Journalist was eloquent voice of New York
Pete Hamill, the Brooklyn-born bard of the five New York City boroughs and eloquent voice of his beloved hometown as both newspaper columnist and bestselling author, died Wednesday. He was 85. Hamill fell on Saturday, fracturing his right hip, said his brother, famed journalist Denis Hamill.
Hamill had emergency surgery at New York-Presbyterian/Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, but his kidneys and heart failed while in the intensive care unit, his brother said.
Hamill’s past health woes included a March 2014 stint at the NYU Medical Center, where the writer cheated death before emerging intact. Kidney problems led to dialysis treatment four years later.
The legendary Hamill worked for three city tabloids, serving as editor for the New York Daily News as well as the New York Post during a newspaper career that covered the last 40 years of the 20th century.
“One of the best days in my life is when I got my first press pass,” he once recalled fondly. “To be a newspaperman is one of the best educations in the world.”
The lifelong New Yorker brought a touch of poetry to the tabloids, a sense of grace, wit and empathy amid the daily dose of crime and corruption.
The author of more than 20 novels and more than 100 short stories also wrote long pieces on various subjects for the New Yorker, Esquire, Rolling Stone and New York magazine.
Hamill continued writing fiction into the new millennium, with “Tabloid City: A Novel” published in May 2011 and a collection titled “The Christmas Kid: And Other Brooklyn Stories” released a year later.
Hamill’s 1960s contemporaries included some of the best writers of his or any generation: fellow “New Journalism” acolytes Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese and Norman Mailer.
The son of Belfast immigrants was once hailed as “the greatest chronicler of Irish America,” which hardly did justice to Hamill’s expansive range of topics.
He proudly described himself as a generalist, as comfortable inside New York City Hall’s so-called Blue Room as behind the yellow tape at a murder scene.
His attention to telling detail and encyclopedic knowledge informed his efforts on subjects that ranged from Frank Sinatra to the Brooklyn Dodgers to his own life in the acclaimed 1994 memoir “A Drinking Life.”
Hamill swore off the booze in 1972 after one last
New Year’s Eve vodka. When asked why, the son of an alcoholic father said: “I have no talent for it.”
His skills showed behind a typewriter or a keyboard, where Hamill wrote more than a million words — the vast majority with one finger taking the pulse of his sprawling city. Hamill emerged as the city’s erudite everyman, writing about its immigrants, its underclass, its downtrodden and dispossessed.
The native son was a constant witness to history: as a kid watching Jackie Robinson in Ebbets Field, decades later walking with Robert F. Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel when an assassin opened fired, and again on 9/11 in the shadows of the twin towers.
Hamill recounted writing a heartfelt letter that persuaded RFK to run for president. When the shooting started in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, he helped disarm killer Sirhan Sirhan as the mortally wounded Kennedy lay nearby.
“My notes told me later that Kennedy was shot at 12:10, and was carried out of that grubby kitchen at 12:32,” he wrote 40 years later. “It seemed a lot longer.”
He went south to cover Martin Luther King Jr. and stayed home for the last interview with fellow New Yorker John Lennon. He reported on the “Troubles” in his ancestral homeland, and covered wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua and Lebanon.
Hamill stood in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, with paper and pen in hand as the World Trade Center’s 110 stories came tumbling down.
That day, he wrapped up the novel “Forever,” later rewritten to reflect the staggering horrors inflicted on his city.
The oldest of seven children, Hamill was a high school dropout whose first newspaper job was delivering the old Brooklyn Daily Eagle. His youth in Brooklyn, living on the top f loor of a crowded $60-a-month apartment, forever influenced his nuanced storytelling. Hamill, in his book “Downtown: My Manhattan,” recounted the day his mother walked him onto the Brooklyn Bridge as the city skyline shimmered in the morning sun.
“Sure, you remember Peter,” his mom told the awestruck lad. “You’ve seen it before. It’s Oz.”
“And so it was, no matter how hard I tried to escape,” he wrote.
Hamill spent most of his last years living across the East River from his boyhood home, sharing a Tribeca apartment with his wife — Japanese journalist Fukiko Aoki — and hundreds and hundreds of books. They moved back to Brooklyn in 2016.
Hamill is survived by his wife, daughters Deirdre and Adriene, and a grandson.