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Paris at night

March 1, 2015
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paris night 01jpgThe first time my wife remembers being aware of the night was when she was a little girl and thought the darkness was a liquid, a flood tide overtaking the world.

“I was afraid I would drown in it,” she says.

If she wasn’t careful, it might seep under the window sash and fill her bedroom while she slept.paris night 02x

My experience was different. I grew up outside New York City, and for me, night was an empty container to fill with light. It wasn’t night that flowed, but rather the lights that were like opened faucets draining into the darkness, to be diluted by it. The view of the Manhattan skyline at night, seen from the New Jersey Palisades, was the most beautiful thing I knew. It glowed like embers. paris night 03x

Either way, night was something poetic, although we would never have used the term. When you are a kid, when everything is new, and everything is poetic, there is no humdrum, no banality, against which the poetic, the beautiful, can be offset. It is just the way things are.

Now, as a grown up, chastened and wary, night is the black velvet on which we place the emerald ring, to show off its brilliance. And night is the time that gives the day its mythic resonance. We do our work during the day, so that night can work on us. paris night 04x

I go walking in Paris at night, because that is when I feel most completely there. Paris becomes itself when the streets are dark, with storefront windows and the streetlamps pour forth their fluid light, diluted on the curbs and parked cars. I am washed in that thin light. paris night 05x

One feels most deeply the difference between Paris and New York. At night, Manhattan seems just as busy as it was earlier. Traffic is dense, pedestrians fill the streets. You can ride the subway at 2 in the morning and still see a car full of faces.paris night 06x

But, Paris at night is oddly empty, and what people you see are clustered around the steamed windows of cafes and bistros, or on the front steps of the opera house as it lets out, or waiting to get into the disco. It is almost as if these were the campfires that draw the bodies turned from the darkness. paris night 07x

You can walk down the streets and peer into the shop windows, with their wares lit and forgotten, as if the Rapture had occurred last week, and left behind the kitchen furnishings, or the bicycles, or books, and behind the glass, there is a humanless simulacrum of the world we know. paris night 08x

Or you follow some old man in a long coat as he turns the corner and walks down a dark street toward the next streetlight.

Paris is made more magical by the night. In October there is the slight bite to the air, and the rain makes pointillist mirrors of the pavement, redoubling all that dissipating light.paris night 09x

You wander into a Turkish souvlaki restaurant, a cheap storefront halfway down the street, and the man behind the counter is on the phone speaking some language you don’t know — it isn’t French — and he smiles at you as you sit on the molded plastic chair with the rocking table between you and your wife. The wall is bright yellow behind the glass counter, with garish purple writing offering the usual fare, lit with a glare. Gyros, souvlaki, pilaf. It is warm inside, and humid and the food is comforting.paris night 10x

Even the sound is different at night. Like the campfire, the sound is huddled, localized. In this restaurant, the sound is held in by the walls and front window. Outside it is silent once again.paris night 11x

There is cheer in the contact, and when you leave, there is an alive aloneness in the night street. paris night 12x

When I think of Paris, I think of it at night. I hear the voices and see the maitre pulling the Stella Artois from the tap. Most of the seat are empty and those filled are on the way home after a night at the cinema or theater. They may stop at the 8 a Huit for a pack of cigarettes. (Say it like “wee-a-wee,” it is the French equivalent of a 7-Eleven, only tighter packed and with one wall covered with wine bottles. The man sitting by the cash register is Algerian and tired after spending 12 hours in his shop.)paris night 13x

Compared to anything American, Paris is small. You can walk almost anywhere inside the Peripherique, and all the familiar signposts of the city are visible — Montmartre lit by floodlights on the hill, the Eiffel Tower turned into a fireworks display, the Palais Garnier pinned down by its own lights in the darkened city. paris night 14x

