Recently, I went on a very pleasant three week vacation with my parents to the Cayman Islands.  It was a lovely return back to the island, after a trying year.  There will be a separate long, thoughtful blog entry about that journey eventually.  EVENTUALLY.

When I got back, I found out I had a bit more time off, so I decided to go to New York for a couple of days.  The trips always have self imposed guidelines.  I have to travel there the cheapest way possible and I can’t spend a ton of money while I’m there.  I have to do the maximum number of free things.  I don’t get a hotel room.  I sleep on my friend’s futon.  We do a two day literal marathon through the city.  And I have to get the cheapest eats possible.  If there is cloth napkin in sight, I am not interested.  

I kinda love doing these trips periodically.  Sometimes I get back from traveling and I still want to travel a little bit, I go to New York.  Every time I go there, I think the same thing.  I have such a complicated relationship with that place.  So complicated.

I came to a realization on my most recent trip.  I really think I am bad at being a New Yorker.  At this point, I much more of a Bostonian than a New Yorker.  I was in and out of New York for 13 years.  Now I’ve been in Boston for 16 years, almost 20 years including the time of my parents living here.  Again, I am so bad at being a New Yorker.  The city is so huge and overwhelming.  On my most recent visit, I got out of Port Authority and I could not get over the lights and the noise in mid Manhattan.  Consistently I cannot believe that I actually grew up in the city.  It’s wild to me because the city is so big and so overwhelming to me at this point.

To reiterate for a third and hopefully final time, I am really bad at being a New Yorker.  This cannot be disputed.  I am so used to Boston’s spaghetti thrown against a wall arrangement of its streets, so I get disoriented in the grid.  I don’t remember the order of the avenues anymore.  I use GPS to get places.  Don’t get me started on the subway.  There is no way I will ever like taking the subway.  I like the T.  It has this kind of vintage charm.  Maybe because I have so many memories from so many corners of this city with so many groups of people that I have come across here.  

I don’t have the same affection for the New York City subway.  It smells bad.  It is incredibly noisy.  In every other city I have lived in, the terminus stations are place names.  In New York, they are streets in different boroughs.  Living in Boston, I have seen or visited every single terminus on the system.  Well, except Bowdoin, but seriously, who has even been to that one?  A couple of years ago, I got bored and went to see the station to make sure it was real.  But in New York, I have no idea where those places are and it makes sense that the stations are in The Bronx and Brooklyn.  Doesn’t make that system any easier to navigate.  

I’m something of a connoisseur of public transportation systems in the world.  If I am going to a new city and I hear there is public transportation system, I look forward to taking it.  New station names, new train types.  I love that sense of adventure.  As I said in another entry, I was shocked by the fact that I would be boarding a green line in Salt Lake City to get to my hotel.  But any sense of adventure in New York really recedes when I get on the subway.

Oh and I had a really funny moment in the city where I compared New York City to Salt Lake City to my friend who I visit in the city.  That’s when I really knew I was in “I’m not a New Yorker” anymore territory.  I told my friend about how Salt Lake City didn’t smell like gasoline, the way New York did.  I told him about how you could see straight to the Wasatch mountains in Salt Lake City.  Wow.  I am so provincial now.  I’m comparing arguably the center of universe to a city 2,000 miles west that was founded by Latter Day Saint pioneers that could not be more different.  

In my greatest tourist moment, my friend got delayed at his chiropractic appointment and  to paraphrase Moby Dick, having little else to interest me in Midtown and a few nickels in my purse, I decided to go to the top of the Empire State Building.  I hadn’t been up there for a while and really hammered home how I need to finally turn in my “New Yorker” card.  

I’ve heard so many times, to an absolutely nauseating degree that REAL New Yorkers don’t go to the top of the Empire State Building blah blah blah.  Strong eye roll.  That is the most iconic skyline in the entire world.  Why would you miss an opportunity to see it from above?  That has always mystified me.  

I paid the money and went up.  Of course there were tourists up there but it was also a kind of overcast, cold day, so I knew the lines wouldn’t be too bad.  There really weren’t any.  Honestly, I felt lucky to be up there and to be able to look at this skyline from above.  

As I’ve gotten out into the world, when I tell people I grew up in Manhattan, people treat it like it’s an accomplishment of some kind.  But truly, where we grow up in an accident.  In our case, truly an accident because it’s where my dad’s boss moved his lab to after it was initially in Chicago.  I could have grown up in Chicago, if life had turned out differently.  We moved to New York when I was five years old.  When you are a kid, you just go where the adults go.  

