Chapter One
Through the Children’s Gate: Of a Home in New York
In the fall of 2000, just back from Paris, with the sounds of its streets still
singing in my ears and the codes to its courtyards still lining my pockets, I
went downtown and met a man who was making a perfect map of New York. He worked
for the city, and from a set of aerial photographs and underground schematics he
had turned every block, every highway, and every awning-every one in all five
boroughs!-into neatly marked and brightly colored geometric spaces laid out on
countless squares. Buildings red, streets blue, open spaces white, the
underground tunnels sketched in dotted lines … everything in New York was on
the map: every ramp to the Major Deegan Expressway and every abandoned
brownstone in the Bronx.
The kicker was that the maniacally perfect map was unfinished and even
unfinishable, because the city it described was too “dynamic,” changing every
day in ways that superceded each morning’s finished drawing. Each time
everything had been put in place-the subway tunnels aligned with the streets,
the Con Ed crawl spaces with the subway tunnels, all else with the buildings
above-someone or other would come back with the discouraging news that something
had altered, invariably a lot. So every time he was nearly done, he had to start
all over.
I keep a small section of that map in my office as a reminder of several New
York truths. The first is that an actual map of New York recalls our inner map
of the city. We can’t make any kind of life in New York without composing a
private map of it in our minds-and these inner maps are always detailed, always
divided into local squares, and always unfinished. The private map turns out to
be as provisional as the public one-not one on which our walks and lessons trace
grooves deepening over the years, but one on which no step, no thing seems to
leave a trace. The map of the city we carried just five years ago hardly
corresponds to the city we know today, while the New Yorks we knew before that
are buried completely. The first New York I knew well, Soho’s art world of
twenty years ago, is no less vanished now than Carthage; the New York where my
wife and I first set up housekeeping, the old Yorkville of German restaurants
and sallow Eastern European families, is still more submerged, Atlantis; and the
New York of our older friends-where the light came in from the river and people
wore hats and on hot nights slept in Central Park-is not just lost but by now
essentially fictional, like Nu. New York is a city of accommodations and of many
maps. We constantly redraw them, whether we realize it or not, and are grateful
if a single island we knew on the last survey is still to be found above water.
I knew this, or sensed some bit of it, the first time I ever saw the city. This
was in 1959, when my parents, art-loving Penn students, brought my sister and me
all the way from Philadelphia to see the new Guggenheim Museum on its opening
day. My family had passed through New York a half century earlier, on the way to
Philadelphia. My grandfather, like every other immigrant, entered through Ellis
Island, still bearing, as family legend has it, the Russian boy’s name of
“Lucie,” which I suppose now was the Russianized form of the Yiddish Louis,
actually, same as his father’s. The immigration officer explained with, as I
always imagined it, a firm but essentially charitable brusqueness that you
couldn’t call a boy Lucy in this country. “What shall we call the boy, then?”
his baffled and exhausted parents asked. The immigration officer looked around
the great hall and drew the quick conclusion. “Call him Ellis,” he said, and
indeed my grandfather lived and died in honor of the New York island as Ellis
Island Gopnik. Well, as Ellis Gopnik, anyway-though Ellis was regarded as a
touch too New York for Philadelphia, and Lucie-Ellis actually lived and died
known to all as Al.
For the Guggenheim occasion, my mother had sewn a suit of mustard-colored velvet
for me and a matching dress for my sister, and we stood in line outside the
corkscrew building, trying to remember what we had been taught about Calder.
Afterward, we marched down the ramp of the amazing museum and then walked along
Fifth Avenue, where we saw a Rolls-Royce. We ate dinner at a restaurant that
served a thrilling, exotic mix of blintzes and insults, and that night we slept
in my aunt Hannah’s apartment at Riverside Drive and 115th Street. A perfect
day.
I remember looking out the window of the little maid’s room where we had been
installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking,
There! There it is! There’s New York, this wonderful city. I’ll go live there
someday. Even being in New York, the actual place, I found the idea of New York
so wonderful that I could only imagine it as some other place, greater than any
place that would let me sleep in it-a distant constellation of lights I had not
yet been allowed to visit. I had arrived in Oz only to think, Well, you don’t
live in Oz, do you?
Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned
and a place to be aspired to-a city of things and a city of signs, the place I
actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here. As a kid, I
grasped that the skyline was a sign that could be, so to speak, relocated to New
Jersey-a kind of abstract, receding Vision whose meaning would always be “out of
reach,” not a concrete thing signifying “here you are.” Even when we are
established here, New York somehow still seems a place we aspire to. Its life is
one thing-streets and hot dogs and brusqueness-and its symbols, the lights
across the way, the beckoning skyline, are another. We go on being inspired even
when we’re most exasperated.