I love to get out into that night, and walk those streets, nodding to the proprietor of the flower shop as he stands by the door, stopping by the patisserie for the last pain au chocolate of the day, and finally passing the concierge of my hotel as he sits behind the desk, reading an Arab newspaper and drinking a small glass of Kirsch, not noticing me as I go through the lobby. Up the elevator, hardly bigger than a phone booth, and flipping on the timed hall light that busts open the darkness on my way to my room. paris night 17x

Out the window when I draw back the curtain, the city street is black, with highlights drawn by the lamps and the trees beneath my room shimmer in the light. paris night 18x

 

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Driving an arc of a planet

February 17, 2015
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State Line tex-NMTo see the world, you fly around it; to learn about your neighborhood, you walk through it; but to appreciate something about the country you live in, there is nothing better than an automobile.Clouds from plane

A jet flies too high and fast to take in any detail. The country is too big to slog through on foot. A car is the perfect compromise, letting you pass over a significant portion of the nation each day, but allowing you the leisure to stop and sniff the magnolias in Mississippi, the rank ecstatic yellow sunflowers in North Dakota — and the lingering odor of peanut butter at Graceland.

It’s summer again, and once more, I open up another brand-new Rand McNally road atlas and begin planning a drive around the North American continent.Sunflowers North Dakota

In the past 15 years, I’ve made the round-trip across the United States at least a dozen times. I feel like Magellan when I start once more on the circumvehiculation of America.

I’ve done it alone and with my wife. I’ve done it camping and in motels. I’ve done it in summer and in winter. I’ve done it in as long as two months and as short as two weeks. Last year, I made it from Phoenix to North Carolina over a weekend, but I’m not likely to repeat that butt-numbing feat.

Yet I am planning another road trip this spring.

Friends tell me I am nuts, a masochist torturing myself or a sadist torturing my wife, but I keep setting out.

There is always something new to see, or some old friend to revisit: I’ve been to North Carolina’s Outer Banks something like 40 times, and I’m beginning to develop the same relationship with Maine’s Down East. When I have lived in the East, I couldn’t wait to visit New Mexico again.Baldwin Co. Ala. sunset

There are soft-shelled crabs to be eaten in Virginia, salmon in Seattle. There are pirogis in Wisconsin and scrapple in Philadelphia. You can only get pizza in New Jersey, you can only get barbecue in eastern North Carolina, or a real Cuban sandwich in Miami.

Barns in Pennsylvania have stone foundations; in Georgia, they rest lumber right on the ground. In Wisconsin, the barns are red; in North Carolina, it’s the dirt that’s red; the gray, weathered barns aren’t painted at all.

I remember passing through Iowa and being astonished to see a farmfield filled with hogs and each animal had its private home, looking like a Levittown of doghouses.

In southern Arizona, I passed something very similar, but it was for fighting roosters.Bear Mtn Bridge

American regionalism is alive, despite network television and corporate advertising. America hasn’t yet been completely turned into one great food court of McDonald’s and Arby’s.

If you think you have only a choice between Pepsi and Coke, wait till you pop the top of a Double Cola in Reidsville, N.C.

Try one at the Sanitary Cafe, where calf’s brains are the breakfast special.Cadillac Ranch Amarillo Texas

I’ve been to most of those landmark places you’ve heard of: International Falls, Minn.; Walla-Walla, Wash.; Langtry, Texas; Cairo, Ill.; Appomattox, Va.; Intercourse, Pa.; West Point, N.Y.

There are some great old iron bridges across the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, some great concrete bridges in central New Jersey that speak of the the great age of American highway building in the 1930s.

I’ve been up Pikes Peak in Colorado and up Mt. Washington in New Hampshire.

I’ve been over Lake Ponchartrain in Louisiana and across the floating bridge over the Hood Canal in Puget Sound north of Seattle.Columbia River Gorge Oregon-Washington

It helps if you love to drive, and I know not everyone has that passion. My brother hates driving, for instance. He views an automobile vacation like a two weeks stuck in an elevator. He can’t wait for his floor to arrive so he can get the heck out.

But most elevators don’t have windows.

