New York, I Love You (Or, Hello to All That)

And since the district to which we had moved appeared to be as quiet as the boulevard we had previously looked out upon was noisy, the sound of a man singing as he passed (as feeble perhaps as an orchestral motif, yet quite clear even from a distance) brought tears to the eyes of the exiled Francoise. (from The Guermantes Way)

Proust's third volume, The Guermantes Way, begins with a move. Marcel's grandmother needs a cleaner, quieter arrondissement for the sake of her health. This is pure torture to their old servant, Francoise, who is loyal to their former abode where they had been "'so well thought of by everybody.'" In exchange, she is now in a place where "the concierge, who had not yet made our acquaintance, had not shown her the tokens of respect necessary to the nourishment of her good spirits."

Neighborhoods in New York are in a constant state of flux, as if a painter were applying layer after layer of paint to the map, obliterating what came before.

I grew up in that section of Lower Manhattan called TriBeCa (short for "Triangle Below Canal Street"). At that time, the neighborhood was a ghost town full of empty lofts. The only restaurant was the Delphi, where we ate moussaka and backlava. As there was no supermarket, my mother took me on errands to Morgan's, a butcher shop with sawdust on the floor, and Bell Bates, a crowded corner store full of exotic spices.

Today, my mother is my charge in the Saturday morning procession of parents and strollers at the farmer's market outside the park I remember as a vacant dirt lot. "Mama, stick with me, kid!" I say. We pick up loaves of bread dusted with flour, seven varieties of apples, bulbous avocado squash. No shortage of playmates here, as in the late seventies. In fact there must be something in the water--every woman in the neighborhood is a mother or on her way to becoming one. There are so many people here now that the neighborhood houses a Whole Foods and a Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and scores of restaurants at every turn.

In Joan Didion's 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That," she concludes that "All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not young anymore." She is sick of the incessant parade of "new faces" at parties in a city only for the very poor and the very rich and the very young. For her, New York is an experiment one soon tires of. But what about the quiet pleasures?

Quiet pleasures: the room of Degas pastels at the Met, any production of a Eugene O'Neill play, long walks along the bridal path in Central Park, low-key classes at Integral Yoga, lining up at the Film Forum, avocado rolls at Zutto.

I love the scene with Wallace Shawn at the end of My Dinner with Andre in which he treats himself to a taxi ride home and every building he passes is connected to a memory from his childhood. The city by night has become more beautiful than it was before he sat down to dinner, its lights blurred by nostalgia.