
As discussed in this previous post, I went in for my worryingly named BAER exam last week, a midday appointment which sent me scrambling out of my Times Square office right after our 12:30 meeting to the far flung reaches of the Upper East Side. For all my swaggering tough talk about being a native New Yorker, I should qualify the statement every time by noting that I actaully grew up on the Upper East Side, a point which makes the fact a little less impressive, as far as I'm concerned.
A snot-nosed little child of privilege, I grew up going to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum. I went to grade school with one of the Shah of Iran's sons and Robert Chambers, a.k.a. "the Preppy Murderer" (he was in the class ahead of me, and -- at the time -- a perfectly nice gent). In grade school, we played soccer on the Great Lawn and ran laps around the Resevoir. In the Spring, my friends and I would bike recklessly around the neighborhood's leafy sidestreets. In the winter, we'd stand on the islands in the middle of Park Avenue and chuck snowballs at the big modern sculpture on 92nd street (which made a great, hollow, metallic "boonnnnnnnnnnng" sound when hit squarely) and taxi cabs (which, by the way, is a deplorable thing to do). I even lived at a Park Avenue address for a while-- though you never appreciate such circumstances until you're no longer in them. By the time I left the Upper East Side in 1996, I was living between York Avenue and East End, a perfectly nice -- if soul-warpingly dull -- part of the Upper East Side dubbed "Yorkville." It was a ten minute walk to the nearest subway (and a ten minute walk home after you got off the subway). When I left, I vowed never to return.
That all said, whenever I do travel up to the Upper East Side -- specifically into the upper 80s and lower 90's ("Yorkville" and "Carnegie Hill," repectively), I can't help feeling like I'm going home. No one in my family lives around there anymore (my step-father de-camped to Connecticut, my sister departed for Westchester, my Dad moved somewhere up his own ass and my Mom moved across town to the West Side), but having spent such a huge swathe of my life in that neck of the woods, there's no shaking that feeling of familiarity. My grade school's up there. My high school's up there. The streets I played on, walked on, hung out on, got mugged on, misbehaved on,...they're all still up there. It's for this reason that I'm always shocked when I see drastic changes in the neighborhood. I suppose that it's entirely naïve of me to expect the area to remain static -- as if frozen in amber -- but when I climbed out of the #6 train station at East 86th and Lexington last week, I was blown away to see what looked like nine-tenths of the entire block entirely razed. A byway I'd spent an inordinate amount of time on in my youth (E.86th street between Lexington and Third used to play host to many movie theaters, fast food joints and record stores back in the day), I just wasn't expecting to find a huge part of it…..well….missing, as if some unfathomably huge Tyranosaurus Rex had just leaned down and bitten it out of the ground.

Having arrived a good forty minutes ahead of my appointment -- `cos I'm neurotic like that --- I decided to stroll about some areas of my old `hood. A lot of the familiar spots were still there --- the barber shop on Lexington Avenue I went to when I was a little boy, the church I received my first communion in, the supermarket my Mom used to go to, the bicycle shop I used to fill my tires in -- largely unchanged. But lots of the ol' haunts -- the comics shop I feverishly visited every week, the pizza parlor I wasted a fortune in quarters at playing "Tempest," the record stores (remember those?) -- they're all long gone. But it's still "home." For all my bluster at how boring the area is -- and it is -- it's still not a bad place to live. At the very least, you've got Central Park, which I've sorely missed since I moved downtown a decade ago. These days, with Oliver growing larger and more worryingly mobile by the hour, my wife and I are starting to think about moving. We so love living downtown, and especially our neighborhood, but finding a bigger apartment -- much less even a comparable apartment -- than our current one seems indescribably unlikely. While I swore that I'd never go back, I'd totally consider going back to the Upper East Side (or parts of it, anyway) if it meant that we could stay in Manhattan.
Otherwise, Brooklyn or Westchester awaits. If we're lucky.
Recent Comments