As I watch the landscape pass across my windshield, like a travelog on a movie screen, I get a sense of the whole elephant, not just his trunk or tail.

Of course, we are talking here about a two-lane blacktop trip, not a bland rush down an interstate highway, where one stretch of concrete pavement can be distinguished from another only by the names on the exit signs.factory, trees, Lowell, Mass

It is a particular kind of travel and has nothing in common with the destination-vacation of the tourism industry. I have no interest in waiting on Disney World lines for thrill rides or Lake Winnibigoshish for a week of trout fishing. You can have your three days lounging on the sands of Bimini or your Love Boat cruise.

Instead, I get to travel an arc of the planet, get to feel in my bones the curvature of the earth and the roughness of its skin. It is through driving across its surface that I get some body-feel for the size of the globe: It is roughly 10 times the distance I drive to get from Phoenix to New York City. New OrleansThat’s not some numbers on some mileage chart, but a distance I know by the seat of my pants.

It’s also a lot smaller than the world seemed before I began driving.

In those years, my wife and I have been to each of the 48 contiguous state at least twice and most more frequently; we have been to all but one of the Canadian provinces; and even skirted into Mexico a little bit.

And each of those trips could have produced a Blue Highways, a book-length summation of what we saw and learned.Frosty dawn Wisconsin

Part 2

Over the past decade and a half, I’ve put enough vacation miles on the cars I’ve owned to equal driving around the world 2 1/2 times. You don’t drive that much without learning a few things.

The first is, of course, to stay off the interstates. You may get there faster, but not by much, and you’ll be bored the whole drowsy way. And in much of the country — and especially in the West — speed limits on smaller highways is not much lower than on the four-lanes, and with less traffic.Golden Gate Bridge SF Calif

Have a rough itinerary and plan how many miles per day you are willing to drive. This is more important for a passenger: Driving will keep you occupied, but your partner may go stir crazy sitting in a seat while going across some of the flatter places in Texas; Don’t overdo it. Marriages hang in the balance.

But never make your itinerary too rigid. You will discover unexpected things along the way; let yourself enjoy them.Gorilla, Am Mus Nat Hist04 copy

We never reserve motel rooms, so we never feel forced to get somewhere by nightfall. There are enough motels along the way. Even national parks, with their crowds, often have last minute cancellations. We’ve pulled into the Grand Canyon and into Yellowstone and gotten a room. But have a contingency plan.

One year, we hit South Dakota the week of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and there were no vacancies for 200 miles around. We had to drive into the next state to find a room. But that brings up the next lesson:

Don’t be afraid of mishaps and adventures. They may be uncomfortable during the trip, but they will be the best stories you tell your friends. No matter how bad it gets, it will provide the most vivid memory.Imperial Dunes California

Don’t drive every day; take some time to spend in a single spot. Three days we spent in a cabin on Daicey Pond in Maine’s Baxter State Park were three of the best days we ever spent — hiking, canoeing, watching moose and listening to loons at the base of Mount Katahdin. Not once did we start the car. When we finally left, we were ready for more miles.

There are things you should always have in your car: water, a blanket, Fig Newtons, a road atlas, your address book with phone numbers. Forest Lawn cemetery LAI also carry an entrenching tool — one of those small folding shovels you can buy at army surplus stores — for digging out when I get the car stuck in sand or mud.

Don’t be afraid of dirt roads. There are some amazing rewards at the end of a bit of gravel.

We also always carry a small library of Peterson nature guides, two pairs of binoculars, camera equipment and twice the amount of film I think I can possibly shoot.

And finally, my nomination for the greatest invention of the 20th century: cruise control. It keeps your right foot from cramping up on the gas pedal. I was 45 before I ever tried it and I’ll never be that stupid again.pacific coast highway California

Part 3

What makes for good driving?

I don’t know about others, but for me, optimum driving conditions include:

–Little or no traffic for infinite miles ahead, with no stoplights.

