A couple who recently moved to New York City asked me how the city has changed since the ’80s. We were at a Palestinian restaurant on Avenue C that, not long ago, had been a German beerhall called Zum Schneider. Back then, German expats would gather there for the World Cup, roasting a whole pig on the sidewalk to mark the occasion.
But that was already after the gentrification. Before, there were no restaurants, just take-out Chinese joints and bodegas. Drug dealers were conveniently positioned on every block, mostly serving homeless punk rockers. Kurt Cobain scored his heroin a block away from where I lived. The sidewalks were peppered with empty dime bags and needles. The graffiti-covered neighborhood looked exactly like the dystopian manga I had read as a teenager in Japan.
Manhattan was king. Brooklyn wasn’t hip or cool—just inconvenient. On weekends, I’d wake up early and walk to St. Mark’s Bookshop. Past the front desk and the table stacked with oversized graphic design books, I’d head straight for the philosophy section. Their selection was solid, but more often than not, the book I was looking for wasn’t there. Next stop: Barnes & Noble in Union Square. Then Shakespeare & Co. on Broadway, followed by NYU Bookstore. Only in Manhattan could you have all that within walking distance.
If you lived in the other boroughs, you had to commute into Manhattan to buy anything: Broadway Panhandler for kitchen tools, Canal Jeans for clothes, Pearl Paint for art supplies, Tower Records or J&R for music, Duggal for film processing, Canal Plastics for odd plastic products, The Wiz or Crazy Eddie for electronics, Dean & DeLuca for high-quality food ingredients.
Every day, we woke up with a sense of purpose: I’m going to find that book today. We felt like we were at the center of the universe because, here, you could get things done that suburban or rural people could only dream of.
But no more. Amazon took it all away. Now, we don’t know what to do with ourselves, so we scroll through social media and feel depressed. But we can do that anywhere. Why move to New York City for it?
I will email you when I post a new article.
