New York state of mind
Barry Divola, New York City
New York is not just my favourite city. It’s one of my favourite things. Every time the view of that skyline fills the window of my taxi coming in from the airport – those familiar skyscrapers porcupining a sliver of an island hanging off the east coast of the US – I smile. Every single time. And I’ve been to New York almost every year since 1991.
But my very first experience of the city was in 1983, as a callow youth, taking my first overseas trip with my cousin. After visiting Disneyland, then hanging out in London for a while, travelling around England on trains and then taking one of those “it’s Tuesday, so it must be Belgium” bus tours of Europe, we landed in New York in a cold January and washed up on the doorstep of our great-uncle Charlie, an Italian gentleman in his 90s who lived with his eccentric 80-something-year-old Irish girlfriend in a third-floor walk-up on Bleecker Street in the West Village. In his working days Charlie ran a deli in the shopfront below. When we met he was in the twilight of his life.
They were so protective of us they wouldn’t let us out of their sight. They took us to a Broadway show and the UN and the Statue of Liberty and Central Park – all the things you do when you’re a tourist in the city for the first time. But on the final day my cousin and I escaped and wandered all over the Village, our eyes like saucers. By the time we returned, night had fallen. Charlie and his girlfriend were about to call the police. “You don’t walk in this city after dark,” she scolded us, her voice shaking. It was 1983 and we were young idiots – she was probably right to be so concerned.
I’ve just published a novel called Driving
Stevie Fracasso that is in part a love letter to the city. It’s about two brothers who have been estranged for 30 years, driving in a stolen Nissan Stanza from Austin, Texas, to New York in the days leading up to 9/11.
In 2001, I landed in the city 10 days after the Twin Towers fell. I spent a lot of time hanging around Union Square and listening to the arguments and the singing. I watched kids penning heartbreaking messages of hope on huge sheets of white paper, the air thick with the smell of scented candles and the incense of chanting Buddhists. The hard shells that
New Yorkers usually walked around with were dented and softened and everyone wanted to talk, to try to understand how this had happened and what might happen next.
I remember coming home from that trip thinking that one day I wanted to write something about that experience and about this city I loved. Twenty years later, here it is.
For a long while there was a lovely little restaurant with a bar in the shopfront below my great-uncle’s apartment. It was called
August. I would go there one night every trip, have dinner by myself, and raise a toast to his memory. But seven years ago, the landlord raised the rent 200 per cent. Gentrification had become hypergentrification. August shut.
I last went to New York in 2019. There was still nothing in that shopfront. It has remained empty all that time, a testament to real estate
I came home from that trip thinking one day I would write something about that experience and about this city I loved. Twenty years later, here it is
greed. Yes, I still go to 359 Bleecker Street every year, even though there’s no place to toast Charlie’s memory any more. I always get someone to take a photo of me standing in the doorway. It’s a ritual.
My favourite issue of New York magazine each year is the annual “Reasons to Love New York” instalment – the most recent one was a sobering in memoriam detailing 500 beloved businesses that had closed forever due to the pandemic. Right now, many of the things that make New York what it is have gone, along with the city’s magic promise that Joan Didion wrote about – that “just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about”.
I don’t know when I’ll get back. But I’ll go. And, just like every other visit, I’ll go to 359 Bleecker Street and stand in that doorway and get my photo taken and remember being that callow youth wandering the streets of the Village with my cousin as twilight fell, blissfully unaware of any danger, but open to the possibility that absolutely anything could happen. Barry Divola’s novel Driving Stevie Fracasso (HarperCollins, $32.99) is out now .
See 20 New York must-dos at escape.com.au/newyork