In Warren's Words

You Can't Go Home Again...Or Can You?
 

Ever since I returned full time to New York City from a forty-odd year exile in other parts of America, I have pondered the wisdom of this great title of the novel by Thomas Wolfe, the fabulous and favorite writer of my youth. Few read him now, although my guess is that one day he will have his long overdue revival.

There is no denying the changes in the city of my birth have been profound, not only during the years of my absence but since the dawn of my earliest memories. Most of that world has been swept away by the winds of physical and environmental changes. At times I try to catalogue these changes in my mind until the memory chip in my brain gets too overloaded and I have to desist, frightened that yesteryear’s domination might affect my adjustment to the reality of today.

The Brownsville and Crown Heights of my Brooklyn childhood, for the most part, have disappeared. My grandparents lived in a tiny house in Brownsville, a family sanctuary paid for by their more prosperous sons, always the fallback site when my father lost his job, which was frequent and we were periodically dispossessed from our more upscale apartments in Crown Heights.

Aside from the radically changed demographics, some remnants of these neighborhoods do remain, just enough to provide me enough signposts to jog my memory.  The street names are the same. The subway, once called the IRT, stills rocks out of the underground in Brownsville to the El that carries it to New Lots Avenue. The old trains and straw seats are gone, along with the wooden turnstiles, the nickel fare and the penny chewing gum vending machines, and the old system designations have been replaced by numbers. For the most part, the stations have the same names.

The old stores are gone as well, the candy stores, the mom and pop groceries, the fresh fish stores, the kosher butchers and the delicatessens, but that is no mystery since the customers who once patronized them have disappeared as well. My grandparents’ old house on Strauss Street across from Betsy Head Park miraculously still stands, although radically changed in appearance. The front porch has been demolished but the three fruit trees, the pear, the cherry and the plum apparently still provide their seasonal feast.

Yes, the evidence of my eyes is conclusive. New York City has changed its garb, updated its appearance, put on a fresh face.

My old public schools in both neighborhoods, P.S. 183 and P.S. 91, still stand, their outward appearance reasonably unchanged and enough to open the tear ducts of nostalgia. A few years back I was “Principal for a Day” at P.S. 183 and found it, surprisingly, cleaner with a more dedicated teaching staff and a talented principal who could easily run a Fortune 500 company. So much for preconceived notions.

The old Stone Avenue library where I cut my teeth on the glories of the written word still stands, but the pushcarts that lined the path from my grandparents’ house are gone. They were the supermarkets of yesteryear where you could buy a complete wardrobe, toiletries, spectacles, fresh fruit and vegetables and versions of fast foods like potato knishes, baked sweet potatoes and roast chestnuts.

The old synagogues have become churches, and huge swaths of tenements and single family homes have been demolished to make way for unseemly prison-like public housing.

The old movie palaces are gone, the Ambassador, the Peoples Cinema, the Pitkin, the Cameo and the Savoy, along with all the others. Across the street from our apartment on Balfour Place was the Empress where my mother and I went twice and sometimes three times a week to all the movies ever released through the entire decade of the forties. This undoubtedly accounts for my ability to name every movie star that appeared in those films, a feat that astonishes my children.

Wonderful Prospect Park and the awesome Botanical Gardens, the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Public Library building, among other edifices and monuments created by earlier generations, have been enhanced and beautified and remain the easily recognizable landmarks of my youth.

My old high school, Brooklyn Tech, still stands in downtown Brooklyn. It admits girls now. The absence of that gender during the years of my exploding hormones was sorely missed. By some miracle I was chosen by test to attend that elite school. It still baffles me why I was chosen since I had neither interest nor competence in technical subjects and couldn’t wait to graduate. Once sitting in a neglected, broken down area of decrepit and depressing brownstones, the neighborhood surrounding the school is now upscale and gentrified, a miracle of transformation that now makes this part of Brooklyn one of the hottest real estate markets in the metropolitan area.

The Brooklyn Dodgers are gone, along with Ebbets Field where I used to hang out on Saturdays when the team was in town to cadge autographs from the players. I can still name every player on the roster of the 1941 Dodger championship team, a feat of memory that astonishes me. Talking baseball now to a younger generation is like speaking Esperanto or old Egyptian. How many still alive ever heard of Van Lingle Mungo, Tot Pressnell, Kiki Cuyler or Heinie Manush?

The “city”, that designation we once used to describe that area of Manhattan along Broadway from 42^nd to about 57^th, has been completely changed. Perhaps the word should be renovated. For a nickel in earlier years you could take your forty minute ride to the city and find yourself on Broadway, the ground zero of the crossroads of the world or as it was dubbed then “the Great White Way.” Once there, you could see any show in the theater district for 55 cents, sitting way up in the second balcony, which hardly mattered since you were blessed as a kid with perfect eyesight and hearing. After the show, for ten cents you could get the greatest hotdog in the world at Grants on 42^nd Street and return to Brooklyn for a nickel.

The Greenwich Village of my youth, which was, as it is today, the college campus of my NYU summer school, remains somewhat recognizable. During the school year I attended the uptown campus in the Bronx, a jeweled replica of a real out of town college, now no longer a part of the NYU family. It was a cinch to get into NYU in those days. Now I’m told it is one of the toughest schools in the country to get into.

Can’t go home again? Sorry, Mr. Wolfe. When it comes to the Big Apple, you’ve got it wrong..

If I were to list all the things about New York from my younger days that I miss the most, up at the top would be the second hand book shops that lined the streets not far from downtown NYU. I spent hours going through those musty stacks and talking endlessly with the proprietors who knew more about books and their authors than anyone I have ever met before or since.

I hadn’t meant this little exercise to wallow in the sentimentality of contemplating the lost world of bygone days, but merely to illustrate that the changes in appearance have been startling and profound. All things are subject to radical physical change. It is a cliché easily proven by a glance into the mirror and contemplating the inevitable comparison with the youthful façade that once looked back at you.

Aside from the nostalgic digressions, I have been exploring the question of coming home and contemplating the wisdom and veracity of my old literary idol Thomas Wolfe’s title about the impossibility of going home again. Yes, the evidence of my eyes is conclusive. New York City has changed its garb, updated its appearance, put on a fresh face. And yes, the people are vastly different in appearance. They come from all corners of the globe in every racial permutation. One hears a variety of languages spoken that defy identification to a native born like myself. There is a polyglot buffet of foods offered everywhere. One can take an around-the-world tour of the palette by merely walking a few blocks from restaurant to restaurant.

Yet when all is said and done, New York, despite all the mutations and permutations, is still, quintessentially, New York as it was and always has been, the Big Apple: unchanging, exciting, energetic, multi-layered, creative, gloriously alive, where the sense of  “being” is validated. Above all, it is the city of hope and aspiration. People come to my hometown from every point on the globe carrying their dreams with them. In this great city hope springs eternal and the spirit of optimism permeates the very air we breathe. 

You have to be away a long time, like myself, to understand how unchanging New York really is.  It is the city of romance and fantasy, of vision and imagination, of wonder and curiosity. It is welcoming and, under its tough veneer, softhearted and giving. Even if you are defeated in New York, your dreams dashed, your prospects dimmed, you know in your gut that you dared to fight the good fight on the toughest turf in the world.

Can’t go home again? Sorry, Mr. Wolfe. When it comes to the Big Apple, you’ve got it wrong. I came home after wandering in the desert, like Moses, for forty years. But unlike Moses, I did get back to the Promised Land. And here I am. Home again.

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