2. Janet Malcolm

“It is the avid people from somewhere else who fan [New York’s] extravagant flame as they scale its hierarchies of finance, commerce, and art. We indigenes with our proprietary airs are all very well, but we don’t count in the New York scheme of things.” -Janet Malcolm 
 

I moved to New York in 2004, understanding already that the city was far removed from its best years. I was happy to inhabit a diminished version of New York, though, one in which the Bloombergian revolution was well underway—in fact, had been underway since Koch struck his devil’s deal with real estate interests—but had not yet consumed the city in an irreversible suburban sameness. I enjoyed my early years in the city, despite living in a relatively remote section of Queens and suffering through a bad marriage. I went to see experimental jazz shows at The Stone, ate Korean BBQ on West 32^nd Street, wandered the streets of different neighborhoods, trying to isolate and define for myself their specific qualities. But I understood quite clearly that the city’s anarchic spirit had already been tamed, a state of affairs I frequently heard lamented by New Yorkers who had been there far longer than I had.

As I soon learned, this native/newcomer divide is often fraught. This is, after all, a town where vast numbers of people come from somewhere else, but where it is always important to be seen as belonging, to present as a real New Yorker. The transplant constantly suffers from a nagging sense that he doesn’t truly fit in, that no matter how well he knows the city, how strongly he’s mastered its unspoken customs, he will never measure up to the New York-ness exhibited by what Janet Malcom calls, in a pointedly antiquated phrase, the “indigene.”

And, yet, it is often these ambitious newcomers that come to define the city’s landscape, for good or, more frequently, for less good. I can’t even imagine the bewilderment that must be felt by people who’ve lived in New York for the better part of a century, such as Malcolm and the subjects of the 2014 profile from which the above quote is taken, the elderly “three sisters” who own the legendary Argosy bookstore, at what the city has become. Even since 2004, I’ve noticed an essential change in the character of incoming New Yorkers, for whom the long-standing ways of the city “don’t count in the… scheme of things,” just as old-timers like Malcolm and her subjects do not. For these people, it seems, there is not the same anxiety about whether or not they can adapt to the city. Instead, as they isolate themselves in their luxury buildings, order whatever they need via Seamless and Task Rabbit, and take Ubers everywhere, it is the city that must adjust to them.

In 2018, having had enough, I decamped upstate. I was quickly hit with a nasty surprise when I discovered that Hudson, NY, where I moved, is the favored weekend destination for exactly the sort of New Yorker that I hoped to escape. (That is my fault; I failed to do the proper research.) But, despite this realization, I’m happy to be here. And what I’m happiest about, when I really think about it, is that I don’t have to ride the subway, that I don’t have to constantly negotiate crowds of people, and that I have significantly more living space. In the words of a pair of novelty socks my wife bought for me at a local bookstore, “I fucking love it out here.” All of which leads me to wonder: Was what I was escaping the “new” New York, with its diminished possibilities and increasing conformity, or was it, in fact, the city full stop, the massive metropolis that’s always existed and that, in my creeping middle age, I no longer have the patience or desire to navigate?