–Interesting and varied weather; I don’t want incessant sunshine any more than I want endless rain. A front moving through gives me a constantly changing cloud show.Greylock Mt from Melville home Mass

–An old road with a history. Route 66 is the most famous, but not the only one. I especially enjoy roads that follow geology: along a mountain range or river, so that the road seems to belong to the earth, rather than denying it.

–Occasional side roads, preferably gravel, for a change of pace.

–Periodic change of landscape, such as when you drive from the Plains to the Rocky Mountains, or from the white sands of the Atlantic Coastal Plain into the hilly interior of the Piedmont.

— A regional food specialty you haven’t tried yet and no chain restaurants.leo carillo st beach california

— A few museums and a few national parks. I gotta have both.

— A used book store in every town.

— A pile of Haydn symphonies on CD to run through the dashboard player.

–A clean windshield. This last must be renewed frequently. Bugs bust on the glass.Mississippi barge

Part 4

The dozen most scenic drives in the 48 states:

1. Beartooth Highway, U.S. 212 from Red Lodge, Mont., to Yellowstone National Park.

2. The Pacific Coast Highway, Calif. 1, from San Luis Obispo to Leggett, Calif..

3. Blue Ridge Parkway, from Waynesboro, Va. to Smoky Mountains National Park, N.C.

4. N.C. 12 from Nags Head to Okracoke, N.C.

5. Ariz. 264 from Ganado to Tuba City, Ariz.

6. U.S. 1 from Miami to Key West, Fla.

7. La. 82 from Perry, La., to Port Arthur, Texas.

8. U.S. 1 from Ellsworth to Calais, Maine.

9. Kancamagus Highway, N.H. 112, from Conway to Lincoln, N.H.

10. Tex. 170 from Presidio, Texas, to Big Bend National Park.

11. Utah 12 from Red Canyon to Torrey, Utah.

12. Wash. 14 though the Columbia River Gorge from Camas to Plymouth, Wash.Niagara Falls

Part 5

It isn’t just the flashy, famous places that draw the true driver. In fact, commercial destinations, such as Disney World or Las Vegas, are probably best gotten to by airplane and shuttle bus, so you can give over all your time to waiting in lines.

No, in a car, some of the best experiences come by rolling through the kind of places that fall through the cracks of marketing. Places “below the radar,” so to speak, of commercial development.mobile bay point clear

The small towns, endless farms, mountain ranges, Indian reservations — these are the places you have the opportunity to discover things for yourself. In the big theme parks, you get a uniform experience, developed through marketing research. The ride you take is the same ride millions of others take.

But when you talk to the harried but chummy waitress in Doumar’s, an original ’50s style drive-in on Monticello Ave. in Norfolk, Va., you are talking to a real person, a one-on-one experience that is particular and individual. You get a flavor of place, of culture, of people, of individuals.Page Dam Arizona

To say nothing of the flavor of ice cream, in a cone as close to identical as possible to the original waffled cone Abe Doumar is credited with inventing in 1904. They still make them on the same old wheezy portable machine. If your lucky, they’ll be making them while you eat.

Likewise, there is nothing predictable about the starfish you find in an Oregon tidepool, or the bears in the Smoky Mountains. You get to experience the infinite variety of real life.Sierra Nevada Mts California

Of course, I have my favorites.

Among the 48 states, I can never find the end of either California or North Carolina. They are both richly varied.

California seems to have everything from the world-navel of pop culture to the most remote wilderness. It has more than any other single state.Thunder hole Acadia NP Maine

But North Carolina is nearly as varied geographically, and it has B&G fried pies, the most soul-satisfying food in the world. North Carolina also has the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Outer Banks.

And I cannot get enough of the great, grassy, rolling middle of America. When I tell people I love driving through Nebraska, they look at me like I just said I was born on the Hale-Bopp Comet. But just pull into one of those one-street towns with the grain elevator towering over the single railroad track and have lunch in the cafe where the farmers eat.Yellowstone Nat Park Wyoming

Or imagine the wagonloads of immigrants trudging along the Platte River, with Scotts Bluff on the horizon.