There is no way to describe what growing up in New York in the 1980s was like if you weren’t there.  During that time, the first seeds of what we all call modern life were planted.  At the same time, so many 1950s things were in their very final days in the city.  All of those grand dame department stores still existed, like A&S, Gimbels, Lord and Taylor and B. Altman.  Macy’s was almost a poor relation to those grand dames.  These were palaces to consumerism and capitalism.  Those stores were beautiful inside.  Now just Macy’s remains, all the other grand dames shut forever.  

Yet though in the 1980s, some mix of forces created an environment that saw the development of what we now call modern life.  There’s a nostalgic documentary on PBS called “Trader” about Paul Tudor Jones, now a hedge fund titan, but in those days, a thirty something energetic upstart in red suspenders and an Oxford shirt.  And Bruce Willis’s high top sneakers.  As he says in the documentary, the man’s a stud.  Tudor Jones marked the beginning of the non-commodity based billionaire.  Before those days, to be rich, you had to have oil or some kind of commodity, or master something early that no one thought to do.  I watch the documentary periodically when I feel nostalgic for those days.  I remember seeing those guys in the red suspenders walking around New York, ready to take over the world.  

It’s a bit strange watching that little documentary because you see the very beginnings of our lives now.  At one point, you see Tudor Jones cross a street with one of the lieutenants from his trading firm and he reaches into his pocket to take something out.  We assume with our modern eyes that it’s a cell phone but it’s a very fancy looking calculator or a radio of some kind.  So many things are happening in that one scene.  They are almost like time travelers from 40 years hence.  One day people will have these handheld information portals in their hands.  

I love finding things like that that let me relive those days and that bygone time.  I also found a documentary podcast a few years ago called “the Just Enough Family” about the corporate raider named Saul Steinberg and his meteoric rise and spectacular fall.  His meteoric rise took place when we lived in the city and because my father’s idea of a good time on a Saturday was going to Central Park with two copies of the Sunday New York Times, which we would read together as a family, I remember this very clearly.  Saul lived at 740 Park avenue in one of imposing buildings that face the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park.  The protagonist of the story we watched unfold in the New York Times was not too far away from us.  

Steinberg was, and I dislike this terminology because it is really overused, a force of nature.  Some described him as a swashbuckler, which by all accounts is a pretty apt way to describe the guy.  He’s the sun all the other people in the family profiled in the podcast turn around.  I googled him and his wife, a very glamorous woman named Gayfryd Steinberg and all of these beautiful pictures came up.  In particular, I spent a lot of time analyzing a set of photos taken featuring Gayfryd at Malcolm Forbes’s 70th birthday party in Morocco.  That might be the most glamorous sentence ever written.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more glamorous and cosmopolitan looking set of people in my life.  I have a couple of sets of photos that I look at when I’m lacking in ideas or inspiration.  That set is definitely among those photos.

I listened to the podcast so many times because it offered an inside view of how those rich people I saw in New York living.  Here we were, these people from nowhere whose lives were very circumscribed by our financial situation surrounded by this profligate, over the top spending.  The Go Go 80s, right?  As a kid, those people looked extremely glamorous.  As an adult, having experienced a few things and learned a few things, I realized that all that glittered was not gold.  

I also remember seeing those preppy kids running around the upper east side, where we lived.  I looked up to them in a way.  I crossed paths with them a lot in my gymnastics classes and on our summer trips to Cape Cod.  In 1986, the city was rocked by a young woman named Jennifer Levin was murdered in Central Park by a person she knew and trusted.  It was called “the preppy murder” and was this murder case that received an inordinate amount of press coverage.  A particularly poignant moment in the documentary was Jennifer Levin’s best friend showing a picture of them together and saying what an innocent act taking the picture was, when less than a year later, Jennifer was gone.  

Jennifer Levin was almost a decade older than me and I wasn’t even a pre-teen yet when the case happened but it is very strongly stored in my memory, due to it having a connection to the area we lived in at the time.  I also remember how she was portrayed in the media, being blamed for this tragic thing that had happened to her.  The murderer, whose name I am not writing here on purpose was, in the wise and angry words of Jennifer’s best friend, portrayed as a symbol of white male beauty power money and intelligence. Mike Sheehan, the square jawed gravely voiced police detective on the case said the murderer had been in jail from the time he was 19 years old and is now knocking on 60, had just wasted his life. The voice of reason in a complete circus.  

The 1980s in New York was this almost volatile mix of preppies, aspiring Wall Street tycoons, graffiti artists and up and coming hip hoppers that gave the city this kind of magic that it no longer has.  What always strikes me on every visit is how every kind of off kilter and fun neighborhood where it was once possible to rent an apartment for a cheap price is now full of those awful empty glass towers where apartments are priced out of the reach of everyone except the most upper income person.  You can’t really have magic if you price everyone out.  That’s the sad part about visiting the city now.  It feels like the magic won’t come back because it’s simply too expensive to try to make it in the city as a creative person.

