Author Pete Hamill pays tribute to the Big Apple

Journalist and New York Times bestselling author Pete Hamill gives a guided tour around his beloved town, New York City, in his latest book, “Downtown.” In it, he tells the stories the streets would tell if only they could. Hamill was invited on the "Today" show to discuss his tribute to the city that never sleeps. Here's an excerpt:

The Capital of Nostalgia
This is a book about my home city. I was born in the immense and beautiful segment of it called Brooklyn, but I’ve lived and worked for much of my life in its center, the long skinny island called Manhattan. I live here still. With any luck at all, I will die here. I have the native son’s irrational love of the place and often think of William Faulkner’s remark about his native Mississippi, and how he loved it “in spite of, not because.” New York is a city of daily irritations, occasional horrors, hourly tests of will and even courage, and huge dollops of pure beauty. For any native the home place is infused with a mixture of memory, myth, lore, and history, bound together in an erratic, subjective way.

That’s as true of the natives of New York as of the natives of Oxford, Mississippi. That mysterious mixture is why so much of this portrait is personal. Past and present are merged in its pages, as they are in my consciousness. But something else is in the mix too. Something magical. And certain moments of magic are always present tense.

In my earliest memory, I am five years old, coming home from the Sanders Theater in Brooklyn. I am with my mother and we have just seen “The Wizard of Oz.” The year is 1940. In the safe darkness of the movie house, I’ve seen emerald castles and a lion that talked and a road made of glistening yellow bricks. But in memory, all of that is a blur. In memory, my mother takes my hand and the two of us are skipping all the way home singing “because because because because because!”

On this wonderful evening, my mother still has brown hair. She is laughing and exuberant, clearly made happy by going to a movie with her eldest son. I remember nothing else, except the word “because.” Later, I will learn that the woman I call Mom is actually Anne Devlin Hamill, an immigrant from the hard, dark city of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. She arrived in New York, with perfect Irish timing, on the day the stock market crashed in 1929. She was then nineteen. The calamity of the Great Depression did not dismay her. She went immediately to work for a rich Manhattan family as a domestic servant, glad of the work, joyous about being again in the city of New York. In all the years that followed in the life of Anne Devlin, that city would always be a wonderland. Why? Because.

Above all, because her journey in 1929 was Anne Devlin’s second migration to the place that would be her home until her death at eighty-seven. On these streets, she had once been five, too. I would learn that in New York, many stories begin somewhere else, for people who become center fielders and for those who start as domestics. Her father was named Peter Devlin, who went to sea as a youth, became an engineer, traveled as far away as Yokohama and Rangoon, worked for years as an expert in refrigeration for the Great White Fleet in the banana trade with Central America. He was a Belfast Catholic, and at sea he was free of the accumulated bigotries that went with the endless religious quarrels that began in the Irish seventeenth century. When he married in his thirties and soon fathered two children, Peter Devlin decided that it was time to live again on land. He had seen many places in the world, but he and his wife chose New York. The young family of four settled in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn in the parish of Mary Star of the Sea, hard by the harbor. There he would work on the ships of the Cunard Line but live on land with his family. The Devlin children (the other was my uncle Maurice) would be raised in a city where nobody cared about their religion. They would grow up in the greatest metropolis in America, where everything was possible, if only you worked. Above all, they would grow up free of the iron certainties of the European past, the first requirement for creating an American future.

Then, in 1916, while the slaughters of the Great War raged in distant Europe, disaster struck in Brooklyn. My grandfather Devlin fell from the deck of a ship and was crushed between hull and dock. My mother was then five, and remembered later the tumult and the tears in the flat in Red Hook but few of the details. She did remember New York fading into fog and the long voyage home across the vast Atlantic. Her mother must have known that German submarines were prowling the approaches to Ireland and England, but she chose to risk any danger to get back among her own people. One of the few consolations in any life is a sense of the familiar, with all of its imperfections.

