A Very Slow Goodbye
We are heading out for California in eight days. It feels like we’ve been heading out for six months. The fact is, we have been. Time seems to be passing far more slowly than it normally does. Everyone says and thinks that time moves by faster and faster as we age, but I’m here to tell you that time modulates based on the circumstances. Sometimes it whips past and sometimes it chooses to crawl by. Right now, it is crawling at a snail’s pace for some reason. I don’t want to overthink this, but I suspect life wants me to savor my last bit of time here in NYC. I am quite anxious to get going, like I always am. But then again, I have never up and left somewhere I’ve lived for forty-three years (Obviously, I don’t count my two-year sentence in Gulag Toronto, since I weekended in New York for those two years). Even though I moved over and over again in my youth, it was always after I had only lived somewhere for a few years. There is something to be said for a place feeling like home after forty years.
In Kim’s case, she has only lived in New York City for thirty years, but she more than makes up for the difference by having dreamed all through her youth of moving to and living in New York City. I have to honestly say that I never dreamed of living in New York City. Come to think of it, being a bit of a rolling stone in my youth, I never imagined myself living anywhere in particular. I’ve never realized that before. Some people grow up assuming they will live where they grew up their whole lives. Others grow up with the vision that they will move away and find somewhere more exciting. I always grew up being ambivalent about where I lived. I guess that was a self-defense mechanism for that little boy that had no choice but to be a trailing child to an adventurous mother.
Let me reprise my New York City life so that I can exorcise any demons about it. I moved with a U-Haul to Queens (Bayside) in June 1976. I had taken a one-bedroom apartment half way between where I worked and where my girlfriend (soon to be fiancé) worked. I was a planner and this seemed like a good plan. Apartments in Queens were also a LOT less expensive than apartments in Manhattan. Other young bankers lived on the upper East side to be in the mainstream, but I never concerned myself with such conformity. I took either the express bus or parked at Shea Stadium and took the #7 train into Manhattan.
My plan worked and my girlfriend became my fiancé and then my wife by the end of 1976. But in February 1977 we bought and moved into a started house in Rockville Centre, a lovely little town on the south shore of Long Island. It was 36 scheduled minutes into Penn Station by Long Island Railroad. I would walk to the station for an earlier and earlier train (one-part career ambition and four parts dislike of the commuter crowds). In 1980 we did what all young couples did in the 70’s, we stretched to buy a bigger and better house than we could probably afford. I got specific advice from a very conservative boss that it was the best financial decision I could make. It matched the advice I had gotten from a business school professor except he thought in terms of Connecticut, not Long Island. I then spent almost ten years driving to the station for that 36-minute ride to Penn Station. By then I had backed myself up to catching the 5:14 train with all the work boot crowd. I remember the motto on getting home on the unreliable LIRR, “Yam aka Jamaica, yam aka your home”. Such were the travails of the Long Island commuter. I rode that beast for thirteen years and saw NYC as a commuter. I knew the path from Penn Station to Park Avenue by heart.
As a divorced man in 1989, I moved into “the dorms” in Battery Park City. That lasted a year and then I was banished after my first career stumble to Gulag Toronto for a 2-3-year sentence. I was back and forth to NYC a lot and was pardoned in 1992 for good behavior. My “train ticket back to Moscow” put me into an apartment overlooking the UN in Tudor City. I remarried and then moved to a big, sprawling penthouse in the fringe area of Union Square. I was a downtown guy at heart (probably a result of an eclectic life and being an ex-con in a banking sense). We had magnificent views of uptown, downtown and all of New Jersey. The area quickly became the hottest part of NYC. That apartment is still lived in by what is now my second ex-wife.
As a newly separated man in 2000, I moved for a year to an apartment on 29th Street with a view of the Flatiron Building. I then bought a place over on 22nd Street near Gramercy Park. I wasn’t entitled to a key to the park, but anything is available at a price from the friendly doormen of NYC, so I had my Gramercy Park access for whatever it was worth. After enjoying the fringes of the lower East side for a few years, I bought another penthouse in the South Street Seaport. It was an unusual an unconventional address, but with a view of four bridges including the Brooklyn Bridge and a huge 1600 sf terrace, it was a wonderful place to enjoy New York City in its full, diverse way.
Kim and I lived there until it was time to move to Staten Island to build the now infamous New York Wheel, a future icon of New York City that came close ($450 million worth of close) to reality but remains less vertical than it is supposed to be. Seeing New York from Staten Island makes one realize what one is missing every day, so we moved back to lower Manhattan two years ago for one last bite of the apple. We can see the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and the Verrazano Bridge from our apartment and my office is about 150 feet away, so it is convenient and very urban. Kim and I like lower Manhattan as a place to live and reach out to whatever we want uptown from there.
And now it is time to move on. People ask me regularly how I will exist without New York City. They say I will miss it. I’m sure I will miss it a bit, but fundamentally, I believe it is time to move on. We have a wonderful perch in California. I feel certain it will make us happy. We have many reasons to come back regularly to New York City. And fully expect to do just that. We have three children and two grandchildren who live in New York City. I have work in New York City. Kim has a cabaret community in New York City with which she will remain connected. We have friends throughout New York City. And we both have ties with this wonderful city that will never be broken. New York City is in our blood and is a part of us. We will have many reminders of it in California. In the end, a very slow goodbye to New York City is not only what we are going through this week, it is what we will be going through for the rest of our lives.
