Memory City by Melissa Holbrook Pierson
The city had a weight. The force on the body, constant but also immeasurable, was exerted by both the abstract concept and the wholly physical ache of yearning.
Even when I still lived there, I knew that if ever a place embodied longing for the lost, it was New York. Desire was the infectious agent in the air, the vector of this disease every last window above street level. I passed, and kept passing, as they multiplied overhead. Tenements, lofts, high-rises. Behind each, the life I wanted but was never going to have. Wealth, beauty, creative genius, thrills of such unimaginable variegation the synapses burned. Behind the impassive glass concentrated the memory of two hundred years of literature, empire-making, deals and deaths, life and dinners. I wanted in.
For a place that is constrained by geography – boroughs that are islands, water the only ground over which to advance new frontiers (practically impossible, it still happens, because New York is also a place of miracles) – the city is mystically elastic. Hope, that which follows close upon desire, is expansive: Maybe I will get there yet! Time balloons. Lunch hours encompass continental explorations, avenues and side streets charted like rivers and mountain ranges on a map of the new world.
One walked forward into the past. Into the lunch room unchanged since 1921, with waitresses also drawn from that time.[1] Into one’s own history: a small frisson—comfort as well as queasy horror— that I might be reliving my mother’s life just by sitting on a stool at the counter of Chock Full o’ Nuts and ordering a cream cheese on date-nut bread. (She had also moved to the same city from the same Midwestern backwater after the same college, but she returned home, defeated, after a brief career at the same employer where I would also soon get a job.) Sometimes whole decades of New York history seemed to be running simultaneously,[2] a shadow following so close on your heels it pulls your shoe off so that you look quickly back to see who is there. No one; just a doppelgänger. Let’s nip in to Lord & Taylor and peruse the sales racks; after an in-depth course of study lasting the whole Fall term, they would finally yield something in tissue silk that flew far above an editorial assistant’s salary, the tag now bearing prices slashed successively from heaven to earth by the red pen of a sales clerk. See, New York was the kind of place that so fleetly elevated you to the sixteenth floor it was now you, suddenly, looking out of that window.[3]
Here is where I learned to shape-shift. High and low, sometimes in the same day. Lunch at the automated sushi joint near the office, where small white plates circulated on a conveyor belt. Hesitate, and you lost the tamago. But lo! It comes again! Could I afford three plates, or just two? There was no hiding from the voiceless waiters. You turned on your stool to catch the disdainful eye of one. In a single swift move, click click click the plates were stacked and some slashing shorthand on a check, ripped off and fluttering toward the tray where you caught it midair, then skulked to the cashier, somehow ashamed.[4]
Only in the annals of astronomy is the vastness of the New York night written, barely. This was the time of sequential transfigurations, or at least of passing. Outside a velvet rope, where a line of couples and groups stretched down the block to the vanishing point, one learned how to gather oneself up. It was, as I imagine, the feeling of a Corsair pilot in 1944, as the fighter began to shudder. He pushed the stick forward. I walked past. Right up to the latter day Heimdall guarding the gates of Valhalla. I barely smiled; no good to give too much away. My stomach turned, slightly, but nothing showed on my face. He looked to his compatriot, who looked at me. At a short nod, the rope was unclipped. I slipped through and it was clipped back as quickly. As I ascended, I sensed the perturbation in the crowd behind me. Yeah, well. They were behind me. I was in. I tried to memorize the feeling for future use: I belong here. At that moment a pulsating universe took me into its supernova. The sound came from everywhere at once, primarily the floor. It entered by way of the calcaneus and on up to the femur to concentrate in the chest. The bass pounded like a heart made external and big as Tier 3, Limelight, Pyramid.
At some point I made my way out a back door into the cold night air again. Bent over, flipped my long hair in front of me, and felt the winter on my wet neck. I stayed that way a long time.
I did this outside such a deep list of clubs that finally I was no longer able to remember if I had ever been to Danceteria[5] or if it was my friends’ recollections that later tangled with mine. In the city’s strange ether, membranes thinned to transparency: there was no longer any ‘no’ between you and a stranger, or the year this was and another age, or the status you woke up in this morning and the one you would assume by dinnertime. One foot in your own life, the next step already reaching toward another’s. Whose? Yours? The person you were becoming? The person who passed you on the subway stairs?
