Downtown : My Manhattan

Rating:
Summary: AN ARMCHAIR VISIT TO A VIBRANT CITY
Review:
Who knows New York better than former editor-in-chief of the New York Post and the New York Daily News, Pete Hamill? Few, I'll wager. Who possesses a better reportorial eye, or greater ability to spot just the detail that will bring his comment into sharp focus? None, I'll bet.

Manhattan has been home to Mr. Hamill for some 70 years, and he seems to have loved every minute of it. There's also a bit of the historian in him as "Downtown" takes us on a journey back in time to some folks and events that have made the Big Apple what it is today. We go from the Bowery of the 1860s to the bohemian enclaves of the 1960s. Night spots are on tap as are remembrances of John Jacob Astor, William Randolph Hearst, and others.

The author's personal memories are intertwined with events of the past resulting in a fascinating collage of thoughts and ideas. Mr. Hamill has referred to this work as a grouping of "essays." It's so much more than that, especially when we hear it in his voice.

"Downtown" is an intriguing armchair visit to the city that has become emblematic of America. Our visit, while absorbing and enjoyable, is just too brief.

- Gail Cooke

Rating:
Summary: "A Great City is That Which Has . . .
Review: . . . 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.


Rating:
Summary: A Native's Ode to the City He Loves!
Review: Downtown

New York is such a remarkable city with such a great history. Perhaps, therefore, its history can only be chronicled by a native with Big Apple blood running through his veins. Pete Hamill is such a man. Born and raised in Brooklyn, journalist/writer Hamill, in his simple yet poetic style chronicles the life and times of Manhattan, the city he loves and in which he has spent his life.

Hamill begins by explaining that this book will be about "his" Manhattan, which consists of "downtown." He explains that by "downtown" he means not just the section that New Yorkers today call "downtown" but all those parts of the city that have a historical resonance to him. Thus, Times Square is downtown although today we refer to it as "mid-town." Harlem is downtown although it is far uptown (and Hamill does not feel competent to write about it in detail not having neither lived in it nor absorbed its essence as the rest of the city)

New York's history is as old as the history of the New World. But Hamill's narrative is not strictly chronological. Rather it is geographical. He begins with the oldest part of the City, the battery and writes of the Dutch and the British and Colonial times. He moves on to describe the Wall Street area as it existed in Colonial times. Although unrecognizable today, obviously, important structures from the period exist. He spends much time discussing the Trinity Church, where Alexander Hamilton is buried, a mere block from where the World Trade Center once stood. As the City expanded northward with the passage of time, so Hamill expands his narrative northward, explaining how the "Knickerbockers", the offspring of the unions of old Dutch and English, moved northwards into elegant houses on fifth avenue outside the increasingly teeming streets of downtown. As early as the early 19th Century, old New Yorkers were already pining for the good old days. And this is the ongoing theme of the book as Hamill describes the growth of the dangerous neighborhoods of the Five Points and later the Tenderloin, precursors of the Forty Second street/times square district that would threaten the city in the seventies and eighties and the other neighborhoods that developed, Greenwich Village, The Flat Iron district, the lower west side that is today called Tribeca. That theme is constant change coupled with nostalgic longing for a vanished past. Sometimes the nostalgia is warranted, sometimes as in the case of the old Times Square, it is not.

Hamill's writing is at its finest when he describes the Manhattan of his own youth, in the late fifties, early sixties. He writes of the great jazz musicians he saw, of the writers he drank with at the Lion's Head tavern. He brings the period to life but he never seems to imply that the future is not something to look forward to as well. Indeed, Hamill does not shy away from the squalor that overtook the City in the seventies and eighties, when rampant crime and drug abuse threatened to take New York down permanently. He marvels at the revival that has made New York one of the safest most pleasant large cities in the world today.

The reader of this book will learn many interesting facts about New York's past, about its architecture and about its street life. Revealed are the buried layers of the past, still visible among the skyscrapers to those willing to take the time to look. This is a marvelous book and a great companion to "Forever", Hamill's fantasy novel about New York's history.


Rating:
Summary: A brilliant tribute to a dynamic city
Review: For anybody who was born there or grew up in its immense shadow, there can be, no matter how far away you travel in life, only one place forever known as "The City."

And that city is the real life Oz known as New York. Bestselling author and journalist Pete Hamill knows this city well. He was born in Brooklyn and has spent the last four-plus decades exploring the streets of New York as both a newspaperman and resident.

DOWNTOWN: My Manhattan, is Hamill's brilliant tribute to the city he loves. It is part history, part memoir, and part elegy.

The book follows the growth of Manhattan from its roots as a Dutch trading post on the lower tip of the island to its inevitable expansion uptown to Times Square and upwards to the sky.

The geographic scope of this book is no accident. It mirrors the area where Hamill has paid rent on 14 different apartments over the years and where he now lives. On these streets, he tells us, "I am always a young man."

Besides being one of America's most famous journalists, Hamill is also one of our greatest living writers. He is a master of the craft. He brings to this book both the journalist's eye for detail and the poet's gift for language. The writing is sharp and clear, and as tough as a street vendor on Canal Street during lunch hour.

There is much here to delight the reader. Hamill reveals little known aspects of the city's history, from the first Dutch colonial governor, who was also the first to cook the city's books, to British Governor Lord Cornbury, who enjoyed strolling around in drag after 1702 and once had himself painted as Queen Anne.

But we also learn how an African American named Master Juba joined with an Irish American named John Diamond in 1844 to create tap dancing. And then there is the first Broadway musical in 1866, which prompted 31-year-old Marc Twain to exclaim: "the scenery and the legs are everything."

Hamill introduces us to a city where "the present becomes the past more rapidly than in any other world city." This is a place where the velocity of change is so great that it seems the entire city is rebuilt every ten years. But there are still many wonderful places you can visit today, such as Trinity Church in lower Manhattan, which, he explains, "asserts a sense of pheonixlike triumph, rebirth and enduring faith" while nestled among skyscrapers.

The engine for this perpetual growth has been the immigrants, who still arrive daily in search of a better future. Hamill tells us the great enduring gift that the Dutch gave New York was tolerance. For New York was a city built on pragmatic concerns; commerce, not religion or political ideology, ruled its history. The only true religion of New York, we learn, is real estate.

New York is a city that should not work. Today there are more than 100 languages spoken on its streets, including at least 10 dialects of Chinese. But it does work because, despite its fair share of crooks and scoundrels and disasters, the tradition of tolerance holds.

Each new generation of immigrants becomes part of the alloy on New York. Lower East Side settlement houses that once helped Jewish immigrants now provide aid to Latinos and Asians.

The immigrants also brought with them nostalgia, which would become the one thing permanent here. Hamill calls New York "the capital of nostalgia." The immigrants endured a double dose of it. They felt the loss of the land of their birth. But as they assimilated into America and watched new waves of immigrants transform New York, they carried inside them the memories of the now vanished New York where they once lived and struggled.

All New Yorkers carry this nostalgia. Even after Times Square and 42nd Street were rescued and cleaned up with the help of corporations like Disney in the 1990s, many of us find ourselves missing the old "Deuce" with its edge of danger and forbidden excitement.

In describing this longing for the past, Hamill's writing becomes almost lyrical. On the long lost and much missed old Penn Station, he writes, "For generations, young men had waited near the clock for young women arriving for a night together on the town. I was one of them. We could look at the ruins of the station and remember girls in polo coats with snow melting in their hair...We could remember a time when we were so young that we thought the things we loved would last forever."

What lasts forever is New York. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this great city or is planning a visit.

Follow Hamill down these streets and into the parks. Stop and look up at the marvelous Beaux-Arts buildings that now house Starbucks and Kinkos on their ground floors. Stand in Grand Central Terminal during rush hour and feel the energy flowing around you. Gaze out at New York Harbor from Battery Park and imagine ships filled with immigrant dreams. You will find a magical place that will make you want to live forever.

--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan


Rating:
Summary: Hamill's Narrative Vibrates With Life - A Pean To NYC!!
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: If you ever lived in NY City, as I have; you know Pete Hamill from his newspaper column.

Pete is a great writer and Downtown : My Manhattan is a captivating book.

Guaranteed to please every reader.

Rating:
Summary: TEARFULLY NOSTALGIC -- WONDERFULLY COMPLETE
Review: Pete Hamill tells us about the Lion's Head saloon where he spent far too much time drinking after work. That was long ago and now far behind him. But that was already discussed in his exquisit "A Drinking Life." That's also a MUST READ. In the latter, Hamill said that drinking robbed him of his memories -- which is what a writer needs most for his craft. However, "Downtown" gives no hint of this as he takes us on a tour of his life and New York City's life. As Hamill wanders the Bowery, the Lower East Side and the rest of the territory below 14th Street, lately known as "Ground Zero, in his memory this qualifies as sacred ground.

Generally, "Downtown" contains two central themes. Hamill shares with us the power of nostalgia that he presents as the city's dominant passion. That comes after greed, anger and resistance to authority. Every generation watches its own past being demolished because New York changes so quickly. During my own young boyhood, the Brooklyn Dodgers had left town -- which soured me on baseball forever after. Then Penn Station disappeared. The little cafe where I first took my wife to dinner? Gone!

Hamill explains, "The New York version of nostalgia is not simply about lost buildings or their presence in the youth of the individuals who lived in them. It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss." This, he argues, is what makes New Yorkers tougher. It braces them against sentimentality. Indeed, it's helped them move on following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

The second of the book's two themes is the way Hamill explores all immigrant groups or buildings or artistic movements leave their traces on the city. They are never lost but become part of the "New York alloy," as he puts it. This alloy is mysterious. At times it stands for the blend of faces, accents, and emotions of which the city is composed. Other times it simply provides a way for Hamill to quickly move on to his next topic.

Hamill, a New Yorker's New Yorker, didn't start driving a car until he was 36. That's why his is a pedestrian's view of his city. Hamill's a walker and a talker, known to engage a stranger next to him simply because everyone has something to say. Like the Italian tourist he sees in Battery Park looking out at the Statue of Liberty, an architect from Bologna who knows he should sneer but simply can't. "In spite of everything, it's beautiful," he says. "Because the emotion is beautiful."

The reader can do no better than to take a tour of New York City through Pete Hamill's eyes. And if you are one of those who had grown up there then when no one is looking you may even shed a tear. Hamill's book is THAT good.

Rating:
Summary: A delightful history/memoir/walking tour of lower Manhattan!
Review: This beautifully written walking tour of lower Manhattan was an absolute pleasure to read, and halfway through, I knew I would be reading it again.
Mr. Hamill brings to life the part of Manhattan from Battery Park to Times Square, in a way where you somehow visually experience the change from the Dutch settlement to the sky-scraping metropolis it is today. It's like a time-lapse film, in prose.

I am one of those people who have only recently discovered New York. My wife and I have gone twice this year (traveling from SoCal), to simply spend two or three days soaking up that city buzz. Broadway, fine meals, touristy sight-seeing, casual walks...we have fallen in love with the city. This book puts my feelings into words.

There are historical facts you were aware of, yet have never considered in quite such a manner, and there are historical facts you had no idea ever existed. You will find a host of both here.
Hamill's prose is simple yet beautiful; a reporter with an eye for art.

When the Queen Mary pulled into the harbor in the mid-40's, every inch packed with returning WWII GI's, Hamill writes how the roar from the city could be heard in heaven. He allowed me to hear that.
He allowed me to visit the squalid Times Square, the one I'll never have to see, safely from the comfort of my recliner. He invited me into buildings that I'll never be able to explore anymore, since they've now long gone.
Better yet, he has exposed me to places I've surely walked by, but never considered. I feel the need to go find them; I need to give those places the respect and attention they deserve.

When I return to NYC, I'll have this book with me. I'm going to re-read it on the plane flight over, and I'm going to carry it with me as my wife and I stroll along those glorious avenues.
This time, I'm going to reach out and touch those buildings and monuments I never "considered", and see them with new eyes, Hamill's.

Rating:
Summary: confusing...but great!
Review: This is an extremely well-written, insightful and poignant piece of writing about one of the greatest cities in the world. Anyone who has ever lived, or wanted to live in New York should read this book... however ... the title is extremely confusing! I was recently on vacation in Seattle and picked up this book in a bookstore I happened to stroll into, thinking it would help me find my way around downtown Seattle! I was halfway through chapter 3 before I figured out what was going on!

Rating:
Summary: Knocks it out of the park
Review: You don't buy Pete Hamill for experimental prose or hard-hitting scholarship--it's more like sitting down in a bar with a great old neighborhood character. Hamill's really in his element in "Downtown," displaying his considerable journalistic chops along with some quite moving and exhilirating turns of phrase. He travels from the tip of Manhattan to Times Square, pulling out nuggets of trivia, historical highlights and vivid memories of his own, quite entertaining past as he goes. If only I could go along with him in person!
If anyone writing today has "the gift of the gab," it's Hamill.