The pace is slower, more humane in Nebraska.

Humankind developed on the grasslands of Africa, and Nebraska, especially, seems to call atavistically to me, reawakening my genetic love of savannas.Monument Valley Arizona

It’s easy to love the broad vistas of the West. Southern Utah doesn’t seem to have a square inch that isn’t photogenic, and the Grand Tetons of Wyoming are mountains right out of central casting: They are to other mountains what Cary Grant is to most men.

But I also love the Mid-Atlantic states. Sometimes, a Western forest is too much of the same thing. You can walk for miles in the Cascades of Washington and see only two kinds of trees: Douglas fir and Western redcedar.Zabriskie Point Death Valley Calif

It’s different in Pennsylvania or Tennessee. In the great Appalachian mountain chain of the East, there are more species of plant life than in all of Europe. The variety is blinding: Redbud in spring, Tulip tree in summer. White pine, pin oak, red maple, sweetgum, sycamore, witch hazel, horse chestnut — and hundreds more.

And there is something humanizing about the landscape. This is land which has been lived in for hundreds of years. It is still wild, but it has made peace with the humans who live there and send smoke up their stony winter chimneys.Zion National Park Utah

In the past, I avoided cities the way I avoid Justin Bieber songs. The noise, nuisance, dirt and traffic were everything I was trying to avoid by getting on the road.

But I have come to terms with them, also. After all, it is in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Boston that you find the symphony orchestras, natural history museums, ethnic foods and imposing architecture.Mississippi River Hannibal Missouri

The greatest city for driving is Los Angeles. It may be the home of the cultural antichrist, but it is also a great fermenting, creative pot, with lots of roads that take you past inventively loopy buildings: The Tail ’o the Pup hot dog stand, the downtown Coca-Cola bottling plant in the form of an ocean liner.

In LA, you can’t get anywhere without wheels. It is the perfect American city.mobile bay

There are two states that I have to admit I don’t particularly enjoy: New Jersey, probably because I grew up there and don’t feel much urge to go back; and Florida, which is supposed to be a Southern state, but it has been given over to graceless Yankees. But even in Florida, I have to admit I love the Cubano culture of Miami and the Everglades, proving that there is always something of worth.

The engraved landscape

August 19, 2014
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north bergen to meadowlands

Northern New Jersey in the postwar years was a patchwork of suburban towns and rural farmland. The part just west of the Hudson River is hilly, with a long irregular slope dropping down from the crest of the Palisades and into the valley of the Hackensack River. The larger towns — Teaneck, Bergenfield, Hackensack — were urbanized with a bloom of soot covering everything. My town, Old Tappan, was changing from one of small farms and Dutch-colonial homes to one in which whole neighborhoods of sameness were erupting in tract housing. The population was a mix of old families that had lived there for generations and the bright-cheeked newcomers looking for their own homes and green lawns and an upwardly mobile place to raise their children.

OT bridgeOur house was a one-off — new, but not in a development. It sat on a gentle hill in what had been woods and included a brook. My father built a wooden bridge over the stream and enlarged a bend in it to become a small pool in which we could wade or recline in the water to cool off in the muggy summers.

Because I grew up there, this patch of planet became for me my umwelt — my inner picture of what the world looks like — it was normative. The wider world I knew stretched from upstate New York along the Hudson and down to the Jersey Shore along the Shrewsbury River. The landscape included such landmarks as the accordioned oil-storage tanks along Route 36 in Keyport, the Pulaski Skyway that crossed over the New Jersey Turnpike, and the three-lane Route 9W that skirted Storm King Mountain along the Hudson. It included forests and streams, and it included heavy industry, a web of highways and the shopping malls of Paramus. pulaski skyway

The center and anchor of this landscape was Manhattan — the gravitational center on the other side of the George Washington Bridge. It was where, as a teenager, I wanted to spend all my time. Museums, bookstores, subways, Central Park, Chinatown restaurants and the great cheap ride on the Staten Island Ferry.

