It is one of the most famous covers in the long, rich history of The New Yorker.
“View of the World from 9th Avenue,” by illustrator Saul Steinberg, is one of the first images that come to mind when many New Yorkers of a certain age and, perhaps, social class, describe the alpha city they call home. The drawing is also known as “A Parochial New Yorker's View of the World.”
I am not a New Yorker, but I gained a little bit of experience in that world while teaching journalism, religion and mass media there for roughly two months a year over the past five years. This period of my life that is now, sadly, over, and the coronavirus had nothing to do with this departure.
I claim no great insights into New York, but I really enjoyed this experience.
Everything of substance that I learned during that time came from New Yorkers and that shaped what I saw happening around me. But here is one of the most important things I learned from the set of New Yorkers that I came to know — New York City contains some absolutely amazing churches and religious flocks of every size and shape. This website will tell you lots of what your need to know about that: “A Journey Through NYC Religions.”
Now, please notice that this statement undercuts a popular myth among New York haters in other parts of America. Yes, the Big Apple is a rather secular and liberal place, especially in Manhattan. But in reality, it’s hard to tell the story of Manhattan — past or present — without including religious faith in the mix.
Now, with that in mind, look again at the “View of the World from 9th Avenue.” What is missing from this iconic New York City image that is actually present in real life (other than, of course, the existence of the rest of the United States of America out in flyover country)? What is missing from this picture of New York City life that is so popular with a certain brand of New York insider?
Here’s a clue. It’s the same thing that is missing from a recent feature in The New York Times that ran with this double-decker headline:
What Hardcore New Yorkers Really Miss
Wistful words from the actor Alec Baldwin, the comedian Amber Ruffin, the Rev. Al Sharpton, the chef Amanda Cohen, the assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou and more.
Note the phrase “hardcore New Yorkers.”
What does that adjective mean? Apparently it refers to people who live in a city with no steeples, no cathedrals, no synagogues, etc.
Here is some crucial overture material from the top of that Times feature, referring to the coronavirus that has attacked the “fabric,” maybe even the soul. of the city. This is long, but essential:
The crisis, by any standard, has been costly: More than 19,000 New Yorkers have already lost their lives, and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more have lost their livelihoods.
But the fabric of the city, too, has suffered harm as our attempts to stop the spread of disease have infected the streets and subways, the great public spaces and the secret little hideaways with a kind of festering emptiness. Social distance, for all its benefits, is a plague to places like New York, laying waste to the churning rhythms, the cherished rituals and the millions of spontaneous interactions where, in normal times, the city lives at the level of its cells.
With New Yorkers in retreat from New York, it seemed appropriate to ask a few what they missed most about their home as it was just months ago. Some missed the big things: the daily tide of bodies swirling around the clock in Grand Central Terminal. Some missed the small things: the two-tone chime of a closing subway door.
“There’s a complicated chemistry the city uses as eight million people go about their lives together,” said Ric Burns, the documentary filmmaker perhaps best known for his PBS series on New York. “It’s an infinitely delicate attraction-repulsion mechanism that help us negotiate our density, and it’s been put on hold.”
“It’s like our language has been taken from us,” Mr. Burns said, “and we’ve been silenced.”
So what do real New Yorkers miss, by that I mean the “hardcore” New Yorkers whose experiences and lives need to represented in the papers of America’s most important newspaper?
This isn’t a rich person vs. ordinary person thing. The Times piece does a find job of including some experiences common to anyone who walks the sidewalks of New York.
Actor Alec Baldwin, for example, misses crowded coffee shops. The owner and chef of the vegetarian restaurant “Dirt Candy” misses the daily “family meal” with the entire staff. Talk-show host Curtis Sliwa misses buying newspapers from street kiosks. (I miss getting falafel from the nearby food carts during Eastern Orthodox fasting seasons.)
Writer/comedian Amber Ruffin of “Late Night With Seth Meyers” misses what she calls “The Rush Hour Pedestrian Blob” on sidewalks and in mass transit.
I enjoyed this bite of commentary from Dick Zigun, who is identified as the “artistic director of Coney Island USA and the unelected mayor of Coney Island.”
Having spent his career in front of crowds — whether the huge ones that spill across the Coney Island boardwalk for the Mermaid Parade each summer or the small ones that show up daily for the Coney Island freak show — what Mr. Zigun longs for most these days is a live audience.
“The laughter, the applause, looking at people’s faces — without all that, I don’t know what to do with myself,” he said.
Lots of New Yorkers know what it’s like to address a large audience — in person or through mass media. Some stand in pulpits or behind altars.
Now, I have been in touch with some New Yorkers during the pandemic and I follow many city folks on Twitter. The vast majority of these people have been mourning the fact that they have been cut off from face-to-face experience of communal worship (including hugs).
Yes, for many real (but perhaps not “hardcore”) New Yorkers, a religious congregation is a communal “third place” that is just as essential to their heart and soul as a deli or a coffee shop. This is true for lots of people — Catholics, Jews, Latino evangelicals, Korean Presbyterians, African-American Pentecostals. I met liberal, and conservative, mainline protestants, in New York City. I met more than a few white evangelicals, both conservatives and progressives.
I kept waiting for this complex reality to show up in this long Times feature.
Ah! Maybe religious faith will be mentioned by the Rev. Al Sharpton? Or is he a “civil rights activist and cable TV host” and that is that?
As it turns out, Sharpton misses the “crowds of Times Square.”
Mr. Sharpton, the street preacher and organizer of protest marches, has always had a love of public spaces — none more than Times Square, he said. He recalled “being in heaven” coming into the square as a child from his home on New Lots Avenue in Brooklyn and strolling through its pulsing crowds as a young man with his surrogate father, James Brown.
But now, Times Square, like so much of Manhattan, is a wasteland.
Sigh. Maybe I didn’t get to know the real New York City, the one that really matters?