If you live in New York, you live in the movies. You live in a real place of the imagination. You’re part of a cast of eight million in a crowded fantasy of aspiration and achievement, destiny and destruction, dreams made for a giant screen, a perpetual rush-hour reality styled and groomed into some luminous tapestry of 35-millimeter memory.
You live in New York, but you also live in the New York the movies created in your imagination. New York is your city, but your life there is shaded by all the memories and images you’ve seen of it on film. My life was. Is.
When it came my turn to translate and illuminate what I had seen in New York—in the streets and on the screen—I’ve tried to share and shape new memories, fresh images, different stories, all of which, in some way, contour the ever-changing canvas of New York.
This was a process that began, in some unfinished way, early on. I’m not sure exactly when, but I remember the impact George Cukor’s A Double Life had on me when I first saw it, on TV. The film is eerie, challenging, haunting in the deepest sense, but what startled me the most, beyond the narrative, was the sight of Ronald Colman walking into a small Italian restaurant on Broome Street called the Café Venezia. Fictitious restaurant name, but the real street. Just a few streets from where I lived. The actors had stepped into my neighborhood, my life. Or had the movie made me part of theirs? I’m not sure, but I know that a few decades later I answered that question. That same restaurant became a key location when I made Mean Streets.
I grew up on Hollywood reconstructions of my city, where the streets were sparkling and the curbs were three feet high. Every apartment seemed to be in penthouse on Sutton Place with an epic view of the 59th Street Bridge. It was an uptown fantasia of New York. But here, in the projected fantasy of A Double Life, was the real world I lived in. It didn’t have the saturating light and gleam of the New York the studios made on the back lot. Instead, it was austere, shadowy, immediate, and familiar. And because of that I thought it was even more beautiful.
There was also a kind of half-serious pride when my friends and I saw our neighborhood on a forty-foot screen. When the actors in The Bachelor Party rode the subway and the process screen outside the grimy window showed the Prince Street station, the kids in the theater cheered. It was a bit ironic, but it was also a kind of validation for us. We were being woven into the Hollywood dream.
It was by no means usual to see our part of town shown in, or rendered in, a film. New York of the movies then was mostly the dazzle of Broadway (also shown brilliantly in A Double Life), the rush of midtown, and the cultivated streets of privilege. King Vidor’s masterpiece The Crowd was the outstanding exception to this, but it was a silent movie, and we hadn’t been able to see it yet. Elia Kazan’s wonderful A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was about a different borough, across the East River, but it still felt familiar, not alien territory. The studio sets were representational and caught the texture of the streets, if not their full flavor. A decade or so later, Kazan abandoned the studio entirely when he made On the Waterfront. It took the coming of Neo-Realism from Italy after World War II to finally bring the movies out in the open, and down to our part of town, for real.
For a while it seemed we were enveloped by the genre, which used not only the stores and tenements and streets of our lives, but also the dark current running alongside them. That’s to say, these movies were mostly crime stories: Jules Dassin’s The Naked City, Robert Siodmak’s Cry of the City, Anthony Mann’s Side Street. These films, and so many others, were made just as I was starting to see movies myself with my parents, so I had to catch up with them later.
By then, though, what had started as a novelty—seeing the places of our lives onscreen—had become normal. Hollywood mock-ups of the Lower East Side looked tenuous, and they deflected the power of the narrative. We didn’t need the fantasy of our city anymore. We wanted, in the theater, what we saw outside the theater. Anything less was patronizing, a kind of betrayal.
The long tenement hallways with the dank lighting. The walls with thick impacted paint. Sounds on one floor echoing through the entire building. Spaces—if there were any—between buildings as narrow as gutters. Jersey Alley, known now as Jersey Street. These days it’s an address of bohemian chic, but in my early life it was a known place for the mob to deposit corpses, as a warning. The world I grew up in.
Even now, working in New York, I’d rather shoot in the downtown streets I know than in the settled precincts of uptown. I may live in that neighborhood, but I can’t entirely shake the feeling that I’m passing through. Because downtown formed me. I knew the streets I lived and played on. I knew the cobblestones of the old streets. I knew the bricks. I knew the colors of the city in the day and at night. The tenement rooftops were like escape hatches, high above the asphalt, giving you a glimpse—between clotheslines hung with laundry—of the skyline of the city uptown. Hollywood’s city, and, in time, mine.
It’s easy enough to romanticize this, I know. My part of New York was a spectacularly sordid cityscape. I hated it and it frightened me, but I saw beauty in it too, and I loved it. I loved the paradox of it. I never tried to resolve it but instead tried to draw inspiration from it. I lived around the corner from the Bowery, when it was the desperate last stop for drunks, drifters, and the hopeless. We had to dodge the daily violence and step over the bodies of terminal alkies. But beside the daily fear of having to confront this, I saw some kind of awful honesty in it, a frantic beauty in the undisguised desperation of these lives on the street.
This was the city I grew up in, the city whose myths and memories I’d mined for my own films. Those memories linger forcefully, enduringly. You can’t extinguish them, even if you want to, and their ability to seduce you into a past both lived and imagined is irresistibly powerful.
Writing this, I remember the late 1960s, in Amsterdam, looking to find my way and trying to break into the movie business any way I could. It was my first time out of the country, and I worried I was adrift. I went to see Don Siegel’s Madigan, and there was a second unit shot of a car driving along Houston Street, right past the corner of Elizabeth Street. My street. In wide screen. And color. That was the northern border of my boyhood neighborhood, and the site of it, so casually but so beautifully done, made me homesick.
It was Hollywood’s New York and my New York. They are inseparable now, and now I live in both. But back then, so far away and so short of my ambition, the movie brought me home.
Martin Scorsese is the director of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Age of Innocence, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, and many other acclaimed films. He has also been a major force in film preservation.