My First New York
Early Adventures in the Big City
As Remembered by Actors, Artists,
Athletes, Chefs, Comedians, Filmmakers,
Mayors, Models, Moguls, Porn Stars,
Rockers, Writers, and Others
Edited by
David Haskell and Adam Moss
Epigraph
I came into New York an emperor on a barge. It wasn’t the skipper who was taking the boat in, but my will to conquer, and I was almost sorry for the New York that would have to yield so completely to my demands.
—SINCLAIR LEWIS,
“THAT WAS NEW YORK—AND THAT WAS ME” (1903)
I’m going to New York!
(what a lark! what a song!)
—FRANK O’HARA,
“SONG” (1951)
Contents
Epigraph
Preface
David Dinkins, Former Mayor, 1933
Lorin Maazel, Conductor, 1939
Yogi Berra, Baseball Player, 1946
Chita Rivera, Actress and Singer, 1948
Jonas Mekas, Filmmaker, 1949
Liz Smith, Gossip Columnist, 1949
Paul Taylor, Dancer and Choreographer, 1952
James Rosenquist, Artist, 1955
Dan Rather, Journalist, 1956
Larry Kramer, Playwright, 1957
Tommy Tune, Director and Choreographer, 1957
Daniel Libeskind, Architect, 1959
Liza Minnelli, Actress and Singer, 1961
Nora Ephron, Writer and Filmmaker, 1962
Tom Wolfe, Writer, 1962
Judy Collins, Singer, 1963
Danny DeVito, Actor, 1963
Lauren Hutton, Model and Actress, 1964
Chuck Close, Artist, 1967
André Aciman, Writer, 1968
Mary Boone, Art Gallerist, 1970
Diane Von Furstenberg, Designer, 1970
Padma Lakshmi, Television Host, 1974
Lorne Michaels, Television Producer, 1975
Cindy Sherman, Artist, 1977
Jann Wenner, Magazine Editor, 1977
Graydon Carter, Magazine Editor, 1978
Gary Shteyngart, Writer, 1979
Danny Meyer, Restaurateur, 1980
Susanne Bartsch, Party Promoter, 1981
Colum McCann, Writer, 1982
David Rakoff, Writer, 1982
Harold Evans, Journalist, 1983
Keith Hernandez, Baseball Player, 1983
Ira Glass, Radio Host, 1984
Parker Posey, Actress, 1984
Naomi Campbell, Model, 1986
Audra McDonald, Actress, 1988
Mike Myers, Comedian, 1988
Chloë Sevigny, Actress, 1991
Amy Sedaris, Comedienne, 1993
Rufus Wainwright, Musician, 1994
Maggie Gyllenhaal, Actress, 1995
Michael Lucas, Porn Star, 1997
Albert Hammond Jr., Musician, 1998
Andy Samberg, Comedian, 1998
David Chang, Chef, 1999
Michel Gondry, Filmmaker, 2002
Nick Denton, Internet Publisher, 2002
Kara Walker, Artist, 2002
Ashley Dupré, Former Escort, 2004
Zoe Kazan, Actress, 2005
Agyness Deyn, Model, 2006
James Franco, Actor and Student, 2008
Nate Silver, Political Analyst, 2009
Jenny Joslin, Aspiring Actress, 2009
Acknowledgments
About the Editors
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
This book started out as a magazine feature that, like the city it celebrated, soon grew a bit crowded for its size. In April of 2009, New York magazine published a cover story in which thirty local notables recounted their first New York experience. These true tales—comic, clueless, heartwarming, and unusually candid—had struck a chord in the office as they were filed. But the response they received upon publication, and the outpouring of readers’ own stories at nymag.com, made us realize we were onto something deeper than a collection of newbie anecdotes, however memorable: that one’s arrival in this city was a memory as primal, potent, and private (yet begging to be shared) as that other First Time. So we decided to widen the net. The result, My First New York, expands some of the stories that ran in the magazine, and adds many, many more New Yorkers willing to tell their tale.
For this book, a few of the writers wrote, the rest—a mix of actors, artists, comedians, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, journalists, musicians, politicians, sports stars, and others—talked. For all of them, recounting their first adventures in New York seemed to bring out their truest selves: Liz Smith gossiped while Liza Minnelli gushed; Yogi Berra kept it very, very simple. And they went about moving in very different ways: some, like actress Lauren Hutton, came on a glorious impulse; some (or at least blog magnate Nick Denton) made a detailed spreadsheet that assigned weighted scores to various cities, and then fiddled with the calculations until New York came up the winner. Few have arrived with less than filmmaker Jonas Mekas, a concentration-camp survivor on a UN refugee ship; few have swanned in with more than Diane von Furstenberg, a princess. An extraordinary number managed to land in New York just as something historic was happening—but then again, something historic happens here a lot. Cindy Sherman arrived in the middle of the Summer of Sam; Danny Meyer came on the day John Lennon was shot.