Even my dreams reversed places with whatever I was used to calling reality. The pressure of those shorelines, rivers to either side, harbor below, pushed relentlessly on the notion of space. The crown prince of New York was real estate. Everyone thought about it, continuously. I coveted every place I entered, re-casting myself from the girl who lived in a mouse-and-roach-infested three-room floor-through with dropped ceilings so low my taller guests had to take an immediate seat (and there were only three). There was dinner with the editor of a famous literary monthly in her Upper West Side apartment. It had a rolling library ladder to attain the tops of bookshelves that lined a double-height living room. In the hall off the dining room I found the oak panel that was actually a door to that mythical space known as a powder room – just for guests – so I could sob unseen over an imagined slight, or perhaps the knowledge that I would never have two-story bookshelves. There were visits with the parents of my college roommate in the Park Avenue apartment so large I got lost in it; the maid’s room was off the kitchen but of course their maid only came in during the day so it was empty. They took me to the Rainbow Room for Easter. It now hosts New Year’s Eve parties at $1,650 per person. Someone – a friend of a friend of a friend (the access routes to lofty precincts as likely to disappear as soon as they had appeared) – lived in the octagonal cupola atop a building in Tribeca, windows all around and the breeze slowly animating a tropical rainforest in pots on the rooftop patio outside. That was real estate, all right: the entire sky. I knew someone who lived in the black-and-white tiled bathroom of what had once been a grand place — or did I dream that?
It was in the middle of the night that all remaining seams came fully undone. I dreamed of the places in which I really lived, none of them the succession of scabby, unrenovated tenements that I actually inhabited. Even if these had smelled of lemon polish and one could hear the Miele vacuum faintly in the distance as the maid did her daily diligence on the hand-knotted silk orientals, I would have dreamed of spaces with still higher ceilings. How was it I did not know there was a thousand-square-foot walnut-paneled library, furnished in leather club chairs and Tiffany table lamps, two-story-tall windows hung with olive-green velvet drapes, behind the closet shoved under the staircase in my $450-a-month slum? How did I miss the fact that there was a Moroccan-tiled Olympic-size swimming pool in the basement that I was unaware sat below the fossilized kitchen linoleum? I can see these vast echoing spaces more vividly now than I can recall the four apartments in which I had truly lived, not forgetting the sorry rentals of three boyfriends.
Once I dreamed of visiting an office – my point of view on entrance apparently that of Orson Welles in 1941, with a fifty-foot depth of field to the fireplace and oak desk at the other end – and when I woke felt strange. I wanted nothing so much as to return, yet it was more unreachable a destination than Jupiter’s moons: It was locked in me.
A few years later, flipping through a magazine, suddenly there it was. Impossible. The place I had visited in a dream. But if it was in New York Magazine, nothing could be more real. In Grand Central, the epic cathedral of an office had been closed away for four decades, since the death of its occupant, John Campbell. Now it was being turned into a bar (after the application of $1.5 million in developer’s lucre, a mere portion of the worth of the massive Persian rug that had once covered its floor and had disappeared).[6] Campbell had died the year I was born.
Not only did New York elide years and lives, possibilities and memories; it ripped the last veil separating the real from the immaterial. I moved there the fall after college. Actually, I didn’t; I could only afford somewhere called Hoboken. This was not, I belatedly learned, a neighborhood in Manhattan.
Hoboken was separated from the only place that mattered by a river, the Hudson. One simply had to lean at a 45-degree angle into the freezing wind tunnel of the streets – by my third apartment there, almost a mile of them, still farther into the deep ruins of this forgotten old town – and think hard of the PATH station. Down the stairs the pillowy embrace of warm air awaited. All you had to do was slip a dollar bill into the turnstile. One train headed to the World Trade Center, the other to Christopher, 9th, 14th, 23rd, 33rd Streets. Given the laggardly schedule, if you heard a train coming while still cursing at a limp bill, there was no choice. You jumped over the gate and flew down the stairs to the platform. Your punishment was frequently to throw yourself onto the departing train only to find, after the doors closed, that it was heading to Newark.
