Eat Pray Herman New York

Yeah Ok, it’s December and I got back from the trip in September. OK. But I mean I am the editorial director of Wrong Side of the Camera, I can decide when I write and publish.

Well I do have a full time job, senior lecturing at this little university in Boston. These days though I think more than I write and I develop a narrative in my head, abandon it, come back to it, abandon it again and then somehow 27 minutes before midnight in December, four months after my trip ended, yeah, then suddenly, inspiration strikes. I don’t know how much writing there will be here. Might be a little, might be a lot. Kinda don’t know yet. We’ll see how it goes.

So I spent the first few days of Eat Pray Herman last summer in New York. I was tired last summer, teaching a very academically rigorous class, and quite frankly having a very rough time, it being the first summer without Herman.

I think a lot about the range of time I knew Herman. When he passed I was 46, 14 years into an unexpected career as a teacher, six years after I started teaching on the four year collegiate level, now having spent much more time teaching at different private universities than I ever spent attending any kind of private school over the years. When I met Herman, I was five years out of high school. The last summer before I knew Herman, I guess was 1999. Summer of 1999. I had just finished undergraduate, embarked on a truly weird chapter of the wilderness years that included getting unceremoniously dumped in the central square of Copenhagen and living and working in a place that had a curved, warped floor, living next door to Finnegan, the cantankerous photographer and working for a man named Sanford Horn who spoke in CAPITAL LETTERS. The bit with the hole in the ceiling was a little ways away. Not too far away.

When I found out that Herman had passed, I was at work at the university, just finishing giving a first day diagnostic test for the TOEFL exam. I had left journalism behind long ago and had been working at the university for going on four years. The floor at work doesn’t bend and I live in an apartment without a hole in the ceiling. No one has dumped me in the central square of any Northern European capitals of late. Hoping not to repeat that one. To say things had shifted would be an understatement.

Uh, I am not making a point. Meandering again. Ok meandering back to what you might call our thesis statement, yeah, I was pretty upset last summer. I kept hoping I would have that great summer moment, when the sun would set and someone magical would smile at me. Instead it LITERALLY rained every weekend last summer. Now I’m speaking in capital letters. On one of these rainy Saturdays, I flipped on YouTube while I was probably trying to make soup in my instant pot or just generally trying to figure out what I was going to eat for the rest of the week and this program loaded on YouTube about different unusual places in New York. House museums, places that had remained from the city’s colonial past. Glimpses into the past of a city that had done pretty much everything to stamp all that out. I ended up making myself a pretty good meal and I started a list on my phone of all of these places I wanted to go.

I copied the list into my phone. A lot of the places were in parts of Manhattan I had never really visited, despite having grown up there. Some of them were in places I had not visited in a very long time.

All the destinations on Eat Pray Herman were in a way connected to him and New York was probably the most connected to him. He grew up in Emerson, New Jersey. We could joke about Patterson and Paramus and all of those places that New Yorkers look their noses down at. Herman understood about bagels and about how Washington lacked in them. We could talk New York comfortably, understanding the place in a way other people didn’t. The New York of Action Park, Crazy Eddie, Bernie Goetz, the Strand bookstore and a carnival barker orange haired “real estate developer” nobody really cared about then. This was “our” New York, the real New York, not the one in the movies with the giant apartments people can afford on the salary of a barista.

Both of us had a difficult, complicated relationship with the city, at once in awe of it, but despising it at times but also acknowledging the role it had in shaping us. There’s something about the growing up in the Northeast that shaped us. We’re more sarcastic, more acerbic, that much more pessimistic that your average person. Herman and I shared that. I think that’s why we understood each other so well.

Herman also got being around the city in the 1980s. It was a DIFFERENT place back then. It had a dangerous feeling to it, something decayed and wasted and at the same time beautiful. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m an only child and we didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so I just went along with the adults and saw the city. I remember when Greenwich Village, Tribeca, the Bowery, those were not places you wanted to hang out. The people who lived on the Lower East Side were working class or recent immigrants. The Polish delicatessen was down there, where the owner gave me a treat whenever we visited. I could talk to Herman about this stuff. It wasn’t far away, theoretical or completely unknown to him.

I thought about Herman a lot when I spent my days in the city. I indulged in my love of history and you know, pastrami and visited places I hadn’t been to in ages. The Lower East side is still memorably quirky, the pastrami at Katz’s still heavenly, the area a glorious mess.

Of late I have been teaching a class about the history of Boston, being a history nerd, this is something I enjoy immensely. I sit in the classroom and think about how funny it is that a Polish immigrant who didn’t grow up in Boston is teaching the youth of the world about the Yankee Brahmins and a place where people are allergic to the letter R, have a great time making fun of themselves but if you mess with them, they will shut the place down and find out. What makes Boston such a curious place is that it is a microcosm of the United States, the buildings showing the city’s rise and fall and continual cycles of renewal.

New York, being larger and older, is the Boston microcosm on a larger scale, bigger, shinier, sharper. The goal of my visit to the city was really to trace the history of the place. The thing that I will never get over is that you cross New York and really cross centuries. Upper Manhattan, above 125th street, you see New York’s colonial heritage. Lower Manhattan, below 14th street, you see Dutch New York and the Jazz Age. The grave of Alexander Hamilton next to a building put up during the Wall Street boom, next to yet another sterile condo tower occupied by a raft of foreign billionaires who never visit. It’s all there, a microcosm of the whole world. To paraphrase from my favorite documentary of all time, New York by Ken Burns, a New York at one outward looking and yet shockingly insular full of shadows and light.

I spent a couple of days wandering the island with a dear friend of mine, who is a fellow history nerd. I made a mad list of places to visit and somehow, we made it to all of them.

I should put these in chronological order, but eh, I just don’t feel like it, so we’ll just go with the flow.

The first picture is of a mosaic that I absolutely love. It’s on the old International Telephone and Telegraph building in New York, 1928 futurism, when international communication and the future could only be a good thing. No dark clouds ahead.

These next couple, I put them into the category of “on today’s edition of no this actually Manhattan, not New York,” may I present the campus of the City College of New York. Yes. This is NOT Europe:

These next ones are from Hamilton Grange, from that guy who is the star of some little known musical. Fun fact: he only lived in this house for a short time before being taken out in the infamous duel.

Hamilton Grange:

Next up we have the Morris Jumel house and it’s accompanying terrace. This was the most fascinating place because if you faced one direction, you were in Colonial New York. If you faced the other direction, you were in modern New York. Yes, this is still Manhattan: