Downtown: My Manhattan [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio CD]

I'm a Manhattanite and can't think of another city where I'd rather live than this melting pot mix of a metropolis. To my mind, Pete Hamill is the quintessential New Yorker. A lifelong resident, former editor-in-chief of both the New York Post and New York Daily News, author of eight books, among them the best selling memoir, "A Drinking Life," and "The Subway Series Reader," Hamill knows more than most about the five boroughs, especially downtown Manhattan. He has certainly paid his dues, or rent, with 14 different residences during his lifetime. (unusual, as New Yorkers usually hold on to their apartments, forever). A cynical newspaperman, from the old school more than the new, Hamill was born in Brooklyn, the son of Irish immigrants. He is struck by those who, like his parents, fought for a brighter future while remembering what they left behind. "That rupture with the immediate past would mark all of them and did not go away as the young immigrants grew old. If anything, the nostalgias were often heightened by the coming of age. Some would wake up in the hot summer nights of New York and for a few moments think they were in Sicily or Mayo or Minsk. Some would think their mothers were at the fireplace in the next room, preparing food. The old food. The food of the Old Country." As a child, looking with wonder for the first time at the gilded spires of Manhattan, from the pedestrian ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge, Hammil asked his mother in an awed voice, "What is it?" "Sure, you remember, Peter," she said. "You've seen it before." And then she smiled. "It's Oz."

Hamill's fast paced, fascinating narrative meanders with readers on a tour of lower Manhattan. His view of the city is a pedestrian's - which is the best view, if one doesn't need to be in the driver's seat. Hamill never learned to drive until he was 36. I have to laugh. How typical! What Manhattanite drives their car in NYC?? From the tony haunts of the "Knickerbockers" to the "lost cities" of Five Points, we travel with a most worthy guide. We are still able to see remnants of the British colony, the mansions of the robber barons, and the speakeasies of the 1920s. We wander with the author along the winding streets of Greenwich Village, to the grimy alleys of the meatpacking district, to the cobblestones of South Street Seaport, where the Fulton Street Fish Market and Dock once stood. I was surprised at how far uptown Mr. Hamill's "downtown Manhattan" ventures. But hey, it's his city too....to redefine or define. The author defends himself, "Broadway in my mind is an immense tree," Mr. Hamill explains, "with its roots deep in the soil at the foot of Manhattan, which is why I insist so stubbornly to my friends that the uptown places I cherish on Broadway are actually part of downtown." And if the old Thalia movie theater, at Broadway and 95th Street, is also part of his "downtown" experience, well, he's not the only one who got a first glimpse of Fellini, Kurosawa and Bergman there. So...that counts enough to place the old cinema below 14th street. Right??

In this extraordinary book, which is both a personal and historical portrait, Hamill pays tribute to fellow New Yorkers like: Alexander Hamilton, who was shot dead in a duel with Aaron Burr across the North River in Weehawken, NJ, in 1804. Hamilton's grave graces gothic Trinity Church's centuries' old cemetery; Pearl Street's Captain William Kidd, who was hanged for piracy in London in 1701, "would not be the last New Yorker whose friends insisted he was framed;" John Jacob Astor, who emigrated from Germany in 1784 and became America's first millionaire; architect Stanford White, who designed the Washington Square arch and was the victim of New York's "murder on the rooftop garden" as a result of his love affair with the infamous Gibson Girl, Evelyn Nesbit; and authors like Henry James and Edith Wharton, who chronicled their times from a New York perspective.

Nostalgia is a major theme that runs through the book. "Nostalgia," proclaims the author, "is the city's ruling passion, after greed, anger and resistance to authority." (I smile). He says, and it's true, that New York changes so quickly. "That every generation watches its own past being demolished" - a very acute observation! The Dodgers left us. Penn Station is gone...and so are so many small, neighborhood restaurants, cafes, movie theaters, that were important in an intimate way to our individual lives. Hamill is at once awed by the city's energy and haunted by her losses. As with all New Yorkers, September 11, 2001, weighs heavily on his heart. He lives in Tribeca, in the shadow of the former Towers, and witnessed the horror of that day and its terrible aftermath up close and personal. Hamill explains that the New Yorker's version of nostalgia is much more than a remembrance of lost buildings or the presence of those who lived in these places years ago. "It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss." "This makes New Yorkers tougher," he argues, "less sentimental. It has helped them move on after the attacks on the World Trade Center."

Mr. Hamill covers much ground in this wonderful biography of a city. He is able to give us a first hand impression of the abstract expressionists who thrived here in the 1940s and 50s, as well as bebop, jazz, the Beats who made Greenwich Village the "Village," and many other old landmarks and legends. He integrates personal recollections along with historical observations for an outstanding mix of a memoir...and make no mistake, this is a memoir, of a city and a man who lives and breathes the city. While he waxes nostalgic, Hamill also believes that the city's changes make her stronger.

