One night in the mid-1970s, in a repertory theater in lower Manhattan, I saw No Time for Comedy, a 1940 movie whose barebones plot was this: a hayseed playwright who’d previously scored big with his comedies has been persuaded by a femme fatale to write a tragedy; he has done that and the play has bombed. At the opening of the movie, friends are gathered in the playwright’s apartment to commiserate with him on his disastrous opening night, only the playwright himself has not yet arrived back home. As the hours climb steadily toward midnight and he hasn’t yet appeared, the guests begin to worry, but the playwright’s ex-wife assures everyone that there’s nothing to fear. As I remember it (I’m paraphrasing here), she says, “He’s just walking around in Central Park. It’s what he does if he thinks he’s failed.”
When these lines were delivered, nearly everyone in the theater burst into raucous laughter. We were, I’d hazard, an audience of New Yorkers mostly in our thirties or forties, probably all raised in the Bronx or Brooklyn, and not one of us, I feel safe in positing, would have set foot in Central Park after dark. We could believe that such a foray was feasible in the Thirties or Forties, but this, after all, was New York in the Seventies, when the city was facing bankruptcy, the garbage wasn’t being collected, and grocery stores were being held up in broad daylight.
At the same time, it was also true that no matter how dark and dangerous the streets had become, there we all were. When the screen went black, most of us were going to go somewhere to eat and argue over the movie, and hours later either walk across town or take the subway home. We were, after all, a collection of people to whom it never occurred, no matter what, to stop living our urban lives. I was reminded of those years recently when, during the COVID lockdown, I myself continued to walk the streets of New York, take the subway, eat in restaurants—and kept running into people I’d known for years, all doing the same.
I was born and raised in the Bronx, in a working-class immigrant neighborhood I couldn’t wait to get away from, which meant only one thing: moving to Manhattan. Manhattan was Araby; it still is; I guess it always will be. Although I’ve done a goodly amount of foreign travel, and have lived at different times in different parts of the country—California, Texas, D.C.—I have never achieved a genuine sense of well-being anywhere except in New York City. I once brought a dinner party in a university town to an abrupt close by telling the assembled company that if everyone I knew died tomorrow, I wouldn’t go under because I’d still have New York.
Now what was I doing in that town? I was teaching, as I did here and there for over twenty years, in one university or another—and it was in those towns that I learned what it means to live where the atmosphere is either static or kinetic. By static I mean a place where the pool of human possibility feels small and settled, as opposed to a place where it feels unlimited and ever-moving. That “unlimited,” in my experience, is achieved only through an abundance of street life. It was this last item, major street life, that I learned I could not do without.
One year, when I was living in a town I’ll call Midwest City, I came home on a holiday weekend and took a long walk through Manhattan. The day was brilliant, the asphalt glimmered, the traffic rang out. At 23rd Street, two men in their twenties, thin and well-dressed, brushed past me, one saying to the other, “You gotta give her credit, she made herself out of nothing, and I mean nothing.” At 37th Street, a couple—dark, attractive, middle-aged—came abreast of me just as the man was murmuring, “It’s always my problem, it’s never your problem.” At 46th Street, a cabbie and a passenger were outside the car having an argument; a woman turned to me and blurted, “Can you buh-lieve this?” I remember thinking, “It’s like constant ejaculation. In Midwest City no one is ejaculating!” And I hugged the world to myself.
Only once in my long life has New York lost its kinetic quality, and this was in the weeks following September 11th, when—as I remember it—an immense, unnatural quiet seemed to blanket the streets. One night during this time, I was crossing Broadway somewhere in the Seventies, and halfway across, the light changed. I stopped on the island that divides the avenue and did what everyone does: looked down the street for a break in the traffic so that I could safely run the light. To my amazement, there was no traffic. Not a car in sight. I stood there, in the enveloping darkness, hypnotized by the grand and eerie emptiness that made the city feel suddenly lonely. I couldn’t recall the time—except for a blizzard, perhaps—when Broadway had ever, even for a moment, been free of oncoming traffic. And just as I was starting to think, “It looks like a scene from another time…,” I wrenched myself from the thought because nostalgia, at that moment, felt elegiac. I refused to believe the city would not recover from September 11th, just as nowadays I refuse to believe it will not recover from COVID, even though the streets often feel as unnaturally quiet as they did on the worst days of the pandemic. All I can do is demonstrate my faith by doing what New Yorkers do, in good times or bad: keep on walking.
The moment I leave the apartment and step into the street, there is no yesterday, there is no tomorrow, neither is there age or class or the demands of work; there is simply the wall-to-wall presence of all that I connect with, in the here and the now. How often the street achieves this for me—the flash of experience I extract again and again from the endless stream of oncoming humanity. It’s a joy to catch the eye of the passing stranger, spot a look of surprise or wonder on a tourist’s face, feel the impersonal affection of a palm laid against my arm or my back as someone murmurs, “Excuse me,” and sidles skillfully past me. In those moments I feel myself enfolded in the embrace of the crowded street, its heedless expressiveness the only invitation I need to not feel shut out. Never am I less alone than alone on the New York street. There I connect with myself. There I buy time.
Vivian Gornick writes memoirs, essays, and literary criticism, and could quite happily never leave New York City again.