Arranged chronologically, their stories combine into a subjective and impressionistic history of our city, one that captures its changing temper and tone since the Great Depression. Through the arrivals’ wide eyes, we watch New York’s transformation from the land of jazz clubs and the World’s Fair to a seething pit where college faculty revolted alongside students and empty lofts awaited colonization, to the kind of place where dot-com millionaires took cooking lessons and you needed serious connections to snag a job at a video store. They tell of a city that seesawed from safe to dangerous and back—and then dangerous again, but in a different way. And together they make an accidental encyclopedia of New York hot spots through the ages, because that’s where the newcomers in search of their crowd inevitably gravitate: from the Cedar Tavern and the Gaslight to Lutèce and Elaine’s, from Max’s Kansas City and the Mudd Club to the Odeon and Bungalow 8, they’re all here, dots on the unbroken line of the Next Next Things.
A recent survey found that more than half of all New Yorkers have moved here from somewhere else. And, in fact, the city is a magnet that attracts in times good and bad. Roughly the same number of foreign immigrants (about 750,000) moved to New York during the 1970s downturn as during the boom years that just ended. It is also a bit of a sieve: even as the city serves as a mere gateway to America to millions of immigrants, there is always the subset who look up and realize that moving any farther would be redundant at best. They are joined by about eighty thousand Americans who arrive each year from elsewhere in the country. As it is often said, what makes one a real New Yorker is the conscious decision to become one.
“It’s one thing to become a New Yorker,” notes Keith Hernandez, who was traded to the Mets midseason in 1983. “It’s so much weirder to become a New Yorker that all the other New Yorkers know.” It is true that an inordinate percentage of people in this book are in the second camp: they have won the lottery, conquered the city in one way or another. For some, the red carpet was laid out at once (Naomi Campbell’s account begins with the words “At sixteen years old, I was summoned by Anna Wintour”). For others, it unspooled through roach-infested illegal sublets and late night commutes back to Jersey.
There is one chronicler here who you certainly will not have heard of—yet. As part of the feature that ran in
the magazine, we put a call out to readers to find the city’s most recent arrivals. We heard from hundreds of brand-new New Yorkers, and chose one—Jenny Joslin—to complete the collection. She’s twenty-three years old, hails from Texas, and aspires to be an actress. The direction of Joslin’s career remains to be seen, but like the others in the book, success is, weirdly enough, beside the point. What you are holding is a collection of fifty-six testaments to a larger revelation, one that arrivals of all stripes and all eras have experienced again and again, regardless of how the city proceeds to treat them. It is something songwriter Rufus Wainwright terms “having cracked the code of living life to the fullest.” Becoming a New Yorker is a bit of a victory in itself, and so every story in this book has a happy ending by default. It comes with the territory.
DAVID DINKINS
former mayor
arrived: 1933
I was born and raised during my early years in Trenton, New Jersey. But when my parents separated, when I was six, I moved to Harlem with my mother. Governor Roosevelt had just become President Roosevelt. We had the Great Depression, of course, but the Harlem Renaissance still had some life in it. Seventh Avenue was a boulevard in those days, and every Easter, everyone would march up and down it in their finery. I remember when Joe Louis was winning fights and people would open their windows and share the radios they had. I didn’t see more joy and pride until, well, until those same streets and fire escapes were filled with cheers on election night 2008.
We moved a lot. The joke was that we moved when the rent was due. My mother and grandmother both worked as domestics, each making a dollar a day. But I made some money, too. I’d go to 125th and Eighth, where all the pushcarts were selling groceries. I bought shopping bags, three for a nickel, and I sold them at two cents apiece. I would save up and buy my mother something nice from the five-and-dime store.
I wasn’t always such a good little boy. I had a skater scooter—a soapbox and a two-by-four with roller skates on the bottom. Most kids decorated their skater scooters with bottle caps from soda bottles. But if you were really cool you had reflectors. Thing was, you couldn’t just buy a reflector; you had to liberate them from cars. So I was out there liberating with my friends, and a police officer caught me because I was the littlest in the group. And he brought me home and told my mother and grandmother that their good little boy had done this. It was a total shock to them. Now, heretofore, all they had to do was give me a look of disappointment, and I’d be crying in thirty seconds. But now we were living in this city, and things were changing. They stripped me bare, stood me up in the bathtub, and hit me good with some leather straps. I never did anything bad again.
LORIN MAAZEL
conductor
arrived: 1939
I was born in Paris and grew up on the West Coast, but at nine years old, I came to conduct an orchestra for the New York World’s Fair. It made a mark. The New York Times picked up the story, and when Mayor La Guardia heard that there was a child conducting an orchestra, he called me into his office in one of the pavilions. We had a conversation, and there’s a little picture in the archives of me, my finger up, expounding on something, telling the mayor how to run the city.
