What it’s really like growing up in Manhattan, New York City
It’s a strange city
Little I’ve written about is shocking or so very out of the ordinary that it completely distinguishes my hometown from most other cities on earth, let alone America. But it was (no longer ‘is’… I’m growing more jaded now) strange to me, growing into adulthood with these New York markers affecting what I was becoming. Manhattan, New York, is my strange city. Possibly its strangenesses have contributed to my makeup. This is just a snapshot of the sustained looking into Manhattan, New York.
But why is it strange? That’s the question. Little I’ve written about is shocking or so very out of the ordinary that it completely distinguishes my hometown from most other cities on earth, let alone America. But it was (no longer ‘is’… I’m growing more jaded now) strange to me, growing into adulthood with these New York markers affecting what I was becoming. Manhattan, New York, is my strange city. Possibly its strangenesses have contributed to my makeup. This is just a snapshot of the sustained looking into Manhattan, New York.
Born on the west coast, I reached Manhattan a month or two after my twelfth birthday. I lived on Central Park West with my parents. I went through three years in an Episcopalian all-boys school on the Upper East Side and then high school in the quintessential Manhattan prep school. This doesn’t sound like the “typical” New York City experience, though I challenge people to find one that is. Public schools differ as greatly from one another as Inwood does from the Meatpacking District. Is someone living in Yorkville any less ‘New York’ than someone living in West Harlem, Inwood, or Greenpoint? What is New York? It’s not Manhattan, is it? What of the other four boroughs?
I’ve already fallen into the trap of the Manhattan-centric. There is Brooklyn with its brownstones, the art scene that is all that some folk think of it, most populous county in New York State. There is Queens, largest of the boroughs and the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world. The Bronx, named for Jonas Bronck, is the third most densely populated county in the United States even though a quarter of its area is open. Of course, there’s Staten Island, but prevalent provincialisms seem to ignore this space out in the water, set apart, marginalized as it is, a quasi-suburb with nice views. I guess I should stick to Manhattan.
I hardly left the Upper East Side ambit for my first six years in Manhattan until I left Gotham, the Strange City, for college (I transferred to Hunter from a New England one). I was lucky to have gone to a middle school steeped in a humanities-centered education, a school whose teachers led dozens of tie-wearing, blazer-draped teenage boys along Fifth Avenue to the Met, where every visit we walked past the Kouros, figure of a male Greek youth, on our way to the Renaissance masters, because that’s all our headmaster seemed to care about, and then moved on to various Madonnas and Child, portraits, depictions of the urban, of nature, and more.
We’d then move on, stopping by . There’s so much more that would bore the reading eye almost as much as it did the wearying 7th or 8th grader. They’d occasionally break the monotony of the Met with flash visits to the Guggenheim (the building itself!), the Frick (The Temptation, portraits), the MOMA (Matisse’s Dance!), or the Whitney (De Kooning, Hopper, Bellows). More art. But more than even Gothic, Renaissance, Impressionist, Cubist, or all that, overarching all the talk about perspective, sfumato, or patronage, came a sense, though not explicitly conveyed by our headmaster, to the boy whose mind was open and searching enough to espy it, of the almost excessive bounty of beauty in the city most of us, hardly appreciating its many virtues, called our home.
But these are academic issues, right? New York is more than its art and I’ve only given erratic snapshots. I’ll cycle through just a little bit more. Esther carefully moving a need, rapidly beating up and down, along the still skin of my inner forearm, imprinting a deep blue symbol of forever on my person, in a small shop on MacDougal Street. I’m fifteen, so my 23-year-old brother, getting a massive ‘tat’ on his huge right bicep (he benches hundreds of pounds), had to sign on as my legal guardian. MacDougal Street is cool, a tiny rue with shops whose merchandise is stuff half its clientele hasn’t been able to find elsewhere in the city and half its clientele just feel really cool buying. Maybe it’s different than that but that’s the quick feel I got from there at fifteen.
Jackson Heights in Queens, getting on the 7 from Grand Central and getting off on Roosevelt. Walking around the five to ten-block radius, occasionally hearing Bollywood music set at a tasteful volume in stores whose glass displays are lined from shelf to ceiling with DVD’s and CD’s, observing the seachange in environment, which is a New York which no longer presents mostly white faces (among which many Jewish faces when you’re in the Upper East Side), a couple of Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians, maybe one or two Indians every half hour.
Instead, here everyone is Bangladeshi, many Indian, and a few Pakistanis isolated here and there. It is subcontinent writ on the face of New York. I can navigate the entire area, if I so choose to, without uttering a single word of English (I speak Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu). Here, in Queens, I find a home for that other social self, the subcontinental, with which I drape myself, leaving “American me” for a bit, until he resurfaces about an hour later at home on the East Side.