Our small tribe of Hoboken non-natives huddled together for warmth at the few going concerns in our adopted town, Maxwell’s preeminent among them. The nature of Hoboken as hovering psychically somewhere near that line, spelled out in tile in the middle of the Holland Tunnel, between New York and New Jersey was captured in The New Yorker’s squib on the small but influential music club: BEST CLUB IN NEW YORK — EVEN THOUGH IT'S IN NEW JERSEY. You didn’t necessarily know anything about the band you were going to hear on Friday night, but you went because it was Maxwell’s and because it was always interesting, if occasionally atonal. Plus it was the only place open in a town that pulled down metal shutters en masse no later than 6 pm. After the event you might discover you’d witnessed a segment of rock history that would be canonized in a music writer’s book about the ‘scene’. It turned out you were living in important times, in an important place.[7]
The act of rushing down the long passageway at the 9th Street station, the one in which I found myself at the end of uncountable nights of after-parties and clubs, has made the odor of roasting lamb with rosemary and garlic – courtesy of the exhaust vents from the Balducci’s above the station[8] – a touchstone for a thousand memories.
A thousand more remain buried where I can’t quite get at them. I don’t know what cabinet in me is big enough to store them, but where else could they have gone? They might be found bound to my molecules, like those pieces of exploded stars, thirteen billion years old, in the mineral atoms of my blood. It is no less impossible to think of myself as composed of the residue of ten and a half million minutes lived in New York City as of the Big Bang: all life traced back to these. Now the memories comprise the only me it is possible to be after so many years in New York, every minute of which is worth a whole day somewhere else. I brushed unknowingly against greatness – the famous and brilliant whose sweat was flung onto my own skin in the loud dimness of the Mudd Club, CBGB, Madame Rosa’s – and the not so great, finding much later I had probably jammed my elbow into the back of the man I was years later to marry and then divorce . How much happened in the dark, at night.
We rushed to, and into, it all. Life’s directory was The Village Voice,[9] its listings commensurately thick with possibility, inked and over-inked every week in hope. We did not precisely understand what hope it was, only that we were awash in it. It was so big that it could not have a name, just as the place we lived in refused all demarcations. But an engine was running perpetually in the background, its sound barely noticeable for its constancy.
We were all looking for someone. Through all the gallery openings, film lectures, clubs, gang dinners, writing alone in cafes, parties after which you’d stand on the platform at 3 am exhausted out of your mind, wishing it was all over, or at least that you hadn’t missed a train five minutes before. Looking for someone was not the reason we went out – the magnificence of New York was the reason we went out, the peripheral consciousness that we were living at some high point of cultural history, and were therefore participating in its manufacture – but it was the hum that ran night and day underneath our feet, like the subway below the apparently solid ground on which we walked. We were looking for someone so we could stop going out. We would not leave New York, for that was not possible. New York would leave us.
After eleven years in Hoboken, I moved to Brooklyn. The next ten years, I see only now, comprised a long process of untethering myself from longing, from New York.
The original people of New York were the Lenape Indians. It is not necessary to offer details, because their story is the repeated story of every aboriginal people in the land we call ours: war, treaty, broken treaty, sale of place that could not really be such when they had no concept for ownership of their heaven, the earth. Nonetheless, it was bought for sixty guilders. Then they had to leave.
Like all who go, they left something behind. Broadway, the pathway worn by millennia of soft-shod footsteps, was overlaid by the histories of those who came later, and those who came later yet. But because it is New York, the sound of the Indians’ going can still be heard, simultaneous with the clangor of sequential millions along their route. Somewhere, perhaps even now in someone’s dream, it is 1983 and a young woman is climbing the steps from the subway, looking up to find the Twin Towers to orient herself toward downtown. She is going to a party she heard about via electrical impulses passed among friends. Past darkfall, she walks alone down empty Lispenard Street, watching for a single row of lights on a fourth floor. The only thing she knows is that there she will meet some form of fate. Her exhaled breath, I think, still forms part of the atmosphere over the city to which people come, and people go.
