[URBAN NOTE] "Your Misplaced New York Nostalgia Will Get You Nowhere"

[rfmcdonald]

At the end of March, Vice hosted an essay by one Zachary Lopez talking about how cities change. The New York City of now is going to be removed--transformed, priced out, whatever--and that is perfectly normal.

Someday, somewhere, in the not so distant future, on a social media forum not so foreign from the ones we know, someone is typing "RIP NYC." Someone is typing, probably in all caps, "I can't believe Darkroom/Motor City/St. Jeromes/that crepe place on Ludlow is gone! I did something there, once! RIP NYC!"

I understand this sentiment, mostly. My capacity for nostalgia is the same as yours, which is to say it colors how I perceive every little thing. Before basic human empathy and the occasionally (very) correct online scolds kicked in, I myself felt a cold fear that B&H Dairy might disappear in last week's Second Avenue disaster and with it my favorite square footage in New York City. Even if the wanting seems trivial in the light of actual suffering, it is not unreasonable to want everything to stay right where it always was.

You know, in your hearts and heads if not your status updates, that the world erodes. Even Chinatown will someday be replaced by one enormous Thai restaurant. I will go there, and I will tell my grandchildren that I did lines of cocaine where the peanuts on their papaya salad sit. My corpulent grandchildren will listen, the fat in their ears expanding. I am old and angry and can't be expected to remember that, by this point, everybody is allergic to peanuts. Probably the only thing they won't be allergic to is cocaine. Social mores change. I hope I won't bore them.

I remember the blackout of 2003, the big fun inconvenience of the early aughts, the great liberation from having to pretend that cops and firemen were our friends, whatever name history will settle on, maybe just "Goodbye to All That Ice Cream." I was talking to a long-past friend on a landline—he'd gone from a Robitussin problem to an American military problem to a God problem so I was relieved as hell when the phone went dead and not all that nonplussed to see that the relief had spread, all those problems avoided, on a citywide scale. Good for us! I remember how all the punks and the gays at Mars Bar were feverishly working together on their rapidly dying phones to find that last working coke dealer in Manhattan and huzzah, they found him and he had bags of special blackout paste for sale and well, whatever, if you closed your nostril long enough something happened for sure, so here's to unity. I remember helping hide Dash Snow behind the bar when the cops came. And then I remember how a friend and I crossed the Williamsburg Bridge together at 3 AM, no one around, no lights but those of the theretofore estranged sky, and it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

To live in the city is to be displaced by the city, to rage against market forces, to be sure that things were irretrievably better in the impossible-to-pin-down-to-a-specific-date "then."