give my regards to Broadway:
I STILL FEEL A SMALL ATREMBLE OF A LOVER'S EXCITEMENT...
WHENEVER I IMAGINE MYSELF GETTING OFF OF AN AIRPLANE in the city that I once knew so well. I recall that very first moment among its citizens: the buzz of the streets, the intangible compound of vendors, folks in a hurry, taxis blasting horns, strangers talking in vowels in languages I could not understand, peddlers of knockoff Rolex watches or Louis Vuitton handbags; and, of course, the tabloid newspapers and fine restaurants and magical theaters. That mysterious mixture is why so much of this city called Manhattan is personal to me. It is a magical place to be, a crossroads, combining God, politics, commerce, sin, and spectacle with its own music, its own special sense of hope, anguish, and loss.
Underneath the great quickening of the present city was a plan which began in 1811 and was called the Commissioner's Plan. As imagined by the planners, the future city called the City of Manhattan would rise from a simple grid of avenues and streets. Each of the 12 avenues, running south to north, would be 100 feet wide, stretching from about today's Houston Street to the distant end of the island, at what would be 155th street. Each street would be 100 feet wide. At the time the plan was drawn, most of that land was made of farms, stubborn hills, racing streams, isolated mansions, and stands of trees that had survived the Revolution. Hills were leveled. Ponds and swamps would be filled or drained. The grid would rule. Each of those streets and avenues would carry only numbers, rather than names. There would be no names of any individual, which were dismissed as examples of human vanity. Beauty and convenience was the plan, that was the Knickerbocker vision of the future.
Over the decades, changes came. After the Civil War, the real estate people began a new kind of building, exclusively for offices, truly tall buildings came, through technological advances, many were higher than 6 stories, but they had no way to carry workers from the street to their offices, or to provide them with light. One major solution would come in the 1880s with the development of electrical power by Thomas Alva Edison. The first electric-powered Otis elevator was installed 3 years later, and The New York City Subway opened on the 27th day of October in 1904. I would arrive on the same exact day 82 years after that in 1986, and departed 2 years prior to tumbling of The Twin Towers, on the 11th day of July in 1999. Over those 13 years, I felt as if I were in a wonderland. For me, the place where this was most true was Broadway.
Broadway exists as a concrete place and as an idea. It is the only major Manhattan avenue that moves diagonally across the Island, from the center to the west. It is the only one that moves us through time from the 17th century to the present. A place physical, touchable, it stretches the length of Manhattan from the Battery to the Harlem River, just short of 13 miles and moves 4 more miles into the Bronx and as far into Westchester as Sleepy Hallow, a final destination that would have delighted Washington Irving, making it the longest street on the Island. I have walked much of the avenue in Manhattan block by block, and certain parts of it live vividly in me. It is filled with images of Damon Runyon and Edgar Allen Poe and Jack Dempsey and Mark Twain...
...There is the Broadway block on the Upper East Side where the Thalia movie house once stood at 95th, where the movies of Fellini and Begrman and Karosawa were once shown. It drew students and faculty from Columbia University, from the Village and from far away as Brooklyn and New Jersey. There was a coffee shop nearby where knots of people sat after the movies, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and arguing about the movie they had just seen. Other Broadway blocks were a mushy blur of shops and food markets and take-out stores. They offered cuisine of the New York alloy; sushi and pizza and tacos, or delights from India and Thailand and China. On parts of Broadway, in the mornings and at dusk, hundreds of people walk dogs. Across the afternoons nannies push baby carriages past the latest outposts of Starbucks. Kids rush on crowded sidewalks, everywhere there are dense lines of truck delivering groceries to Gristede's or Pathmark, packages from UPS and Fed Ex and the US Postal Services while the officers from the traffic division lay tickets on illegally parked cars.
Broadway swells with every variety of urban swagger. You see the swagger in the old downtown financial district, where men in conservative suits and overcoats talk toward offices or clubs, or lunch at India House in Hanover Square. The swagger appears around City Hall where men and women with agendas hurry out of taxis or limousines and pass policemen on permanent alert against terrorists and skip up the stairs to meet with the mayor. You see it beyond Chambers Street, among almost eight thousand employees work in the federal building and women with the confident stride of those who have attained permanent employment. And then there are the young people who are now filling the empty lofts; artists, lawyers, designers, computer people. Even in the wake of the dot-com collapse, when you saw SUVs every weekend being loaded up with computers, they have attained the Broadway swagger. They have survived the season of adversity. They've learned that life here will never be easy, that there will be no long runs of success upon success, that impermanence is part of the deal. Sometimes New York knocks you down. It also teaches you, by example, how to get up. All of that is part of the Broadway swagger.
As the grand avenue pushes up through Soho and into Union Square and Times Square and Columbus Circle and through the Upper West Side into Harlem and beyond, through the Broadway of theaters and musicals, haunted by images of Damon Runyon, each of these Broadways is shaped by the neighborhoods through which it passes. Some are centers of retail shopping, or transportation, or entertainment. Others are residential. Many are too mixed for narrow labels. All, in mysterious ways, are meshed in my head...
...And I can sometimes close my eyes and think that I can see the ghost of Broadway Danny Rose coming toward me from the direction of the Carnegie Deli, rushing from nowhere, carrying life...
...And for that I will forever remain thankful...
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