Escape From New York
I have always loved the 1981 John Carpenter film (he wrote it and directed it) starring Kurt Russell and portraying the dystopic city which has become a Federal maximum-security prison (the only one in the country) allowed to self-govern and headed by Isaac Hayes with Ernest Borgnine running around giving people cab rides in his old Checker. Russell plays one of the great movie characters of all time, Snake Plissken with the cobra tattoo adorning his abdomen. In the manner of all movie anti-heroes, Snake is a bad-boy with a snarl that has no superficial niceties or redeeming qualities other than his toughness, and yet we all get behind him and sense that he represents good in the time of great overarching evil. It is fair to say that in John Carpenter’s reality many of the “good guys” are bad and some of the “bad guys” are good. So pretty much like real life in its confusing delineations.
John Carpenter and Snake did reunite for a sequel fifteen years later in Escape From L.A. I guess he figured that was long enough to justify the Feds opening up another maximum security prison in the other major “Blue State City” across the country. Donald Trump must love this series and I’m sure in his dreams the national capital has been moved to Palm Beach with a branch in Houston. As is so often the case, the sequel was not the movie Escape From New York was and certainly was not as impactful as a cultural symbol. In 1981 we were all still fresh from the heels of the NYC fiscal crisis which put NYC on the top of the undesirable list. I remember a Californian I knew coming into the city and commenting about all the garbage on the streets and litter strewn everywhere…and I didn’t even take her to 8th Avenue or Times Square.
I spent my early working years (1976-1989) living outside of Manhattan and commuting in. I maintained the fiction that one day soon I would move to where I really wanted and do what I really wanted rather than being a New York City banker. But life rolls on and pages on the calendar fly off. What I can say is that by the time I moved back from a two-year stint in Toronto, there was nowhere I wanted to live more than Manhattan. From 1992 until the beginning of this year (28 years), I lived in Manhattan with the exception of three years in Staten Island where my view was of southern Manhattan and I rode the Staten Island Ferry almost every day. I can say without equivocation that I truly loved living in NYC for those years and the City just kept getting better and better as far as I was concerned. Fully half of that time I was with Kim, who helped me see the more cultured side of New York with her musical theater and cabaret orientation. But it was more than that. I liked the vibe in New York. It was so very real, so very powerful, so very central to the world. Everyone from anywhere and of any age wanted to be in New York City. If they didn’t live there they wanted a pied-a-terre there and if they couldn’t afford that, they wanted to visit there on vacation. New York City became during the Bloomberg years the #1 urban tourist destination in the world, welcoming over 60 million visitors per year, many of them from the far reaches of the world. It was quite the vortex.
Kim always dreamed of being in New York City as one in theater does, but I rather adjusted, settled-in and grew to love New York City, not through my dreams, but through my day-to-day adventure of living there. All three of my children live in New York City at the moment, but now I wonder how true that will be in a year from now.
There is a great deal of controversy in New York City right now about whether the dream of being a city-dweller is over or whether this is when the tough get going as they did in the mid-70’s and after 9/11. Everyone has their own list of reasons and their own projections of what the world will look like in five years. It’s funny, its less about where you see yourself in five years than it is about where you see the world in five years. For the pessimists that see more pandemics, more economic hardship and more racial violence before we break through to something resembling a solution to all our problems, the City is too challenging and needs to be abandoned. The New York Times tells us today that they have analyzed cell phone records and see a large exodus of young city-dwellers to the outlying areas surrounding New York. I’m not sure how that works in an era where everyone keeps their adolescent of college cell phone address, but I trust the Times figured out some new angle on data parsing. Other people are swearing allegiance to life in the City and say they will never leave it. One of the debates is whether it is a valid excuse to say that all the cultural and restaurant attractions of New York City ain’t what they used to be or ain’t at all and that alone justifies their escape from New York. I don’t really know how I feel about that argument. I know that the argument that people are staying for their friends and neighbors seems somewhat disingenuous since no one ever accused New York City of being a warm and cuddly place where everyone had a sense of community. Weekend homes alone make that a somewhat bogus argument unless you assume that seeing the same friends in the Hamptons or at the Dutchess County General Store as you see at Zabar’s, counts as community.
We have three kids who will be making up their minds about this issue of to be or not to be a New Yorker and I have no intention of swaying them one way or the other. We moved out here to sunny California for reasons that had nothing to do with losing faith in New York City. We do feel our timing was good because life in quarantine has been decidedly easier here than there, but that is a pure coincidence. It is a valid and important life decision for all young people who live and work in New York. It will depend on work culture (which is moving increasingly to WFH as we all know) and family location most likely. I doubt many people will be staying because it is a better lifestyle per se. Maybe the protests and riots will stop and maybe the economy will revive and the the pandemic recede, but will social gathering in urban centers ever be the same in our lifetimes? I doubt it. People will stay for many reasons, but I suspect they will leave for more reasons. The pendulum is swinging away from urbanization, as it has briefly in times past, only this time there are so many reasons for it to swing further and longer in the non-urban direction. It may actually become a secular trend rather than a cyclical adjustment. The world and how we interact with it is changing very rapidly and while its directions are not by any means set in stone, I think it fair to suggest that many will use it as an excuse to escape from New York to an easier and slower pace of life. If not for good, at least for long enough to recover from this barrage of punches that nature has dealt us.