declared the city dead. “Everyone” was fleeing they said, though it was clear that “everyone” actually meant only those with the financial means to decamp to their summer homes in the Hamptons or who had a bank account hefty enough to support buying a house in the suburbs. Businesses would never come back, these same pundits declared. New York City would be an empty island of silent, vacant skyscrapers waiting to collapse under their own weight.
Really? What I’d like to ask these naysayers now is whether they’ve seen the city lately. If so, they couldn’t deny what a joyous place it was, for instance, during the recent New York City Marathon or the Thanksgiving Day Parade. And how vibrant and busy it is on any given weekday when once again, commuters are back to work in the city, tourists are wandering around Times Square, and you need a reservation to get into the Children’s Zoo in Central Park because so many parents want to take their kids to pet the animals. The pandemic is not over but the out-of-control fear of it has mostly abated and it is being dealt with in a realistic manner, without panic, and things, in general, are looking up.
Or they would be, if now the city was not once again being written off as unlivable, this time because of crime and violence. That’s pretty much what the New York Post recently said with an article titled, “American Horror Story is right—New York City is a terrifying hellhole.” The Post was referring to the new season of the FX series which, the newspaper declared, correctly depicts the city as “awash in actual, palpable dread.” Well, no, it’s not. What the city is, is a big, urban metropolis with big, urban problems that are real and often heartbreaking. The rents are impossible, the subway can be dangerous, decent healthcare is unavailable unless you have expensive insurance, there are many people living in the city’s neighborhoods under terrible conditions and without hope for better days. The list of things that need to be fixed, as always, goes on and on. New York can be a tough and unforgiving place. And yet, to me—and I’m sure I’m not alone—it’s still Wonderland. It’s still Oz, still the shining city on a hill and it always will be.
I was born in Manhattan, grew up in the Bronx, and spent the late 1960s—my teenage years—in Rockaway, when that peninsula sticking off the end of Queens was not a surfer’s paradise dotted with taco stands and expensive condos but rather a genuine hellhole, devastated by unrealized plans for urban renewal that left it a beachfront wasteland of empty lots, horrific nursing homes, and housing projects built to be dumping grounds for the poor. I watched Rockaway recover from afar, because in 1970, when I was eighteen, I decamped for the Village, where I lived for many years. My first apartment was in a crumbling tenement in the East Village (not far from East 7th Street where my father had lived as a boy with my immigrant grandparents), and the monthly rent was $50. I soon moved to the West Village and lived in a tiny apartment above the harpsichord kit workshop where I was the manager. I was fleeing a difficult family situation and left home with barely a high school diploma; the way I got hired was by answering an ad for “someone to sweep up and do odd jobs” in the place. My intention was to be a writer, so I followed the trail of the Beats and the Hippies and all the artists who went before me, certain that I’d find my way. I did, though that way turned out to be a very long and incredibly hard. Still, I did manage to survive on very little money and with very little formal education. I do understand, though, that the life I lived back then is probably not possible anymore. Nowadays, you need money—lots of it—to live in the city and romantic dreams of being an artist with a studio in Soho or a cozy garret in the Village are unrealistic. The city is not the same place that it was when I was running around in the 70s and 80s—but it was dangerous back then, too. Crime was rampant, the subways were covered in graffiti, Times Square was a dungeon of porn shops and triple-X movie theaters, and police corruption was rampant. (In the Village, rumor had it that the cops could be bought off with packages of steaks and chops from the meatpacking district when meat actually was the main business being conducted around Little West 12th Street.)
There were also other dangers. I well remember the looting and riots during the city-wide blackout in the summer of 1977. It was frightening, listening to the radio and hearing what was going on further uptown, but I felt safe on the streets of the Village. I walked over to the Christopher Street pier where people were playing music and stargazing; because it was so dark, the night sky was lit up only by the stars and it was astonishingly beautiful. Yes, scary stuff was going on but the sky was decked out in diamonds and the denizens of Greenwich Village were sitting on the pier with their friends and their dogs, asking each other the names of the constellations.
I am 70 years old now and I live in Long Beach, on Long Island, fulfilling my own need to heal my personal hellhole years in Rockaway by making my home in a beach town where most of the time, peace reigns. Where I have a happy marriage and the time and space to go on writing. But until a few years ago, I took the fifty-five-minute journey in to the city on the Long Island Railroad every day to my job as an editor in mid-town Manhattan. I don’t go into the city on a daily basis anymore but that fifty-five-minute train ride is still an important and often-used connection to what, for me, remains the best place in the world. When I travel into the city now, I feel like I’m checking up on an old friend, and as far as I can tell, my friend is still doing fine. Yes, there are lots of really bad things going on and there are lots of reasons for that, most hardly endemic to New York City alone. But the city is an easy target; it’s easy to write catchy headlines about its supposed decline, it’s once-again imminent collapse into chaos and ruin, but I don’t believe any of it. Maybe that’s only because I still remember walking back to my apartment that summer morning in 1977 and looking uptown and downtown, then east, towards Queens, watching the lights come on again all across the city.
Write all the headlines you want, fellas. Tell us we’re dead and gone, and what you’ll hear back is laughter while we turn the lights back on again. That’s what we do here in our tough, pugnacious, diverse, ugly and beautiful and much beloved city, our friend to the end.
When it’s dark, we look to the stars. And when the lights go on, as they always will, we carry on.
__________
Eleanor Lerman is the author of numerous award-winning novels and collections of poetry. Her most recent book is a collection of short stories entitled “The Game Café: Stories of New York City in Covid Time” (Mayapple Press, 2022).