Years later, when our family had moved to Pittsburgh, I would come to New York. I would perform a Friday-evening concert in Pittsburgh, and then I would drive that night to the Big Apple in a DeSoto that I had picked up in some used-car lot. I’d have all day in the city on Saturday, and then I’d get up at five in the morning to drive back in time for the three o’clock Sunday concert. I went to nightclubs, museums, Central Park. If I had a girlfriend, I’d take her to the movies. We never had any money, even for gasoline, so sometimes my buddy and I would take our fiddles to a nightclub where they would give us a meal or a little bit of money if we played tunes for the customers. We’d play Cole Porter and George Gershwin, and also a bit of Mozart or Bartók—pieces written for two violins. If we got too classical, however, the proprietor would come by and start frowning at us until we broke into some well-known tune of the day.
YOGI BERRA
baseball player
arrived: 1946
New York? It was big.
CHITA RIVERA
actress and singer
arrived: 1948
One day George Balanchine sent a scout from the School of American Ballet to the Jones-Haywood School in Washington, D.C., where I was a fifteen-year-old studying dance. We didn’t know we were auditioning, or who George Balanchine was. But I was picked and sent to New York to perform for him. I remember my foot got a blister, and he stopped my audition and sent for a Band-Aid and a pair of scissors. He put my foot in his lap. If I had realized who he was, I would have dropped dead. But everyone just watched as he cut the thing away, put a Band-Aid on my blister, and we continued.
I guess I was excited to be chosen for a scholarship, but mostly I was surprised that my mother allowed me to go to New York. I was fifteen! Especially in those days, nobody let their child out of their sight. But she was brave and let me move in with my father’s brother’s family in the Bronx.
I went to Taft High School near the Grand Concourse and the ballet school in Midtown, so all I knew was Fifty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue, the subway, and the Bronx. I do remember looking up one day on the subway and seeing a man expose himself. That was a hell of an experience! I learned never to look up on the subway again.
At home we never went out to restaurants—who had the money?—but at the ground floor of the ballet school there was a Horn & Hardart, which was the first kind of fast food. They’d have glasses with lemon available for anyone who wanted to buy iced tea. Us dancers would come down, fill the glasses with water, and sit down and drink “lemonade” we didn’t pay for.
At nineteen I got my first job in Call Me Madam. By then I knew that ballet wasn’t for me. The world of theater was different—more relaxed, not as frightening, more like a variety show. Broadway had great shows at the time—The King and I, Guys and Dolls—and the streets were full of stagehands and dancers. That was what helped me get to love New York and made me feel like I owed it something.
Every other night all of us gypsies would go to Sid and Al’s on West Forty-sixth and Eighth Avenue, which was run by a very sweet couple who were known to help us out if anyone needed money for food or rent. We went to hang out and share stories and attempt to feel grown up. It was my first introduction to a bar—I probably drank gin and tonics because I hadn’t yet learned to order Stingers. There was always a piano there, and dancers—you know, we will dance anywhere. One night I even danced on the bar—alone. It had taken me a while to summon the courage to do something like that, but everyone else started clapping and yelling. I don’t remember what song I danced to or how I danced, just that I was good.
JONAS MEKAS
filmmaker
arrived: 1949
The ocean was very stormy. We had been on the boat, my brother Adolfas and I, for seven or eight days. It was crowded, almost two thousand of us on a United Nations refugee ship. When we finally pulled up to the pier at Twenty-third Street, it was evening, and all the lights in the city were blazing. So beautiful.
Adolfas and I had papers, and our papers said that we were supposed to go to Chicago and work in a bakery. But we looked around and thought, We’re in New York City! It would be stupid to go to Chicago. So we went to Brooklyn, to live in Williamsburg with some friends who had come before us.
We were born in the Lithuanian village of Seme-niškiai, where we had lived first under the Soviets, then the Germans. We had been sent to a Nazi labor camp in Elmshorn, then had escaped, hiding for two months on a farm near the Danish border. From there we were moved to the displacement camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel, and then finally the refugee boat. It was all just misery and displacement and suffering and loss. Now, suddenly, everything was bright and exciting and available. The streets of New York were open markets, like something out of Cairo. We bought three or four oranges on o
ur first day. Here we are! We can buy fruit! It was like a miracle. Even simply to eat a real egg, and not the powdered eggs of the camps.
Williamsburg in that time was a very poor immigrant community, with many saloons and Lithuanians. (This was when people in Williamsburg were truly poor and not just doing a pretend performance of poverty.) People mostly wanted to survive—to have a job and to live like everyone else. But I did not want to live like everyone else. On the second day, Adolfas and I woke up and looked at the New York Times and found two well-known films—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Fall of the House of Usher—playing at a theater on Twenty-ninth Street between Sixth Avenue and Seventh Avenue. We became gluttons, absorbing everything: concerts, films, readings, conversations. I was especially interested in books. In the displacement camps, I would sell cigarettes for books. And I remember walking on Fourth Avenue south of Fourteenth Street, near where the Strand is now, and seeing nothing but bookstores. I remember the smell of it.
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