[URBAN NOTE] "How to Experience David Bowie’s New York"

[rfmcdonald]

The New York Times hosts Justin Sablich's wonderful article looking at the points in New York City--lower Manhattan, mainly--around which Bowie maintained his life.

David Bowie was a New Yorker for over 20 years. In Bowie years, that is practically an eternity considering the multitude of lives he lived — musically, geographically and otherwise — since he set out to become a star in the late 1960s.

“I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” said Mr. Bowie, who was born in Brixton in South London and had stints in Berlin; Lausanne, Switzerland; and several other cities, in a 2003 interview. “I’ve lived in New York longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. It’s amazing. I am a New Yorker.”

He somehow managed to settle into a domesticated life that resembled that of many others living in and around SoHo (though most do it without the supermodel wife and penthouse apartment): browsing the books at McNally Jackson and shopping for groceries at Dean & DeLuca, among other low-key adventures that he undertook in what the playwright John Guare called “this cloak of invisibility.”

Soon after news spread of Mr. Bowie’s death on Jan. 10, two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his album “Blackstar,” fans started a makeshift memorial outside the SoHo apartment where he had lived with his wife, Iman, since 1999, joined the following year by their daughter, Lexi. Mr. Bowie and Iman purchased their first city home in 1992, a ninth-floor apartment at the Essex House Hotel on Central Park South, which they sold in 2002.

“Just as each and every one of us found something unique in David’s music, we welcome everyone’s celebration of his life as they see fit,” Mr. Bowie’s family wrote in a statement.