John Podhoretz: Life in New York, Then and Now
[John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary.]
I live in a small city in the midst of a great city. It is the same one in which I grew up four decades ago, and its buildings and landmarks and topography are almost entirely unchanged. Usually the small cities in America that never change are the ones whose best days came half a century or more ago and are now literally rotting away before your eyes, their once-handsome houses mottling, their fences akimbo, their storefronts boarded, their grass untended, their gas stations abandoned on windblown corners. My small city could have been one of those static, increasingly impoverished, blighted places. Indeed, everything suggested it would be.
Nostalgia can be a treacherous mistress, because she glamorizes the past and downgrades the present in a way that threatens to make them both intolerable. Since I live only a mile from where I was born and raised, with only slight changes to the visual landscape, I find myself constantly under nostalgia’s threat. An indifferent French restaurant occupies the space that once housed the record store where I bought my first 45 rpm disc of the Cowsills singing the title song from Hair, and standing in front of it I split into two, the 49-year-old in the present and the seven-year-old in the past crossing its portal with a little brown paper bag in hand, excited beyond measure to get its contents home to place the needle on the 45’s ridge and watch it slide into the first groove, the sound of the scratches giving way to the opening blast of the Cowsills’ five-part harmony. In the same way, standing on a Thursday evening in front of the building in which I was born and raised, I am suddenly in the hazy light of an early Sunday morning at the age of six and managing for the first time to right the bicycle from which the training wheels had lately been removed and then wobbling my way down the block and around the corner and around the second corner and then around the third—and slamming the bike into a toddler who was wobbling his way forward in front of his building.
That memory is itself almost certainly a conflation of two moments that occurred months apart, but in retrospect, they blend high exhilaration and low shame, an almost perfect distillation of the bipolarity of childhood feeling. That is the ambiguous power of nostalgia, as the jagged recollection of hitting a tiny child with a bicycle still has the power to catch like a rusted nail four decades later and open a fresh wound.
Living in the precincts of one’s own past means that its fears and terrors are immediately accessible as well. And in this case, I don’t mean the universal fears—a closed closet door, a dark hallway, a school bully—but rather the very specific fears that came with growing up in my small city in the midst of the big city at a very specific moment. On the spot across the street from a friend’s building, I freeze with the sensation of having, right there, been jumped nearly 40 years earlier by four kids as I got off the city bus from school. They took my empty wallet and the little folder containing the invaluable pass that afforded me free access that month to that bus line. I was mugged four times before I was 14. I think this was the second time.
So my small city is the same and yet it is not the same, because it is today, in almost every way, better. Usually, when we talk about the differences in American life between past and present, there is a moment in which we feel compelled to denounce today’s pathologies in comparison with the moral certainties of older times. But on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, my small city, social pathologies began to run rampant half a century ago, long before they broke into the wider culture. And every effort to cure them through large-scale government action only made matters worse, in one of the most potent demonstrations of the law of unintended consequences....
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I live in a small city in the midst of a great city. It is the same one in which I grew up four decades ago, and its buildings and landmarks and topography are almost entirely unchanged. Usually the small cities in America that never change are the ones whose best days came half a century or more ago and are now literally rotting away before your eyes, their once-handsome houses mottling, their fences akimbo, their storefronts boarded, their grass untended, their gas stations abandoned on windblown corners. My small city could have been one of those static, increasingly impoverished, blighted places. Indeed, everything suggested it would be.
Nostalgia can be a treacherous mistress, because she glamorizes the past and downgrades the present in a way that threatens to make them both intolerable. Since I live only a mile from where I was born and raised, with only slight changes to the visual landscape, I find myself constantly under nostalgia’s threat. An indifferent French restaurant occupies the space that once housed the record store where I bought my first 45 rpm disc of the Cowsills singing the title song from Hair, and standing in front of it I split into two, the 49-year-old in the present and the seven-year-old in the past crossing its portal with a little brown paper bag in hand, excited beyond measure to get its contents home to place the needle on the 45’s ridge and watch it slide into the first groove, the sound of the scratches giving way to the opening blast of the Cowsills’ five-part harmony. In the same way, standing on a Thursday evening in front of the building in which I was born and raised, I am suddenly in the hazy light of an early Sunday morning at the age of six and managing for the first time to right the bicycle from which the training wheels had lately been removed and then wobbling my way down the block and around the corner and around the second corner and then around the third—and slamming the bike into a toddler who was wobbling his way forward in front of his building.
That memory is itself almost certainly a conflation of two moments that occurred months apart, but in retrospect, they blend high exhilaration and low shame, an almost perfect distillation of the bipolarity of childhood feeling. That is the ambiguous power of nostalgia, as the jagged recollection of hitting a tiny child with a bicycle still has the power to catch like a rusted nail four decades later and open a fresh wound.
Living in the precincts of one’s own past means that its fears and terrors are immediately accessible as well. And in this case, I don’t mean the universal fears—a closed closet door, a dark hallway, a school bully—but rather the very specific fears that came with growing up in my small city in the midst of the big city at a very specific moment. On the spot across the street from a friend’s building, I freeze with the sensation of having, right there, been jumped nearly 40 years earlier by four kids as I got off the city bus from school. They took my empty wallet and the little folder containing the invaluable pass that afforded me free access that month to that bus line. I was mugged four times before I was 14. I think this was the second time.
So my small city is the same and yet it is not the same, because it is today, in almost every way, better. Usually, when we talk about the differences in American life between past and present, there is a moment in which we feel compelled to denounce today’s pathologies in comparison with the moral certainties of older times. But on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, my small city, social pathologies began to run rampant half a century ago, long before they broke into the wider culture. And every effort to cure them through large-scale government action only made matters worse, in one of the most potent demonstrations of the law of unintended consequences....