If the energy of New York is the energy of aspiration-let me in there!-the
spirit of New York is really the spirit of accommodation-I’ll settle for this.
And yet both shape the city’s maps, for what aspi- rations and accommodations
share is the quality of becoming, of not being fixed in place, of being in every
way unfinished. An aspira- tion might someday be achieved; an accommodation will
someday be replaced. The romantic vision-we’ll get to the city across the river
someday!-ends up harmonizing with the unromantic embrace of reality: We’ll get
that closet cleaned out yet.
In New York, even monuments can fade from your mental map under the stress of
daily life. I can walk to the Guggenheim if I want to, these days, but in my
mind it has become simply a place to go when the coffee shops are too full, a
corkscrew Three Guys, an alternative place to get a cappuccino and a bowl of
bean soup. Another day, suddenly turning a corner, I discover the old monument
looking just as it did the first time I saw it, the amazing white ziggurat on a
city block, worth going to see.
This doubleness has its romance, but it also has its frustrations. In New York,
the space between what you want and what you’ve got creates a civic itchiness: I
don’t know a content New Yorker. Complacency and self-satisfaction, the Parisian
vices, are not present here, except in the hollow form of competitive boasting
about misfortune. (Even the very rich want another townhouse but move into an
apartment, while an exclusive subset of the creative class devotes itself to
dreaming up things for the super-rich to want, if only so they alone will not be
left without desire.)
I went back to New York on many Saturdays as a child, to look at art and eat at
delis, and it was, for me, not only the Great Romantic Place but the obvious
engine of the working world. After a long time away, I returned, and then in
1978 I returned with the girl I loved. We spent a miraculous day:
Bloomingdale’s, MoMA, dinner at Windows on the World, and then the Carnegie
Tavern, to hear the matchless poet Ellis Larkins on the piano, just the two of
us and Larkins in a cool, mostly empty room. (A quarter century later, I haven’t
had another day that good.) We were dazzled by the avenues and delighted by the
spires of the Chrysler Building, and we decided that, come what might, we had to
get there.
For all that the old pilgrimage of the young and writerly to Manhattan had
become, in those years, slightly Quixotic, we determined nevertheless to make
it-not drawn to the city romantically, as we were then and later to the idea of
Paris, but compelled toward it almost feverishly-deliriously, if you like-as the
place you needed to be in order to stake a claim to being at all. This feeling
has never left me. I’ve lived elsewhere, but nowhere else feels so entirely, so
delusionally-owing more to the full range of emotional energies it possesses
than to the comforts it provides-like home.
A home in New York! However will we have one? The exclamation of hope is
followed at once by the desperate, the impossible, question. The idea of a home
in Manhattan seems at once self-evident and still just a touch absurd, somehow
close to a contradiction in its own shaky terms, so that to state it, even
quietly, is to challenge some inner sense of decorum, literary if not entirely
practical. In literature, after all, New York is where we make careers, deals,
compromises, have breakdowns and break-ins and breaks, good and bad. But in
reality what we all make in Manhattan are homes (excepting, of course, the
unlucky, who don’t, or can’t, and act as a particularly strong reproach to those
of us who do). The Life is the big, Trumpish unit of measure in New York, but
the home, the apartment with its galley kitchen and the hallways with its
cooking smells, is the real measure, the one we know, and all we know. We make
as many homes in New York as in any other place. To make a home at all in New
York is the tricky part, the hard part, and yet, at the same time, the
self-evident part. Millions of other people are doing it, too. Look out your
window. “Do New York!” Henry James implored Edith Wharton in a famous letter,
meaning encompass it, if you can, but when we try to do New York, it does us and
sends us reeling back home. (When the great James tried to come back home to do
it, what he did was the house on Fourteenth Street where he was born, and the
other homes, around the corner on Sixth.)
I still recall our first efforts at making a home, when my wife and I arrived on
a bus from Canada and moved into a single nine-by-eleven basement room, on
Eighty-seventh Street. I remember it, exactly a quarter century after, with
something approaching disbelief: How did we use so many toggle bolts on three
walls? But doing it a second time doesn’t seem easier, or more supple; I can’t
walk into a housewares store in Manhattan without feeling myself the victim of a
complicated confidence trick, a kind of cynical come-on. We’re really going to
use a toaster and a coffee-maker every morning? And then, of course, we do, just
like they do in Altoona, just like we did … back home.
To make a home in New York, we first have to find a place on the map of the city
to make it in. The map alone teaches us lessons about the kind of home you can
make. The first New York home we made was in one of the small basement
apartments strung along First Avenue. Then there was Soho in its Silver Age,
when the cheese counter at Dean & Deluca and the art at Mary Boone conspired to
convince one that a Cultural Moment was under way. But that era has passed-a
world gone right under, as they all do here-and coming home this time, we hoped
to land in one of the more tender squares on the map, the one that kids live in.