It’s Saturday morning and time for a run. I lace up, put on some vaguely shiny mesh shorts (they’re growing old), a long-sleeved technical (it’s winter yet), and jog at a couple of miles an hour along the large square blocks (sidewalks are composed of slabs of concrete or granite, whichever it is, where I live, simplistic linear puzzles). When I get to Central Park, tall trees speckling the sky with flutters of twig and leaf, I make my way through Engineer’s Gate (91st and 5th). This large break in the massive wall that runs over 100 blocks round the park’s perimeter is starting point for hundreds of runners.
I’ll be quick about it. You can go 1.6 miles round the reservoir, hugging the tall fence that toes soft white dirt which you kick in short rough barks that make you feel like you’re in Chariots of Fire, the slightly longer (1.7 mi) Bridle Path , and the 6.1-mile Full Loop, which my older brother frightened me about when he introduced me to it, announcing the Ultra Loop (what a name) to a cowed young boy who’d barely run much longer than two years. I now run the loop, tamely called Full Loop, trees cantilevering pleasantly above on either side of a large road built for cars (which rarely ever pass by), baseball diamonds empty during winter months, peppered with children wearing gloves bigger than their heads when it’s warm, all sorts of people chik-chik-chikking on the asphalt behind and in front of me, skinny women draped with skinnier tanktops, bearded 50-something-year-old men with large abdominal bulges, that stray high schooler running faster than you, so many in chariots close to the ground, throwing hands furiously over large wheels and whisking them over the Full Loop which they cannot run because they’ve lost use of their legs, the skinny dude with a leash in his hand, his gorgeous golden-brown retriever trotting alongside, tongue drooping an inch out of his mouth. There are more, five to fifteen in a bouncing line before and in front of me, more than half of whom drop out at a turn on the transverse 104th street (for the 5.2-mile loop) turn. On to Heartbreak Hill, the final section of the Full Loop that turns just inside the perimeter around 109th street and angles up a steep hill that goes on for something like 150 meters. In high school, my buddy Sandy, with whom I used to run, laughingly (but with some measure of awe) told me about how people used to wait for runners at the top of Heartbreak Hill and push them when they reached the topped, jumping on the exhausted runners to swipe whatever cash or valuables they’d brought on their run (fanny packs). I swallowed the tale whole when I was younger.
Museums, MacDougal Street, Central Park. In this short survey all I’ll turn my eye to for the moment is Wall Street, on which I spent a touch over nine months as a stock broker. It’s a long story, though needless to say, I had taken a year off school when I was 21. When I got to 40 Wall Street, I saw that the road was narrow, something like a medium-sized avenue in a New England town, concrete and glass walls careening up into the sky on either side of me. Wall Street was (and is) compressed altitude constructed of gray, white, and vitreous blue.
When I got into the office, it took little convincing to get Jae, an extraordinarily sharp-looking, short (shorter than me!) Korean-American with a trenchant manner and a strong bite, to hire me. But college degrees aren’t of much importance to most brokerages. All you need is a quick eye and a sharp tongue. I won’t prolong the recollection. Let me just say that I sat a desk, held a receiver (soon just had a headpiece clipped to my ear), and called up to six or seven different countries in Europe (+44 UK mainly, some Germany, the Netherlands, in both of which countries their English is particularly good), and a couple in South-West Asia (the UAE and Israel), the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, Australia, a few in South America and Africa.
It was the same shpeel every time (of course), introduction of self as Suraaj Dutt (my whole name would never fly in a sales call). I could really believe that after less than a year a guy with
no college degree and only a Series 7 (I studied less than 3 months for it) had a book (portfolio) of about $400,000, all from people I’d never met. I left after nine months, full of knowledge about the world and gab I’d learned to pour into the client’s ear about the endlessness, the depth, the endlessnesses and the depths, of New York, of Manhattan.
But why have I gone on about all these things? New York, my hometown, is a dynamic multiplicity. It is art, the world, nature, money, and myriad other things I’ve written nothing about. What of buskers, Times Square (albeit sanitized), dogs and dog parks, used book shops, libraries, CENTRAL PARK (something of an urban wonder), ad infinitum ad nauseam. I’ve already spoken a good deal and I haven’t even touched on the “little things”, like Brooklyn versus Upper East Side accents, the beauty that is the finely-honed spiderweb of the subway system, the sidewalk and subway artistries, and however much more I balk at even mentioning because it would take (more than) ten books to write about the lived life in Manhattan. And I probably wouldn’t be able to think of the half of it.
Manhattan, New York, is Gotham, the Strange City. Can one do such a magnificently strange city justice in but a few thousand words?