The widow and her small children made it safely across the Atlantic, but that year Ireland was seething with violence and sectarian hatred. At Easter, there had been a nationalist rising in Dublin against the British rulers of Ireland, with deaths and executions. For many people, Irish nationalism was exclusively Catholic (it wasn’t), and in the North, all Catholics were accused by some citizens of stabbing England in the back while the men of Ulster were dying in vast numbers at the Somme. The theory wasn’t accurate (many Catholics fought under the British flag), but the fury was real, and so was the fear. But the anger had its own justification. After all, the sons of Ulster were filling the graves of France. It was no surprise that the bitterness, and its local violence, would continue in Northern Ireland long after the Great War finally ended, long after civil war had run its course. Too many Irish corpses would fill the graves of Ireland.

Somehow, in the midst of so much turbulence and fear, young Anne Devlin managed to do what few women, and almost no Catholic women, ever did in those years: she finished high school. That same year, her widowed mother died of a stroke at age forty-seven. And Anne Devlin, now an orphan, decided that it was time to return to the city she had last seen slipping away into fog. Her brother, Maurice, would stay in Belfast for another thirty years. But my mother would sell the family piano, buy a steamship ticket, and go back to the place where she had last seen her father, long ago, when she was five.

My own father, Billy Hamill, was also a child of Belfast. He was twenty when he arrived at Ellis Island, to join two older brothers who had already fled the bitterness of the Irish north. He had only completed the eighth grade when he was apprenticed as a stonemason, but he carried other credentials to America. He was a wonderful singer of songs: Irish rebel songs, the songs of English music halls, jaunty tunes of human foolishness, and songs of sad longing. I grew up hearing those songs and can remember many of the lyrics to this day. He was also a wonderful soccer player. Years later, his friends told me about his magical legs, those legs that carried him across playing fields, that seemed to have an intelligence of their own. The Irish novelist Michael McLaverty, who chose to stay in the Irish north, told me in 1963, “God, he could play that game.”

In 1927, his fourth year in America, Billy Hamill was playing for an Irish team in the immigrant soccer leagues that were then common all over New York. There was a Jewish team called House of David, and German teams, English teams, Spanish teams. One wintry Sunday, in the year that Babe Ruth hit those sixty home runs, Billy Hamill played in a game against the Germans. He was viciously kicked in the left leg (almost surely by accident) and fell to the frozen earth with a double compound fracture, splintered bone jutting through flesh. He was taken to Kings County Hospital, the largest in Brooklyn. Because it was a Sunday, there were not enough doctors. There was certainly no penicillin. By the following morning, gangrene had set in. His left leg was amputated above the knee.

The years immediately after that calamity must have been filled with misery, but I never heard him say so. Among the many immigrant codes, spoken and unspoken, there was one that was absolutely clear: The only unforgivable sin was self-pity. He must have felt it. He must have throbbed with rage, too, against his terrible luck. After all, he would never again play the game he loved more than all others. But he would play no other games either. He was deprived, too, of the American opportunities for honest manual labor, those jobs in shipyards and the construction trades that employed so many other immigrants, not all of them Irish. Those jobs made everything possible in America, starting with a family.

And yet he went on with his American life. He would sing his songs for his friends in dozens of Prohibition speakeasies. He designed a bathing suit that covered the stump of his vanished leg and went swimming in the summer sea at Coney Island. And he worked. His penmanship was excellent, and so he worked as a clerk in the home office of a grocery chain. And, with his friends, he even went to dances.

In 1933, after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the end of Prohibition, he went to such a dance in Webster Hall, just below Union Square. There he met Anne Devlin. They started going around, as the Irish said, and eventually they were married. Anne Devlin did not drink. But she must have loved his endless repertoire of songs, his stoicism, his optimism. He surely was attracted by her brown-haired good looks, her sense of humor, and, above all, her intelligence. No child, of course, ever truly knows what brings parents together. Or why a marriage lasts in spite of bouts of poverty, inevitable quarrels, occasional attacks of despair on one side or the other. But they were together until the day my father died at eighty.

