Democracy in America, Part Five

I remember my dad and I driving to New York City from New Jersey. After passing Newark on I-78, we crossed a bridge over the port of Newark, gleaming new cars and oil tanks to the right. As we came over the crest of a hill, the whole of New York City lay before us; gleaming towers (which, of course, included the awe-inspiring World Trade Center at the time) greeted us with their sun-grazed glass. My dad once told me that sometimes he regretted raising me so close to the greatest city on earth. He said, "the first time I really saw New York, in the 70s, it was the most exciting thing I could imagine. I was twenty-three years old and life suddenly seemed full of so many possibilities. But you've grown up with this. It's no longer impressive. You will feel underwhelmed by other cities, jaded by the greatness that you grew up a short car ride away from."

After passing through the Holland Tunnel, where I stared at the path with a railing on the side, wished I could see someone walking on it, wondered if they would need a gas mask to survive the fumes, we came around a bend onto Hudson Street. Tribeca had already started becoming a hot spot - Robert DeNiro had a loft nearby - but to a kid it was empty, restored masonry on stone towers with no stores on street level. It was when we cut east on Clarkson and then on Bleecker that it all came to life, the restaurants with outdoor tables and the records stores and sex shops and people who moved slower than anywhere else in the city because where else could you want to get to? On the east side we found a place to park and went to Little Ricky's.

Little Ricky's had a black-and-white photo booth, a typewriter with dirty words punched on the paper scroll, lunch boxes with nude photos of 60s pinup Betty Page in black lace stockings, PeeWee Herman dolls with a pullstring that repeated five phrases over and over, fuzzy dice in any color, trading cards from monster movies like The Blob and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, hula girl lamp shades, pink flamingo Christmas lights, Mexican jumping beans, cap guns, a hand-crank cash register.

Later the spot became a coffee shop proud to get its beans from New Jersey. Now it's another coffee shop that charges for WiFi.

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The imagination is not extinct; but its chief function is to devise what may be useful, and to represent what is real. -179