When the family went to the city for whatever reason, and we came home at night, driving up the brand-new Palisades Interstate Parkway, the lights of the city across the river were stars burning in the blackness, outlining the vertical thrust of the skyscrapers, while a thin line of burning beads moved continuously along the West Side Highway providing a baseline. When I was 7 years old, it was the most beautiful thing I knew. nyc night skyline

The landscape of our childhoods is embedded in our minds and memory the same as the language we learn without trying — it is absorbed whole. It shapes the mirror that reflects back everything we live through afterwards.

“The mind, that ocean where each kind/ Does straight its own resemblance find,” wrote Andrew Marvell in The Garden.

As an adult, I have lived in each of the four corners of the nation: the Southeast, the Southwest, the Northwest in addition to my green years in the Northeast. But no matter where I have gone, outside that comfortable nest of the Middle Atlantic, the landscape remains a novelty. I have enjoyed, even loved living elsewhere, but deep in the folds of my cortex, normal is New Jersey.

That same process works for wherever you grow up. It is Mississippi for Faulkner, Brooklyn for Henry Miller, Concord for Thoreau, Ohio for Sherwood Anderson, Missouri for Twain, Lowell, Mass., for Kerouac. You can find Paterson, N.J. in William Carlos Williams and Asheville, N.C. in Thomas Wolfe. The axis mundi.

Leonardo took northern Italy with him when he went to France. Durer took Germany with him to Italy as much as he brought the Renaissance back north. Beethoven never left Bonn even when he lived in Vienna, and the provincial towns of Czechoslovakia chime over and over through the symphonies of Mahler in the military marches and SchrammelmusikRiver Street, Madison NC.

My wife grew up in Madison, N.C., on the banks of the Dan River. “The river and the creek in the back yard are the back of my brain, the inner part I draw from. The front of my head looks out to the town.”

That is the crux: the part we draw on, waters of life from the inner well.

Childhood creates the fixed inner sense of the world, depending on where you grew up: the flatness of northern Indiana, the short-grass prairies of western Nebraska, the leaden skies and perpetual drizzle of Seattle in winter.

But it isn’t merely the look of the landscape — as if it were a painting — but an entire sense of the physical world and our place and size in it. That includes a paradigm of distance — how far is the horizon, how long is a street before it curves away from your vision, how tall are the trees. These measurements are as set in the forming brain as are our names.

So too are the seasons we live through. In New Jersey, there were four, with deep snow in winter and muggy heat in summer. The further north, the more winter and summer vary in length of daylight. In Arizona, there are two seasons: unbearable heat and relief from unbearable heat. In San Diego, there is barely more than one season. If you move from one place to another, you never quite get used to the missing or added seasons.

That umwelt includes the quality of light we know as normal, the feel of air and its humidity against our skin, the way sound carries or doesn’t carry as it is muffled by woods or snow. It also includes the food, the ethnicities that surround us, the accent we speak in and the population density. All create a “normal” in our minds that we never lose, even as we expand our horizons as we grow. bergen co to nyc

There are those who believe we try as adults to recapture our childhoods, but I say instead, we can never escape them. They are there engraved in our synapses.

I have traveled widely in North America, through all the states save Hawaii, and all the Canadian provinces save Prince Edward Island. And all those states many times. The landscape — not landscape as art, but landscape as the planet your drive or walk through — gives character to each location, as if each location were not just a tract of land, but an entire culture.

The land has meaning.

I am going to try to describe over the next series of blog entries a variety of distinct American landscapes and find in them meaning beyond the picturesque. I hope you’ll come with me.

Time and the city buzzing

January 27, 2014
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ny title

A cityscape is also a timescape.ny schist

And a visit to New York City is time travel. Roll the tape forward and back, and see the time-lapse version of the city, from the hard antediluvian schist that crops up in Central Park to the latest high-rise office complex.