I was their first child, eventually the oldest of seven American children, and as a boy, I gradually understood that my father was not like other fathers in our blue-collar neighborhood. Billy Hamill could not take us to play ball in Prospect Park. He could not take us on long walks across that park to the sacred precinct of Ebbets Field. The subway was always a challenge, with its long flights of stairs leading to the street, and the need to be agile, and so he almost never went to Manhattan. He could not even march in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. His America was limited to a dozen square blocks in our small neighborhood.

My mother’s New York world had no such limits. She was a quick, determined walker of the city, starting with the streets of our own metropolitan hamlet. In her company, my younger brother Tom and I learned that the only way to get to know a place was by walking its streets. We went with her as she shopped. We soon knew where the church was and the police station and the schools. But she was always expanding our frontiers. She would show us the main public library, where books were free, right there on the other side of the great arch of Grand Army Plaza. She showed us the Brooklyn Museum and the Botanic Garden. Sometimes she showed us visions that stayed with us for all of our lives.

One Saturday in the summer of 1941, while my year-old sister Kathleen stayed home with my father (she was born on May 1, his birthday, and he adored her), my mother took me and Tom on one of our longest walks. We ended up at the entrance to the pedestrian ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge. We had never before seen this great span. From the Brooklyn side, the bridge rises in a graded arc. The central walkway and the roads for automobiles are flanked by its soaring suspension cables. As my mother pointed out the distant ships in harbor and river, from that great height the size of boats in bathtubs, we reached the top of the rising arc. Then, for the first time, I saw them: spires aimed at the sky. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. All gilded by morning sun.

“What is it?” I said in a stupefied way (as my mother told me years later).

“Sure, you remember, Peter,” she said. “You’ve seen it before.” And then she smiled. “It’s Oz.”

And so it was.

This book is about what I learned in Oz. It is about the places where I lived and about myself, among others. To my astonishment, I’ve known the Manhattan streets and many of its people for almost seven decades. The day before yesterday I was five, crossing that amazing bridge. We moved in 1943 to a new flat with a breathtaking view from our kitchen windows of the harbor and the skyline, and I could gaze in all seasons at the towers. I seem to have been eleven for a very long time, in days and weeks of an endless languid summer. Then time started to rush, through adolescence and high school and a job as a sheet metal worker at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and finally into the US Navy itself. Then, after discharge and a sojourn in Mexico on the GI Bill, I was at last a kind of grown-up, living in the buildings of Oz itself. Living, that is, in Manhattan.

As it turned out, my life in Manhattan had its own geographical limits, and they are central to this book. That is why these notes are limited to those parts of Manhattan in which I have truly lived. My own city, the one that feels like home, is the one I’ve always called Downtown. To me it extends—in defiance of the conventions of guidebooks—from the Battery to Times Square. There is a dense, rich New York beyond the limits of my Downtown, and I’ve spent some time in its many parishes. But it was never mine in the same way that Downtown became one of my personal possessions. So these notes are personal too. Over the years, I have paid rent at fourteen separate addresses in Downtown, and I live now in a loft in Tribeca that was built in 1872. It stands just below Canal Street, that most exhilarating of New York bazaars. I know Mr. Singh, who sells me newspapers. I know the man who runs the corner variety store. I know the people with whom I share my building. Each day, I exchange hellos with a dozen people who work on my street. When the drivers of cars with New Jersey plates honk too insanely on their horns, I shout at them: “Knock it off! We live here!”