The author's prose is sharp, clear - beautifully written. His plain-spoken narrative vibrates with life. And it is obvious how heartfelt the writing and observations are. Mr. Hamill is not an objective observer - no way! He is heart and soul a New Yorker, writing about the hometown he loves. And I loved every minute I spent reading "Downtown: My Manhattan."
JANA

. . . the greatest men and women. If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole word." Whitman's words from his Song of the Broad-Axe never left me as I read Pete Hamill's wonderful book of his city, actually my city, Downtown.

Downtown is part history, part-memoir. It is not a history of New York City as much as it is a history of Pete Hamill's New York City. It is at once a very personal piece of writing but in its own way Pete's story is one immediately familiar to any New Yorker. The streets we grew up on may be different but each of our individual and distinct stories must share more than a small amount of DNA with every other New Yorker for the last 300 years.

I've never met Pete (calling him Hamill just doesn't sound right) but I've known him all my life. Pete is the child of immigrants. His family was part of the great wave of immigration that took the wretched refuse of those teeming shores and carried them not-that-gently to New York since the days of the earliest Dutch settlers. From the famine and oppression of Ireland (Hamill) to the pogroms of Russia (my family) they came. They came from everywhere. Like thousands of other immigrants or children of immigrants, Hamill's family struggled but made a life for itself. My father found his way to one of New York's lower east side settlement houses and learned a trade (music) that served him and his family well his entire life. Like Hamill, I remember the trips as a kid from Brooklyn and, in my case, Queens, New York to that city of proud towers known as Manhattan.

"Downtown" is something of a walking guided tour. Hamill describes the building of lower Manhattan and its early history. He plots the expansion of the city north up beyond the original walled street that became Wall Street. He traces the expansion of what he calls downtown up through to 14th Street and Union Square and then on up to 42nd Street and Times Square. Along the way we read of his first trip to the city, the story of his parents' early life and hard times, and Hamill's own life and development. Along the way a few things become obvious. Hamill loves his city even when he is remarkably candid about its shortcomings. In China, the term for one's hometown is `native place'. It is a word soaked with more meaning than home and as I read through Downtown it was clear to me that New York, downtown particularly, was Hamill's native place.

For me, it was fascinating to read Hamill's descriptions of life and the development of lower Manhattan through the years. Like Hamill, I spent a good portion of my life working `downtown'. I spent more than a few years in the shipping industry, when that industry shared downtown with the Wall St. crowd. I was a messenger and ran documents to and from every building Hamill describes with accuracy and fondness. From the Old Customs House to 17 Battery Place, 1 Broadway, 25 Broadway 90 West Street and all points in between. I walked to work from my first apartment on 12th street and 2nd avenue downtown every day. And, after taking dates home to Staten Island, I'd place myself at the front of the ferry so the breeze could keep me awake in the wee hours of the morning, and stand in awe as we glided quietly past the Statute of Liberty and watched the city's skyline loom bigger and bigger. Pete's childhood vision of `the City' as Oz is singularly appropriate.

Although Pete spends a lot of time describing the geography of downtown and the architecture of the buildings that became a part of his New York experience, Downtown is not simply an architectural digest. At its heart is the story of the people that built those houses and lived in them. It is said that "men make the city, and not walls or ships without men in them" and Pete is keenly aware of that. His feeling for the men and women that made his city is palpable.

You do not need to be a New Yorker to love this book. Hamill knows, as did Whitman, that the place where a great city stands is not the "place of the tallest and costliest buildings or shops" but, rather, stands in the hearts of people like Hamill's parents that arrive from distant shores to build those buildings and live their lives. They continue to arrive today and Pete rejoices in it. Pete Hamill's Downtown is a wonderful piece of writing.

Ex-newspaper editor of the New York Post and New York Daily News, Pete Hamill, was born in Brooklyn, moved around a bit, and returned to Manhattan where he lives and works. Having intimate knowledge of a city so revered, respected, and loved, but also scary and intimidating such as New York City, is surely grist for many a writer. Each time there are different aspects a writer will concentrate on, and many times one will not see what the other does, hence the many books on or about this awe-inspiring place. Mr. Hamill has a fluidity about his account which makes for easy, interesting, and page-turning reading about "his" downtown in Manhattan. It's a compelling read as Hamill tells the history of New York - easy to follow and it all fits into place - unlike other confusing "historical" accounts I've come across. From the late 1700s and through the 1800s and 1900s, so much exquisite change flourished in the then, and now, ever-growing city of New York. He not only covers the buildings and streets and avenues, but also the many peoples (the Dutch, the English, the Germans, Russians, Italians, Irish, and so many more) who so long ago had a huge hand in shaping the city.

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