I wonder a lot too though why I had absolutely no interest in living in the city as an adult.  I think about this almost every time when I visit.  Why did I have no desire to do life here as an adult??? I just couldn’t see myself living in one of those anonymous high rises and going to Gristedes or Food Emporium to shop.  I couldn’t see myself riding that subway every day to some other anonymous office building.  I didn’t want my life to be a string of overpriced brunches and loud nights out.  None of that really suited me.  

I also could not have those same conversations over and over and over again.  Yes, I moved here when I was five years old and I went to high school in the suburbs.  “Oh so you aren’t a real New Yorker.”  I mean I’m sorry that I couldn’t convince my parents to leave Poland five years earlier so I could have been born in New York.  There were some really pressing concerns they were dealing with at the time.  And I could not hear for the umpteenth time that because we had lived in Westchester when I was a teenager, that I was “from upstate.” For some reason in New York, that’s some kind of an insult.  You upstate simpleton don’t understand us complicated city people.  No.  My dad got a job over there and we moved.  In my mind, when people said I was “from” there, they were saying it was ok what happened to me while we lived there.  They weren’t saying that but it was really annoying and I just wanted it to end.  I just never wanted to have this conversation again.  Enough was enough.

When I moved to Denmark when I was 20 years old, I loved it because I was completely disconnected from all of that.  No one cared the year I had moved to New York, so they could judge my “New Yorkness.”  We talked about other things and life, for a split second, felt normal.  

My friends who I visit in New York aren’t natives.  One is from Hawaii and educated in Indiana and then New York.  The other lived in Florida and came to New York 25 years ago.  Both are absolutely better at being New Yorkers than I am.  Both know the subway way better than I do, in that they don’t need to use GPS to navigate it.  They saw other parts of the world and decided they loved New York enough to make it their home base.  I saw other parts of the world and decided I wanted to be somewhere else.  

I look around Boston and I cannot imagine living anywhere else.  Life has opened up into a phase I had never experienced before.  I’m not out chasing anything anymore.  I remember thinking recently how my life settled down one day and all of the doors of the houses and apartments around me just opening.  I spent years living in places wondering who my neighbors were.  

I did spend about 3 1/2 years working in New York as an adult and I found it for the most part to be incredibly disappointing.  I wasn’t offered any mentorship or help or anything while I lived there.  It always felt like people were off somewhere living it up and I was alone in my sad little apartment.  I lived in Mount Vernon, in the Yonkers area of New York.  I guess all the “real New Yorkers” can chime in and tell me I wasn’t living in “real New York.”  Please.  Go ahead.  I can’t wait to hear what YOU have to say about ANYTHING.  I lived in this building in Mount Vernon and I never saw a single human being open a door or pick up their mail in that building.  Not one.  I never saw anyone leave for work in the morning, never saw anyone come back.  I never even heard my neighbors in their own homes.  It was strange, to say the least.  I think about that a lot when I’m hanging out with my community now.

There was also a little “downtown” area in Mount Vernon. There was an A&P there and a bakery, I think.  I went down there one time, I think.  I also did not cook at home very much.  

I lived in Mount Vernon in New York for a year before I moved to Boston.  I had this on/off phase when I lived and worked in New York of about three and a half years in my 30s.  It wasn’t a period for me that was particularly fruitful professionally or personally.  Sometimes I feel like that phase was like the low rated seasons of the television show where it had bad writers and almost no one watched.  It wasn’t even a period of time when I was taking a lot of pictures.  It was just in 2008, when I was living in that desolate building where I never saw anyone.  I look around at my life now and think — how is that even connected to that old life?  I lived in a neighborhood where I didn’t know anyone??? Now I can’t imagine living in a place where I don’t know half the people in my neighborhood.  I could have never pictured in my mind the people I would meet and become friends with. 

The other thing that always hits me when I go to New York is how growing up there made me love nature as much as I do.  I cannot overstate how happy I am sitting on that ski lift every weekend in that landscape covered in snow.  All of these years of skiing have not made that wear off.  If anything, that’s sharpened.  Standing on that black sand beach in Iceland in 2023 and staring at the Mars-like landscape on Antelope Island in Utah in 2024 filled me with feelings I never had in New York, staring at those glass manmade monoliths.  You see the hand of God in nature.  You see the hand of capitalism looking at those skyscrapers.  

Now I go to New York like a tourist, just like I go to Poland as a tourist.  I was born in Poland but I’m a tourist there.  I grew up in New York and went to elementary school, high school and college there and I’m a tourist there too.  I didn’t grow up in New England and had absolutely no connection to this area before I came to live here but this is home now.  And it feels good to finally be home.

Some pictures from my recent visit to New York.  Some really touristy pictures: