I Hate Brooklyn
Part 1
Number of Bedrooms: Studio; Rent: $1
"Please tell me you’re not moving to Brooklyn,” she said.
“No, no, no,” I said. “Never.”
“Thank God.”
“Why would you think such a thought?”
“Something about the way you said . . . Brooklyn . . . like you’d gotten comfortable with it.”
“No,” I said, “it’s just that I’ve had to say it a lot lately because that’s all anyone ever talks about. Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn. I hate Brooklyn.” I’ve been having some version of this conversation—the dreaded Brooklyn Conversation—a lot lately. This particular version was with a woman I met in 1988, the year I moved to New York. We’ve been friends ever since—Manhattan friends. We bump into each other in mutual acquaintances’ apartments or noisy downtown parties and occasionally wind up having dinner alone together, lingering over wine and cigarettes. This sort of relationship—genuine but entirely spontaneous—happens more often in Manhattan because, when you take away the nail salons, office buildings, and Central Park, the island really isn’t all that big. Living here is like unrolling your sleeping bag in the world’s largest commune, a year-round camp for similarly neurotic, vain, lonely, ambitious grown-ups. On any given night I could, without making a single phone call, walk out my door and go to a party/bar/restaurant where I’d probably run into someone I know. Or so it seems.
But my Manhattan friend had begun exhibiting all the telltale signs of susceptibility to Brooklyn brainwashing: mid-thirties, recently married, with a new baby. She lowered her voice and sheepishly admitted that, because she and her husband can no longer afford downtown, they recently looked at a couple of places in Park Slope. For a moment I thought, NO! Not her too! It was as if she had been spirited away in the middle of the night and turned into a robot—a Brooklyn Wife, if you will. But then, this: “To be honest, it was my husband’s parents who snapped us out of it. When they found out we were looking in Brooklyn, they threw a fit: We spent a lifetime trying to get out of the boroughs and you want to take us back?! We searched our souls for about two minutes. Now we’re buying a place on 94th, between Park and Madison.” She paused for a moment and then all but shouted, “I’d rather live on the friggin’ anodyne Upper East Side than live in Brooklyn!”
Phew. She had taken sides. My side.
The first time I felt my hackles go up about Brooklyn was last summer at a backyard barbecue in Carroll Gardens. “Oh my God, I can’t believe you still live in Manhattan,” said a new friend, a political consultant who joined the Brooklyn team a few years ago and quickly became one of its most boisterous cheerleaders. With eyes glazed over, I had endured people extolling the virtues of Brooklyn countless times—the party chatter about “how much better” it is and all the fun they’re supposedly having, as if they all spend every Sunday together having brunch at the same “surprisingly good” restaurant. (If it has to be insisted upon constantly, it can’t possibly be true.) But never before had it been suggested that I was a moron for staying in Manhattan. That was it. What was once merely disinterest in that giant expanse of low-slung buildings across the river morphed into disdain and then congealed into bitterness. That was the moment I decided I was a Manhattanite to the core.
Like most people who live in Manhattan, I came here in my mid-twenties because my heart was scalded by some crazy ambition I did not entirely understand. Growing up in South Jersey, I dreamed of Manhattan, that Neverland of glamour, culture, skyscrapers, and reinvention—the place you go to escape from your dreary outer-borough-ness. (And let’s face it: New Jersey is pretty much just a huge Staten Island.) I never once thought of moving to Brooklyn—it was another place people were trying to escape from. This I knew from watching Welcome Back, Kotter as a kid. As the credits rolled over footage of ugly mid-seventies New York, including a big green highway sign that read WELCOME TO BROOKLYN: THE 4TH LARGEST CITY IN AMERICA, the opening line of the theme song by John Sebastian said it all: “Your dreams were your ticket out . . .” of Brooklyn! I had to be in Manhattan. I’ve always felt a little like Tess McGill in Working Girl. The Staten Island secretary would do anything—lie, cheat, abandon perfectly good friends (she had no choice!)—to find her rightful place in the only part of New York that mattered. My eyes still go moist when I hear “Let the River Run,” the theme song by Carly Simon.
But it wasn’t just career ambition that drove me. To paraphrase Alicia Bridges, I wanted to go where the people danced. I wanted some ack-shouwn. From reading Interview and Michael Musto, I was under the impression that Manhattan was a giant dance floor on which everyone from the skankiest drag queen to Nan Kempner danced their own special dance.
My Manhattan fantasies were stoked by a few firsthand experiences in the mid-eighties. Despite the fact that I’d grown up less than three hours away, I’d never been to New York until I drove here at 21 in my $200 blue ’72 Chevy Nova, which broke down just as I got through the Holland Tunnel. I coasted into a garage and walked around the West Village with an ex-girlfriend who was hoping to be “discovered” as a model. As night fell, we ended up sitting outside at the Riviera Cafe near Sheridan Square. I was dumbfounded by the rush of cars and people, and by the strange things—batteries!—that vendors sold on the streets at midnight. I remember secretly loving the fact that everything cost a fortune and that it could take 45 minutes to go less than a mile in a cab. It was my first clue that Manhattan was not for the faint of heart.
A year or so later, I came to New York with a well-to-do friend who took me to a swank restaurant in a hotel on the Upper East Side and then to the ballet to see Swan Lake. I nearly fainted from intolerable joy as I smoked a cigarette on a steamy August night by the fountain at Lincoln Center. We went back to some friend of a friend’s bachelor pad in an uptown high-rise. I remember whooshing up in a sleek, high-speed elevator to an apartment that was all black lacquer and red carpet. You know what I’m talking about: major stereo, sunken living room, expensive bong on the glass coffee table. I may as well have taken an elevator all the way to heaven. I stood at the window and stared at the sparkly skyline and the red river of taillights streaming down Park Avenue. I was so amped up from simply being in Manhattan that I did not sleep.
“I can’t believe you still live in Manhattan,’’ said a new Brooklyn cheerleader. Never before had it been suggested that this made me a moron.
Shooting for New York, I somehow landed in Atlantic City, a place that, despite its reputation as a dump with casinos, had for me a kind of glamorous decrepitude. It felt like a mini-Manhattan, laid out on a grid on an island, seething with intrigue 24 hours a day. Every morning I went to a newsstand to buy the New York Times solely for the classifieds—I threw the rest away. New York rents seemed laughably expensive, but I promised myself that I would not move until I could afford to live in Manhattan. Settling for Brooklyn or, worse, Hoboken seemed like living backstage, like training half your life to be an actor and then accepting a job as a stagehand hauling the scenery in and out. Miraculously, I got a decent magazine job by answering a classified ad. I found an apartment the same way: a big one-bedroom with an eat-in kitchen on 102nd and Broadway for $550 a month—no fee.
I can barely remember the days of packing and moving because I was in a zombie-like fever dream. When I arrived in New York on Valentine’s Day, 1988, I felt like the family pet that accidentally gets left behind but inexplicably finds its way across thousands of miles to turn up on the doorstep one day, exhausted, a little worse for wear, but so happy. I knew exactly one person who lived here, and the first thing she did was take me to some scary disco in midtown where I saw the performance artist Leigh Bowery walking around with lightbulbs attached to his head and a black woman onstage whose act was to lactate on the crowd.
Naturally, my most avid pursuit as a new New Yorker was going to parties and nightclubs to see how late I could stay out. Being able to stagger away from the wreckage and flop into bed once the sun was high was more than half the point. Manhattan is nothing if not an island of restaurants, bars, and nightclubs—with thoughtful little sleeping quarters just upstairs. It was like owning a time-share in a ski-in, ski-out condo. No need to schlep to the shuttle stop. Just step into your bindings and off you go!
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