The first specimen in what I am forced to title ‘A Slightly Bitter Catalog of Wistfulness’ is Mary Elizabeth’s, a tearoom on East 37th Street that catered to decades of ladies dining on cucumber sandwiches and Lady Baltimore cake while packing away a cocktail or two. It was located near the center of fashionable commerce, notably the great B. Altman’s* department store on Fifth Avenue. Its proprietress had built an empire -- tearooms in Newport and Boston as well as New York, and sixty women toiling in a basement kitchen making sweets sold across the country -- from a candy business she started as a teen in Syracuse. She ended up with a Newport millionaire for a husband. Somehow this history, of improbability yielding to natural condition, was enclosed in the space of 6 East 37th Street. It will always be thus; you had found a place that said ‘New York endures!’ It closed in 1985.
* Altman’s, after existing in its imposing block-long French limestone Renaissance Revival home since 1906, closed in 1989.
[2] It was less that New York City revered its history enough to preserve it; it was that no one particularly noticed that stuff was sitting around getting very, very old. You could prowl the Village in 1986, say, and see something worthy of further investigation at the end of Commerce Street and, upon entering, realize you’d stumbled on 1945. Empty of patrons, the place’s waiters in long aprons and dour expressions attended to ghosts. The menu appeared on a single metal board leaning against an interior column so the staff did not have to spend any more time with you than required. Finding the place made you joyous beyond reason. The Blue Mill Tavern closed in 1992.
[3] After more than a century on Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor shut its doors in early 2019.
[4] Genroku Sushi, Fifth Avenue at 35th. $1.71 a plate. Received health code citation in 1987, closed around 1991.
[5] R.I.P. 1986. The great Mudd Club had closed three years earlier, but CBGB hung on until 2006. Its storied squalor was replaced by a high-end men’s clothier.
[6] The rush to remake even that which has been recently remade -- after something old has been rediscovered in today’s New York, it cannot be ripped up fast enough to be replicated into a cleaner, smoother simulacrum of its original handmade self -- is illustrated here by the Campbell Apartment bar. The 1999 renovation lasted only eight years before it was in need of freshening; an additional $350,000 was spent on new fittings that were installed in 12 hours, so not a single night of revelry was lost. It has since closed again.
[7] After a dry run at closure in 2013 followed by another attempt, Maxwell’s ceased to exist in 2018, after thirty years.
[8] There used to be only one Balducci’s, as it once used to be in New York. When I moved there I somehow assumed there was a law prohibiting national chains from operating within the city, or maybe simply the collective good sense of the populace to eschew them. When McDonald’s began, incredibly, to proliferate in the city, it turns out my naïve assumption was more or less correct: in 1995 Mayor Giuliani, the man responsible for ‘cleaning up’ New York, redrew zoning plans and caused whole neighborhoods to become suburban strip malls.
A small Italian grocer’s opened in Manhattan in 1916, and occupying the Sixth Avenue store since the 1970s, Balducci’s was the Tiffany’s of foodstuffs. It offered the impoverished ingénue the opportunity to wander its aisles and imagine the day when she would be able to toss French cheeses and cipollini onions into her basket without a thought as to cost. Then, in a trajectory so predictable it would be sad if it were not such a cliché, Balducci’s in the nineties started experiencing a Napoleonic urge toward empire. It was sold to a Maryland-based, company, and the 9th Street store was closed in 2003. It drew back the curtain on its new and improved future by reopening (naturally) in a grand old bank building on 14th Street. It had readied itself for purchase by an actual bank. Of course, the store was soon deemed ‘underperforming.’ It closed two years later. Now Balducci’s exists everywhere (if one considers Greenwich, Scarsdale, and JFK everywhere), but not Manhattan.
[9] Publication ceased 2018.
Memory City by Melissa Holbrook Pierson first appeared in Hinterland Issue 4 Winter 2020 / hinterlandnonfiction.com