The New York I lived in ... was rapidly regressing. It was a ruin in the making, and my friends and I were camped out amid its potsherds and tumuli. This did not distress me—quite the contrary. I was enthralled by decay and eager for more: ailanthus trees growing through cracks in the asphalt, ponds and streams forming in leveled blocks and slowly making their way to the shoreline, wild animals returning from centuries of exile. Such a scenario did not seem so far-fetched then. ...

[...]

For those of us who had been in the city for a while, squalor was not an issue. Most of the city was squalid. If this troubled you, you left, and if you were taken by the romance of it, a long regimen of squalor in everyday life would eventually scrub your illusions gray. At this remove I'm sometimes retrospectively amazed by what I took for granted. Large fires a few blocks away every night for a couple of years would seem conducive to a perpetually troubled state of mind, but they just became weather.

[...]

In those days the police, when not altogether invisible, were nearly benign, or at least showed no interest in the likes of us, being occupied with actual violent crime. Almost everybody had a story about walking down the street smoking a joint and suddenly realizing they had just passed a uniformed patrolman, who could not possibly have failed to detect the odor but resolutely looked the other way. Casual illegality was unremarkable and quotidian, a matter of drug use and theft of goods and services, petty things. We slid by in weasel jobs, in part because we were preoccupied with our avocations and in part because a certain lassitude had come over us, a brand of the era.

The revolution was deferred indefinitely, then, because we were too comfortable. Not, mind you, that we didn't live in dumps where the floors slanted and the walls were held together with duct tape and the window frames had last been caulked in 1912 and the heat regularly went off for a week at a time in the depths of winter. The landlords were the primary villains and the most visible manifestations of authority. ... At the same time, you could let the rent go for a while and not face eviction, because the eviction process itself would cost the landlord some kale, besides which it might be hard to find anyone else to take up the lease, so that a tenant who only paid every other month was better than nothing. We were comfortable because we could live on very little, satisfying most requirements in a fiercely minimal style for which we had developed a defining and mitigating aesthetic. It was lucky if not entirely coincidental that the threadbare overcoat you could obtain for a reasonable three dollars just happened to be the height of fashion.

I had things a little easier than Sante did, and thus never was a part of the demimonde existence he describes, because I was lucky enough to run into a friend from high school on the train the day I went looking for an apartment. That led to a job as a stage manager for an off-off-Broadway theatre, which led to a permanent job at the theatre, which led to a Broadway show and then to a national tour, all of which meant that I was gainfully employed for my first 4 or 5 years in the city. Still, my first apartment in 1976 was on 3rd Street between Avenues B & C, in Alphabet City, and my second on 6th between 1st and 2nd in the East Village, so while I never had to live in exactly the kind of squalor Sante describes, the accidental aesthetic of it was all around me.

But the city was like that at the time, doling out rewards and perks seemingly at random. If I hadn't met my friend on the train, I probably would have lived exactly the way Sante did -- and maybe I would have learned some valuable lessons about how to survive in the city that I've really never mastered in my 27 years in Manhattan.

Suspicion in the hinterlands of New York City's moral fiber and quality of life, rampant since the early nineteenth century, reached new heights during the 1970s. Hadn't the President himself urged the city to drop dead? If you told people almost anywhere in the country then that you lived in New York, they tended to look at you as if you had boasted of dining on wormwood and gall. Images of the city on big or small screens, fictional or ostensibly journalistic, were a blur of violence, drugs, and squalor. ... Aside from [that], there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions.

Downtown we were proud of this, naturally. We thought of the place as a free city, like one of those pre-war nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions. I had never gotten around to changing my nationality from the one assigned me at birth, but I would have declared myself a citizen of New York City had such a stateless state existed, its flag a solid black.

This sense of New York City as foreign to the rest of the country has diminished somewhat in the meantime (evidenced by the malling of Time Square and Soho and the increasing number of blockbuster stores on Sixth Avenue in Chelsea) but it still hasn't disappeared entirely (and I fancy I can see vestiges of it in the ritualized Yankees-hatred that we're inflicted with every baseball post-season). You could even see it in the somewhat detached way many Americans reacted to the 9-11 attacks: after all, it happened there in that foreign city New York (and in D.C., the seat of the hated gummint), not here in America.

Now, more than a decade after I finally finished my book Low Life, the city has changed in ways I could not have pictured. The tenements are mostly still standing, but I could not afford to live in any of my former apartments, including the ones I found desperately shabby when I was much more inured to shabbiness. Downtown, even the places that used to seem permanently beyond the pale have been colonized by prosperity. Instead of disappearing, local history has been preserved as a seasoning, most visibly in names of bars. The economy has gone bad, but money shows no signs of loosening its grip. New York is neither the Wonder City nor a half-populated ruin but a vulnerable, overcrowded, anxious, half-deluded, all-too-human town, shaken by a cataclysm nobody could have foreseen. I don't live there anymore, and I have trouble going there and walking around because the streets are too haunted by the ghosts of my own history. I wasn't born in New York, and I may never live there again, and just thinking about it makes me melancholy, but I was changed forever by it, and my imagination is manacled to it, and I wear its mark the way you wear a scar. Whatever happens, whether I like it or not, New York City is fated always to remain my home.

I'm still here, and I'm likely to stay here for the forseeable future, and my only trouble walking the streets isn't the ghosts of my past, it's all the tourists in Times Square, who make it practically impossible to get to and from the Biltmore Theatre without dodging and weaving past gawkers strolling three abreast. Tourism is supposed to be down, but you couldn't prove it by me, but whether that means the city is on the way back or just pacing time before it goes down again, I dunno -- it may ultimately depend on whether the Democrats take back the White House in 2004.