We tend to think of America as a place that eats up its past, tearing down the old and erecting the new with no regard for history. And New York certainly has an energy that feeds on tomorrow.

But it is surprising how much of the past is still there, just left alone, standing in a multi-era crowd, with a brownstone wedged between a modern glass tower and a Beaux Arts library.

I suppose all of us who love the city have our defining frames in the time-lapse film. There is the fedora-topped bustle of New York in the 1940s, the World’s Fair gleam fighting the decay of the 1960s, the rhinestone Trumpification of the 1990s.

The city you remember best depends on how old you are and which version you first came to love.

But all of the versions are still there.

I first knew the city in the 1950s, and my memories are of Con Ed steam erupting from the streets in winter, diesel fumes filling the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 42nd Street like color fills a Titian, the squeal of the AA train (now the C train) as it fought the big curve between 168th and 175th streets. When I was a boy, we ice-skated at Rockefeller Center and window-shopped at Macy’s.ny in the subway

When I go back now, the subway still squeals, and the fumes are still the glorious aroma of the city, the garlic in its stew.

My city is still there, a little buried maybe, its face turned away.

That is not to say there aren’t chunks missing: Penn Station is gone; the Horn & Hardart Automat is gone; the current Madison Square Garden is a generic shadow of the old one; the Coliseum has been replaced by the gaudy Time Warner Center. Others, such as the Edward Durrell Stone Gallery of Modern Art, at Columbus Circle, have been given a new set of clothes.

Even Yankee Stadium has been torn down — Yankee Stadium, which I expected to last as long as the Roman Colosseum. (No such longing for Shea Stadium.)ny hudson river

Although some of the carcasses still exist along the Hudson River, the great ocean-liner piers are dusty, sagging, hollow or demolished.

And these don’t include the most obvious loss.

When I flew cross-country in 2005, the plane passed over Manhattan, and, from 30,000 feet, the missing place of the World Trade Center looked like nothing so much as the empty socket of a pulled tooth.

Yet, much of what I knew of New York when I grew up is still there.ny camilles

Four decades ago, I stopped at a coffeehouse just outside Columbia University. It was when coffeehouses, not Starbucks, were the natural accoutrements of student life. You had to step down from the sidewalk to the below-grade tables. Someone was playing folk songs on guitar. It was called Cafe Ole. Two years ago, I accidentally found the same spot when I stopped for breakfast. It’s now Camille’s, but the uneven brick floor was still there, and the steps. Forty years squeezed together like an accordion.

You didn’t have to be born there: New York has a historical presence for most of us. We saw it in the movies and newsreels, in gallery photographs and paintings.

The New York of the mind comes from seeing King Kong, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The French Connection.

Not to mention the best evocation of the city ever transmuted to celluloid: Woody Allen’s Manhattan, that cinematic mash note:ny dusk

“He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion — er, no, make that: He romanticized it all out of proportion. Yes. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.”

That New York of the mind is largely black and white. Or shades of gray. Even the snow in winter is gray. Like statuary, New York expresses form more than color.

Times Square sits in the mind like the black and white of Alfred Eisenstaedt, who photographed the famous V-J Day kiss there in 1945. The Staten Island Ferry does, too, and the crowds of people you pass on Sixth Avenue. (It will always be Sixth Avenue.)ny pizza

Enough people fill a block there, as lunch hour begins, to populate a ballpark, but most of them might as well be alone in the wilderness that Manhattan once was. People avoid colliding but never seem to make an effort to miss each other. There’s a subliminal awareness of the crowd, but you can see in their eyes that they aren’t primarily aware of the here and now: They are thinking of the meetings they are required to attend today or whether their husband has remembered to buy the potato salad for dinner tonight. Pairs or trios walk along talking, but they are leaves floating together downstream in a current.