There are other levels of the familiar in the dailiness of my life here. My Downtown is also the place where the city was created. It is where, across the long, turbulent nineteenth century, today’s New York character was formed. I look at other people and the places where they live, and the things they do or say, and I learn something about myself too. As a geographer, I’m as idiosyncratic as the early explorers of the New World. My interior maps are jagged and personal, often resembling in spirit the famous New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg showing Ninth Avenue larger than the state of California. My Downtown includes the Carnegie Deli and Carnegie Hall, which on most maps are firmly nailed into Midtown. For me, Rockefeller Center between Forty-eighth and Fifty-first streets, Fifth and Sixth avenues, is triumphantly Midtown, but P.J. Clarke’s saloon, at Fifty-fifth Street and Third Avenue, is a treasured fragment of Downtown. The differences have to do with the patina of time, of course, the colors that time gives to brick, slate, copper, stone, and wood. I am always delighted to find something new, or strange, or unusual within the familiar. But I’m happiest in those places where generations have passed before me.

The bunched towers that I first saw as Oz are better viewed from Brooklyn or New Jersey. Up close, they climb out of view. Some Downtown skyscrapers have their own kind of beauty, of course, but I feel more a part of the older city, the one that was lower, that could be seen in one glimpse, that is more horizontal than vertical, that allows us to absorb the light of the city sky, the city of walkers and the city of horses. That is, I cherish the Downtown city. I have been looking at that New York for decades now. The place seems as fresh as it did when I was twenty-one. On its streets, I am always a young man.

It is a standing joke, of course, that New Yorkers are the most parochial of Americans, and that commonplace contains a small amount of truth. For parts of my life, I’ve wandered far from my home parishes, to live in Mexico City and Rome, Barcelona and Dublin and San Juan, and have also paid rent in New Orleans, Key West, Los Angeles, and Santa Fe. But I’ve come to realize that I lived in all those places as a New Yorker. I gazed at their glories and tried to learn their histories, to define those elements that made them unique, but always I measured them against my own city. In unexpected ways, they each taught me something about New York, its strengths and terrible flaws, its irritations and its triumphs, the way learning another language teaches you about your own. But in spite of their many seductions, I always knew I would go home.

In some ways, my experience of the city has been unique, even for a native. After the summer of 1960 I was a newspaperman, paid to move through many neighborhoods with pen and notebook in hand. No other experience can be so humbling. You think you know the city where you were born; each fresh day as a reporter teaches you that you know almost nothing. I could go to the scene of a murder and record the number of gunshot wounds, the caliber of the bullets, and the name of the person whose corpse was sprawled before me. I’d talk to the police, the relatives, and the neighbors, including the nearest bartender. I could listen while the victim’s relatives wailed their laments. Trying to rescue the human reality from the murder statistics, I was often instructed by the street-smart photographers, who were paid, above all, to see.

“Look at this guy’s socks,” a photographer named Louis Liotta said to me one morning at a murder scene. “One brown sock and one blue sock. What’s that tell you?” I didn’t know what it told me. Liotta explained: “This guy got dressed in the dark.” He paused. “Or someone dressed his body in the dark—and at home, or there wouldn’t be two different socks.”

When I talked to a detective about the socks, he said: “Look, the socks tell you he probably got dressed at home. Or his body was dressed at home.”

But as I got better at seeing and describing what was directly in front of me on a Manhattan street, a troubling dissatisfaction began to grow within me. I acquired enough craft to get the facts and then write a story for the next edition that would give the readers a sense of what I had seen and heard in a place where the readers had not been present. But I was nagged by doubt, knowing that I’d only skimmed the surface of the story and some larger truth was always eluding me. Who were all these other people in the neighborhood where one of them had now been killed? How did they live? Where did they go to school and what were their jobs and how did they find their way to these buildings? What was this neighborhood itself? How did it get here? And what about certain abiding New York mysteries: Why was the Bronx called the Bronx? How did Harlem get its name? Who was Major Deegan? From the specifics of a newspaper story, I was learning how little I knew about my own city.