We came back to New York in 2000, after years away, to go through the Children’s
Gate, and make a home here for good. The Children’s Gate exists, and you really
can go through it. It’s the name for the entrance to Central Park at
Seventy-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue. The names of the gates-hardly more than
openings in the low stone wall describing the park-are among its more poetic,
less familiar monuments. In a moment of oddly Ruskinian whimsy, Frederick Law
Olmsted and Calvert Vaux gave names to all the entrances of Central Park,
calling them gates, each accommodating a class of person to enter there: a park
for all the people with entrances for every kind. There was, and is, the Miners’
Gate, and the Scholars’ Gate, and-for a long time this was my favorite-the
Strangers’ Gate, high on the West Side. The Children’s Gate is one of the lesser
known, though the most inviting of all. On most days you can’t even read its
name, since a hot-dog-and-pretzel vendor parks his cart and his melancholy there
twelve hours a day, right in front of where the stone is engraved. It’s a shame,
actually. For though it’s been a long time since a miner walked through his
gate, children really do come in and out of theirs all day and, being children,
would love to know about it. Now my family had, in a way, decided to pass
through as children, too.
This was true literally-we liked the playground and went there our first
jet-lagged morning home-and metaphorically: We had decided to leave Paris for
New York for the romance of childhood, for the good of the children. We wanted
them to go not to baffling Parisian schools-where they would have gotten a
terrific education, been cowed until seventeen, and only then begun to riot-but
to a New York progressive school, where they’d get a terrific education and, we
hoped, have a good time doing it. Childhood seemed too short to waste on
preparation. And we wanted them to grow up in New York, to be natives here, as
we could never be, to come in through the Children’s Gate, not the Strangers’
Gate.
A crowd came through the gate with us. Twenty-five years ago, Calvin Trillin
could write of his nuclear family of two parents and two kids as being so
strange that it was an attraction on bus tours, but by the time we came home,
the city had been repopulated-some would say overrun-with children. It was now
the drug addicts and transvestites and artists who were left muttering about the
undesirable, short element taking over the neighborhood. New York had become,
almost comically, a children’s city again, with kiddie-coiffure joints where sex
shops had once stood and bare, ruined singles bars turned into play-and-party
centers. There was an overrun of strollers so intense that notices forbidding
them had to be posted at the entrances of certain restaurants, as previous
generations of New Yorkers had warned people not to hitch their horses too close
to the curb. There were even special matinees for babies-real babies, not just
kids-where the wails of the small could be heard in the dark, in counterpoint to
the dialogue of the great Meryl Streep dueting with a wet six-month-old. Whether
you thought it was “suburbanized,” “gentrified,” or simply improved, that the
city had altered was plain, and the children flooding its streets and parks and
schools were the obvious sign.
The transformation of the city, and particularly the end of the constant shaping
presence of violent crime, has been amazing, past all prediction, despite the
facts that the transformation is not entirely complete and the new city is not
entirely pleasing to everyone. Twenty some years ago, it was taken for granted
that New York was hell, as Stanley Kauffmann wrote flatly in a review of Ralph
Bakshi’s now oddly forgotten New York cartoon-dystopia Heavy Traffic, and every
movie showed it that way, with the steam rising from the manholes to gratify the
nostrils of the psychos, as if all the infernal circles, one through thirty,
inclusive, were right below. E. B. White was asked to update his famous essay
about the city, and that unweepy man, barely able to clear the bitter tears from
his prose, declined to write about a city he no longer knew. In the seventies,
Robert Caro’s life of Robert Moses, blankly subtitled “And the Fall of New
York,” was the standard version of What Had Happened.
Everyone has a moment of personal marvel about how far things have gone or
changed: Twenty-three years ago, I recall, they were toting bodies out of the
Film Center on Ninth Avenue, and (nice lost word) the degenerates were brooding
on it at the Film Center Café. Now the Film Center shines and the café across
the street serves mussels and croissant sandwiches, having kept its Art Moderne
front, so “period,” if nothing else. The scale of this miracle-and for anyone
who remembers the mood of the city in the early seventies, miracle it is-leads
inevitably to a rebound of complaint. It Is Not So Miraculous At All. Or: You
call that a miracle? The cross-dressers in the Village sniff at the influx of
nuclear families as the fleeing nuclear families once sniffed at the
cross-dressers. Some of the complaining is offered in a tone of intelligent,
disinterested urban commentary: The service and financial and media industries,
they say, are too unstable a base for a big city to live and grow on (though,
historically speaking, no one seems able to explain why these industries are any
more perilous than the paper-box or ladies’ lingerie industries of forgotten
days).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Through the Children’s Gate
by Adam Gopnik
Copyright © 2006 by Adam Gopnik.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2006
Adam Gopnik
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4000-4181-3
