First of all, you can’t go to New York City. It’s not there anymore.
I say that to you now, in 2023, full well realizing that people said it to me when I started going to the city in 1990. For all I know people said it to kids in the ‘50s and ‘60s who missed the Beat moments of the 1940s and ‘50s (and it’s notable that On the Road was written in 1947, though the book wasn’t published till 1957). And for all I know people told the Beat writers they missed out on Billie Holiday in the 1930s, even if her immortal moment in literature comes not from the Beats but from the New York School:
… leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
—Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died”
And one could go on—who missed out on the Algonquin Round Table? Edna St. Vincent Millay? On Edith Wharton?
Going to New York is much like what Edward Abbey said about going to Arches National Park (then Arches National Monument) in 1967:
Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to see the Canyon country…. In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on your hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not…. most of what I write about in this bood is already gone.
—Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
And yet I jumped in my automobile some months after I read those words and walked and scrambled and sat under the vast starry sky and thought I still felt something, and I still go to New York City.
Last week I went with my kid, who wanted to see Times Square and the Empire State Building and Central Park and the Statue of Liberty, places I have largely avoided on my many trips to the city because, you know, they’re not cool. I have derided (mostly privately) the people who want to go on celebrity sighting bus tours, the people who want to see Disney shows on Broadway, the people who won’t take the subway.
But then I thought of the things I used to do when I was younger, which were mostly going by bars where dead white guys used to like to get hammered. Is it really any cooler to go by the White Horse Tavern or the Kettle of Fish (which I recently learned isn’t even in the same place anymore!) or the West End Bar because once upon a time Dylan Thomas or Jack Kerouac hung out there? You can take a tour of Beat NYC (or you could—the map is from 2007, and who knows what’s changed since then?), and is that really all that different from riding a bus to see where famous people live now?
The Magnetic Fields played a show at my college when they were cool but before they were famous. I didn’t know who they were then and in fact didn’t really know them at all till before I took that trip to New York in 2009 and my friend Steve sent me this video. I mean, really, I am not a very cool person.
We did a bunch of stuff on our trip. We went to many famous places and saw famous things. We went to a couple of gaming stores (shoutout to Astro Game and Videogamesnewyork), which wasn’t a thing I would have thought would be cool, but it was. We saw friends and we rode the subway, which is maybe my very favorite thing to do in New York. We got on the wrong subway once and off at the wrong stop once but otherwise didn’t really get lost, in part thank to our excellent guides. We also ate a lot of pizza.
Before we left, a lot of people asked me for recommendations, including many I could not give (I am not up on nightlife in Brooklyn) and some I could but that seemed generic and not useful (yes, the Lego Store and the M&M Store are superfun with kids). My advice is just go. Go however you can get there. Walk around. Look at all the crazy insane marvelous things, the ones that are there and the ones that aren’t.
Mita Williams (who also has a newsletter, though you have to subscribe to read it, I think?) was in NYC at the same time we were, though our paths didn’t cross. Her take on it is different from mine—as your should be, too. I don’t know what’s cool anymore, or what makes you a tourist instead of a local, or how much it matters. Places are cool because you went there before you were cool—because you spent time there when you were just kids.