Sometimes I would explore these mysteries in the library of the newspaper, using slow time to take out envelopes of crumbling clippings. Or I’d ask older reporters and editors. Sometimes I’d be told, “Major Deegan was a Tammany hack who served in World War One and lived until the 1930s.” Then I’d confirm this with the clippings. The Bronx was named for a guy named Jacob Bronck, a rich Dutchman who owned most of it as a private farm. Harlem was named Harlem for the same reason Brooklyn was called Brooklyn: The Dutch got there first and named one place Haarlem and the other Breuckelen after places in the country they’d left behind.

In short, I was educating myself as a reporter, but also as a New Yorker. Much of my reading never found its way directly into newspaper stories, of course. For one thing, I was young and having too good a time in the company of people I loved. For another, the original stories had faded from the newspapers and my discoveries were irrelevant. On newspapers, we believed we were all writing history in a hurry, and after the first few days, even the most appalling stories gave way to the shock of the new. Still, it was clear to me that the only way to try to know this city (or any other) was on foot. I didn’t learn to drive until I was thirty-six. Who needed cars when you had two good legs and the subways moved under the traffic?

Even today, I wander through the city as if I were a young man. Something always surprises me. Something else fills me with wonder. I pass a building I’ve passed a thousand times before and see it suddenly in a new way. In good weather, I like to stand and watch the passing show, a flaneur lounging in a doorway. I see a burly black man help a blind woman across a street. I talk to him later and discover he is from Togo, “all the way in Africa,” and he works for one of the fabric wholesalers on Walker Street. He tells me why he came to New York. “For my kids,” he says. “I want them to be free and, you know, healthy. In Togo, lots of things are green and beautiful, but the neares’ doctor, he was seventeen kilometers away, man.” I see a cop flirting with a pretty girl, a tourist from Italy. “Hey, you want me to walk you?” he says. She smiles a dazzling smile and moves on. He sees me watching, smiles in a conspiratorial way, and says, “Makes you wanna live forever.”

The New Yorker learns to settle for glimpses. There are simply too many people to ever know them all, to unravel all of their secrets. Nobody in such a vast and various place can absorb everything. You know the people you love and the people with whom you work. The rest is glimpses. And on certain days, yes, you want to live forever.

And yet, in many separate ways, the people of the city express certain common emotions. The forms and details are different for every generation and every group, but certain emotions have continued to repeat themselves for centuries. One is surely greed, the unruly desire to get more money by any means possible, an emotion shared by citizens from stockbrokers to muggers. Another is sudden anger, the result of so many people living in so relatively small a place. Another is an anarchic resistance to authority. But far and away the most powerful of all New York emotions is the one called nostalgia.

The city is, in a strange way, the capital of nostalgia. The emotion has two major roots. One is the abiding sense of loss that comes from the simple fact of continuous change. Of the city’s five boroughs, Manhattan in particular absolutely refuses to remain as it was. It is dynamic, not static. What seems permanent when you are twenty is too often a ghost when you are thirty. As in all places, parents die, friends move on, businesses wear out, and restaurants close forever. But here, change is more common than in most American cities. The engine of greatest change is the cramped land itself. Scarcity can create a holy belief in the possibility of great riches. That’s why the religion of real estate periodically enforces its commandments, and neighborhoods are cleared and buildings hauled down and new ones erected, and all that remains is memory.

This book is littered with casualties of time and greed and that vague reality called progress. Just one example here: I was in high school in Manhattan when I came to know the Third Avenue El. Sometimes I took it as a ride, not just a means of getting from one place to another. I loved its rattling noise, the imagery associated with the 1933 movie King Kong, the stark shadows cast by its beams and girders, and the rows of tenements and Irish saloons that I could see swishing by from its windows. I had no memory of the Second Avenue El, or the Sixth Avenue El, or the Ninth Avenue El. They were all gone. But in some ways, the Third Avenue El seemed as permanent as the Statue of Liberty, and for me it provided a ride through more than simple space. It hurtled me through time as well. They started tearing it down in 1955. By the time I returned from Mexico in 1957, the Third Avenue El was gone too.