In his tiny 1949 book, Here Is New York, E.B. White wrote, “New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities, it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants and needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.”NY McDonalds

Stop at a storefront McDonald’s on a rainy November day and see the hordes lined up, warm against the cold outside, rubbing their hands as 40 people wait in ill-defined lines to be served. It’s noisy, yet quiet: The heat is steamy, the floor is worn. The bustle is enough to keep your ears electrified, but there is not much language to be heard outside the giving of food orders. The din is a roar of accelerating buses on the street, car horns, subways below the sidewalk grates and the incoherent susurrus of private conversation at tables.ny the met

It’s surprising how well people get on in New York, given the wide variety of types, ethnicities, politics and interests. The city makes room for all of them. Or, more precisely, the city takes equal lack of notice of all, so there is a kind of equality built in, an equality of negligibility.

It hasn’t always been that way. In the 1960s, the city seemed to be coming apart at the seams. The tourism slogan was “New York Is a Summer Festival,” but everyone in the city remembers it as “New York Is a Summer Fistfight.”

But now, allowing for the fact that you have 8 million people squeezed onto 300 square miles of land, the city is notably amicable: It has the lowest crime rate of the 25 largest U.S. cities, according to FBI statistics.ny grocery boxes

It is a city of diversity, and one that enjoys that about itself.

The last time I left the city, the hotel concierge phoned for a cab to take me to the airport. The cabbie was a large, bearded man with a black suit and an Eastern Europe accent; he drove a shiny black limo. Two blocks from the hotel, he pulled over. Another cab pulled over in front of us.

“If you please, my brother take you rest of way,” he said in a thick Boris Badenov voice. We emptied my bags into a second black limo.

The “brother,” who spoke with a Spanish, not Russian accent, explained as we drove that only one car in their fleet of cabs was authorized to pick up customers at the hotel, and so the first cab spent his day going from hotel to hotel, picking up customers and then redistributing them like a kindergarten teacher handing out cookies.

You come to expect such things in the city. It has always been this way.ny water tanks

What single image can catch the essential persistence of New York? The subways, the cabbies, Mott Street? For me, it is the wooden water tanks on the roofs of high rises. One would think they would have been replaced by something modern, something in stainless steel, perhaps. But they haven’t: All over the city, roofs are defined by their wood-slat water tanks, sitting on the tops of buildings like the acroteria on Greek temples.

A tourist will never run out of things to catch his attention, or his dollar. But the Statue of Liberty, the Guggenheim and The Lion King are not the images that boil up in memory for me. It is the water tanks.ny alleyway

My essential New York is built of alleys between apartments on the upper West Side, their trash cans waiting to be emptied.ny 172nd st elevated station

It is the elevated train station at 125th Street, looking like some obsolete, alien spacecraft landed on stilts in the gully called Manhattan Valley.ny gwb

It is the George Washington Bridge, which my grandfather worked on as an engineer in the 1930s.

There is no better way to enter the city than to walk across the GWB. You get the sense of crossing some large space that defines the difference between the comfortable world you know and the beehive world of the city. The bridge is a behemoth, covered in a putty of silver paint, with leopard spots of rust. The noise of the traffic as it passes blots out awareness; it is a constant ear-splitting surf.

But you arrive at 178th Street, and the neighborhoods begin. It is important to recognize that New York isn’t a single city; it is hundreds of individual communities, each with their life-support drugstores, groceries, shoe stores, churches and pizzerias. The city may not be as medievally immobile as it used to be, when most New Yorkers rarely left their two- or three-block turf except to go to work, but those neighborhoods are still the hearts of local patriotisms, each an axis mundi.ny apartment building

The two-story 1920s frame houses that line the streets of Queens, the brownstones of Brooklyn, the awning-beaked apartments of 59th Street in Manhattan — each neighborhood has its flavor, its architecture, its private history.

I look at my life and I know that although I am a grayhair 6 decades old, the 10-year-old kid who watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is still there somewhere, and so is the college graduate who came back to the city, and the married man who vacationed there, and now the senex who encompasses them all. And just as my whole life is a single long memory — a single speck of meaning — the city is the same: Everything that ever happened there is still there.