New York Trip, Part 1 - Then and Now

I lived in New York or its suburbs during seasons 3-6 of Mad Men. If you’ve seen the show that’s the most efficient way I can convey to you what New York was like when I was there. I was oblivious to its soap opera themes because when I arrived I was eight years old.

I flew TWA from San Francisco wearing a dress, and there was a card that read “Miss Ballou” on the back of my first class seat. They gave us all red slippers, and parfaits for dessert. I visited the pilot and got my wings. My grandmother had given me a little gold notebook in which to record my impressions and I did do that, although she may have been overly optimistic about the writing ability of an eight year old. I kept that notebook a long time. I can’t remember exactly what was in it except that it was optimistic (the things my mother encouraged me to say) and quirky (my own thoughts). It also had Dick Clark’s autograph. We encountered him on the streets of New York a couple of weeks later. All I remember about that was that he and I were both so short that I never really saw him past the other people gathered around. I just handed my little gold notebook in to the crowd and it got handed back with his autograph.

My father had been transferred to the Manhattan office of AT&T for what we thought was a six-month stint, with my mother and I joining him for the last month, July. We lived in a hotel by Lincoln Center. My mother and I spent the days going around doing New York things while my father worked. We all went to see How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying on Broadway. The World’s Fair was going on. I loved that. I remember so much of the World’s Fair. I could go on and on about that but I won’t.

During this whole experience my mother kept up a stream of low level griping about New York. It was all wrong to her. Everything about California was better. New York was dirty, crowded, and crime-ridden. People did things differently and were abrupt with you if you didn’t do it the New York way. As an adult I can’t argue with any of this except the part about everything in California being better. Some things are, some things aren’t.

One night my father came back to the hotel and told me to go ride the elevator up and down for a while so he could talk to my mother privately. In retrospect, as a parent, I wonder what they were thinking sending an eight year old to wander through the halls of a New York hotel unattended for an indefinite amount of time, but nothing bad happened.

Eventually I wandered back and saw my mother had been crying. My father tried very hard to break the news as gently as possible: he had been transferred to New York for another two or three years. This was what the crying was about? I astonished them both by saying, okay, Dad, we can do that. About five minutes later I went from perfectly fine to sobbing when a thought occurred to me. I could barely choke the word out. Mitty! My cat. I couldn’t leave him! I was assured he could come too. Then I was fine again. That’s what eight years old is like.

A New York realtor showed us various apartments but my mother would have none of it. She would NOT do laundry in the basement with everyone else. She would NOT send me to a school that didn’t even have a name, just PS Number Something. There would be no place to play. She hated everything. There were no trees in New York! In actuality the place is loaded with trees, probably more than the arid San Francisco Bay Area. But she would not. No.

That’s how we ended up living across the river in the New Jersey suburbs for two and a half years. I didn’t return until I was in my twenties.

When we’ve known a place a long time we normally say, aw, you should have seen it before, you should have seen it when it was great. But on our recent trip I repeated a different version of the geezer’s song. You should have seen it back in the 80’s when graffiti covered every surface that could be reached by ladder. When Times Square wasn’t so crowded with tourists you could barely get from one side to the next, as it is now. In those days it was empty like a Western ghost town, garbage blowing like tumbleweeds, and the only people who ventured in were dealing drugs or trading sex. You should have seen it when the subways reeked of urine and the sidewalks were covered in homeless people and you frequently found yourself in the awkward situation of stepping over some poor guy to get into a hushed restaurant where a waiter stood by to drape a napkin over your lap, returning you to a helpless, infantile state. You should have seen that. That was really something.

In the early 80’s I spent one summer installing a computer at ABC Radio Network. My coworkers and I lived in a very nice brownstone in the Upper East Side. I resided in California at the time, so this was a temporary situation. The very first day I arrived in New York I had my wallet stolen … from inside a high end Manhattan office building … by a security guard. I had been told to go straight to the office from the airport for an orientation, so I had my luggage in an office on the 58th floor. The vice president of my company asked me to come down the hall so he could show me something. It was not my office so I didn’t have a key. It was a Sunday so there was nobody there. I left my luggage in the office, crammed my purse behind a filing cabinet, and went down the hall for a few minutes. When I came back the luggage was there but I noticed later my wallet was not. In my wallet was the key to the brownstone along with the address. So the thief had taken not only all my cash and credit cards but had access to where we lived. I was absolutely terrified. Later that evening I was approached by a panhandler. In my distraught state I told him I didn’t have any spare change because my wallet with every penny I had was stolen. He offered me sympathy. The homeless guy and I stood around for a while talking about how terrible the world can be. In that moment we were simpatico, he and I.

My coworkers could get us into the brownstone but I didn’t sleep well that night. I was convinced we were going to be visited by the crook. Instead I got a phone call from him at 6 a.m. He wanted me to meet him at the office building because he was a security guard who had “found” my wallet and wanted to return it. He was very specific about where in the building I should meet him. When I got there I went straight to the security desk and asked if one of them had my wallet. They told me they had caught wind of this plot somehow, gotten my wallet from the guy and fired him. So I got my wallet back but I didn’t ever rest well because the guy had had my key and address long enough to make a copy and now he had a grudge. He never came around though.

I have another story about getting chased through the subways by a stalker but I guess that one can wait.

Apparently we have Rudolph Giuliani to thank for starting a process that turned New York around. To drop back into the city after being away for nearly thirty years was shocking in the best kind of way. In the 80’s rows and rows of burned out buildings stretched up the west side and I remember thinking, if someone had enough capital to reclaim these, entire blocks at a time, they could make such nice neighborhoods – right near Central Park, with the fine brick bones of buildings. At the time the windows were nearly all broken and most had literal smoke stains pointing toward Heaven, bearing witness that they were burned out buildings with burned out people burning little fires to cook heroin and I don’t know what else. They roasted rats to keep warm maybe. By contrast, directly across the park was the Upper East Side where apartments sold for millions. John Lennon had lived and died just a few blocks down from this.

Riding up the West Side I kept waiting for this no man’s land to start and it never did. It had been gentrified clear up to Harlem and – astonishing! – into Harlem itself. Used to be that if you were white you really didn’t want to drive in Harlem too much because if your car broke down you might not survive the experience. We hadn’t planned on spending time there but our brief cruise through Harlem revealed an artistic and cultured area of mixed races that reminded me of Oakland!

All this sprucing up has come at a cost. They say some New Yorkers are pretty bent out of shape that the city has turned into a police state. There are police and Transit Authority (they have just as much clout as the PD) everywhere you look, most of them just standing there. We saw police helicopters circling and circling, giant Mobile Command Centers, these interesting contraptions that lift the police up above the crowd in places like Times Square, and security cameras everywhere. I mean everywhere.

It’s worth it. Tourists have flooded in, $pending ca$h like fool$. The city in August is like a theme park.

There’s easily a week’s worth of activities. I could have filled two weeks. Truth be told I could fill about two months but I’m trying to be reasonable. Part two will describe some of this week’s experiences.