There would be many other disappearances, including too many newspapers. Buildings went up, and if you lived long enough, you might see them come down, to be replaced by newer, more audacious, more arrogant structures. I came to accept this after the el had vanished and some of the worst office buildings in the city’s history began rising on Third Avenue. There was no point, I thought, in permanently bemoaning change. This was New York. Loss was part of the deal. In the same year that the Third Avenue El disappeared, so did the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. The demise of the Third Avenue El was a kind of marker, the end of something that had outlived its time. But for many people, the flight of the baseball teams was an example of unacceptable losses. Some never got over it. After a long while, I finally consoled myself about the Dodgers by saying, Well, at least I had them once and I will always have them in memory. That nostalgia lives in me today. It erupts whenever I see a fragment of black-and-white newsreel showing Jackie Robinson heading for home. But to talk about the Dodgers’ departure without cease would be to live as a bore. New York teaches you to get over almost everything.

Our losses would culminate, of course, with the violent destruction of the World Trade Center. For many New Yorkers, now including the young (who grew up with the twin towers), even such a ferocious human toll can provoke nostalgia. Months after the murderous morning of September 11, 2001, I kept hearing New Yorkers speaking in tones of regret about the loss of the buildings themselves, even people who didn’t care for them as architecture. For me, the twin towers were in Downtown but never of Downtown. That is, they were detached from my sense of the home place. And yet most New Yorkers missed their position in the skyline, the sense of dominance they suggested, and longed for the comparative innocence of the brief years in which they existed.

“I hate to admit this,” one close friend said, “but when I look at the old photographs of the Trade Center, I’m sometimes choked with nostalgia.”

Nostalgia. The word itself, as critic and educator Nathan Silver has pointed out in his fine book Lost New York, is an imperfect one to describe the emotion itself.

“The word in English is hopelessly wishy-washy,” he wrote in the revised 2000 edition of his 1967 book. “It seems to denote something between a handwring and a tearjerk, referring as it does to a wistful, regretful feeling. Nowadays most urban dwellers accept that a city’s past vitalizes a coherent sense of the present, but calling that ‘nostalgia’ evokes the approximate reaction that one would get from mentioning heirlooms or embroidery.”

The New York version of nostalgia is not simply about lost buildings or their presence in the youth of the individuals who lived with them. It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same. Tuesday turns into Wednesday and something valuable is behind you forever. An “is” has become a “was.” Whatever you have lost, you will not get it back: not that much-loved brother, not that ball club, not that splendid bar, not that place where you once went dancing with the person you later married. Irreversible change happens so often in New York that the experience affects character itself. New York toughens its people against sentimentality by allowing the truer emotion of nostalgia. Sentimentality is always about a lie. Nostalgia is about real things gone. Nobody truly mourns a lie.

That is why, in a million small ways, New Yorkers behaved so well on September 12, 2001. Millions of us wept over the horrors of the day before. Many mourned their own dead and the dead of the larger parish. More millions grieved for the world that existed on September 10, knowing it was forever behind us. For a while, at least, all felt various degrees of fury. But nobody ran. We knew that at least we had lived once in that world before the fanatics changed it forever. With all its flaws, horrors, disappointments, cruelties, we would remember that lost world all our days and most of our nights. And now we would get up in the morning and go to work. Our only consolation would be nostalgia.

That tough nostalgia helps explain New York. It is built into our codes, like DNA, and beyond the explanation of constant change, there is another common thread in our deepest emotion. I believe that New York nostalgia also comes from that extraordinary process that created the modern city: immigration.

Excerpted from “Downtown” by Pete Hamill. Copyright © 2004 by Deidre Enterprises, Inc. Published by Little, Brown and Co., a division of Time-Warner Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.  

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