Through the Children's Gate (2 page)

For all that the old pilgrimage of the young and writerly to Manhattan had become, in those years, slightly Quixotic, we determined nevertheless to make it—not drawn to the city romantically, as we
were later to the idea of Paris, but compelled toward it almost feverishly—deliriously, if you like—as the place you needed to be in order to stake a claim to being at all. This feeling has never left me. I've lived elsewhere, but nowhere else feels so entirely, so delusionally—owing more to the full range of emotional energies it possesses than to the comforts it provides—like home.

A home in New York! However will we have one? The exclamation of hope is followed at once by the desperate, the impossible, question. The idea of a home in Manhattan seems at once self-evident and still just a touch absurd, somehow close to a contradiction in its own shaky terms, so that to state it, even quietly, is to challenge some inner sense of decorum, literary if not entirely practical. In literature, after all, New York is where we make careers, deals, compromises, have breakdowns and break-ins and breaks, good and bad. But in reality what we all make in Manhattan are homes (excepting, of course, the unlucky, who don't, or can't, and act as a particularly strong reproach to those of us who do). The Life is the big, Trumpish unit of measure in New York, but the home, the apartment with its galley kitchen and the hallways with its cooking smells, is the real measure, the one we know, and all we know. We make as many homes in New York as in any other place. To make a home at all in New York is the tricky part, the hard part, and yet, at the same time, the self-evident part. Millions of other people are doing it, too. Look out your window. “Do New York!” Henry James implored Edith Wharton in a famous letter, meaning encompass it, if you can, but when we try to do New York, it does us and sends us reeling back home. (When the great James tried to come back home to do it, what he did was the house on Fourteenth Street where he was born, and the other homes, around the corner on Sixth.)

I still recall our first efforts at making a home, when my wife and I arrived on a bus from Canada and moved into a single nine-by-eleven basement room, on East Eighty-seventh Street. I remember it, exactly a quarter century after, with something approaching disbelief: How did we use so many toggle bolts on three walls? But doing it a second time doesn't seem easier, or more supple; I can't walk into a housewares store in Manhattan without feeling myself the victim of a complicated
confidence trick, a kind of cynical come-on. We're really going to use a toaster and a coffee-maker every morning? And then, of course, we do, just like they do in Altoona, just like we did … back home.

To make a home in New York, we first have to find a place on the map of the city to make it in. The map alone teaches us lessons about the kind of home you can make. So the first New York home we made was in one of many small basement apartments strung along First Avenue. Then there was Soho in its Silver Age, when the cheese counter at Dean & DeLuca and the art at Mary Boone conspired to convince one that a Cultural Moment was under way. But that era has passed—a world gone right under, as they all do here—and coming home this time, we hoped to land in one of the more tender squares on the map, the one that kids live in.

W
e came back to New York in 2000, after years away, to go through the Children's Gate, and make a home here for good. The Children's Gate exists, and you really can go through it. It's the name for the entrance to Central Park at Seventy-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue. The names of the gates—hardly more than openings in the low stone wall describing the park—are among its more poetic, less familiar monuments. In a moment of oddly Ruskinian whimsy, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux gave names to all the entrances of Central Park, calling them gates, each accommodating a class of person to enter there: a park for all the people with entrances for every kind. There was, and is, the Miners’ Gate, and the Scholars’ Gate, and—for a long time this was my favorite—the Strangers’ Gate, high on the West Side. The Children's Gate is one of the lesser known, though the most inviting of all. On most days you can't even read its name, since a hot-dog-and-pretzel vendor parks his cart and his melancholy there twelve hours a day, right in front of where the stone is engraved. It's a shame, actually. For though it's been a long time since a miner walked through his gate, children really
do
come in and out of theirs all day and, being children, would love to know about it. Now my family had, in a way, decided to pass through as children, too.

This was true literally—we liked the playground and went there
our first jet-lagged morning home—and metaphorically: We had decided to leave Paris for New York for the romance of childhood, for the good of the children. We wanted them to go not to baffling Parisian schools—where they would have gotten a terrific education, been cowed until seventeen, and only then begun to riot—but to a New York progressive school, where they'd get a terrific education and, we hoped, have a good time doing it. Childhood seemed too short to waste on preparation. And we wanted them to grow up in New York, to be natives here, as we could never be, to come in through the Children's Gate, not the Strangers’ Gate.

A
crowd came through the gate with us. Twenty-five years ago, Calvin Trillin could write of his nuclear family of two parents and two kids as being so strange a sight in New York that it was an attraction on bus tours, but by the time we came home, the city had been repopulated—some would say overrun—with children. It was now the drug addicts and transvestites and artists who were left muttering about the undesirable, short element taking over the neighborhood. New York had become, almost comically, a children's city again, with kiddie-coiffure joints where sex shops had once stood and bare, ruined singles bars turned into play-and-party centers. There was an excess of strollers so intense that notices forbidding them had to be posted at the entrances of certain restaurants, as previous generations of New Yorkers had warned people not to hitch their horses too close to the curb. There were even special matinees for babies—real babies, not just kids—where the wails of the small could be heard in the dark, in counterpoint to the dialogue of the great Meryl Streep dueting with a wet six-month-old. Whether you thought it was “suburbanized,” “gentrified,” or simply improved, that the city had altered was plain, and the children flooding its streets and parks and schools were the obvious sign.

The transformation of the city, and particularly the end of the constant shaping presence of violent crime, has been amazing, past all prediction, despite the facts that the transformation is not entirely complete and the new city is not entirely pleasing to everyone. Twenty
some years ago, it was taken for granted that New York was hell, as Stanley Kauffmann wrote flatly in a review of Ralph Bakshi's now oddly forgotten New York cartoon-dystopia
Heavy Traffic,
and every movie showed it that way, with the steam rising from the manholes to gratify the nostrils of the psychos, as if all the infernal circles, one through thirty, inclusive, were right below. E. B. White was asked to update his famous essay about the city, and that unweepy man, barely able to clear the bitter tears from his prose, declined to write about a city he no longer knew. In the seventies, Robert Caro's life of Robert Moses, blankly subtitled “And the Fall of New York,” was the standard version of What Had Happened.

Everyone has a moment of personal marvel about how far things have gone or changed: Twenty-three years ago, I recall, they were toting bodies out of the Film Center on Ninth Avenue, and (nice lost word) the degenerates were brooding on it at the Film Center Café. Now the Film Center shines and the café across the street serves mussels and croissant sandwiches, having kept its Art Moderne front, so “period,” if nothing else. The scale of this miracle—and for anyone who remembers the mood of the city in the early seventies, miracle it is—leads inevitably to a rebound of complaint. It Is Not So Miraculous At All. Or: You call
that
a miracle? The cross-dressers in the Village sniff at the influx of nuclear families as the fleeing nuclear families once sniffed at the cross-dressers. Some of the complaining is offered in a tone of intelligent, disinterested urban commentary: The service and financial and media industries, they say, are too unstable a base for a big city to live and grow on (though, historically speaking, no one seems able to explain why these industries are any more perilous than the paper-box or ladies’ lingerie industries of forgotten days).

Most of the beefs are aesthetic and offered in a tone of querulous nostalgia: What happened to all that ugliness, all that interesting despair, all that violence and seediness, the cabdrivers in their undershirts and the charming hookers in their heels? This is standard-issue human perversity. After they gentrify hell, the damned will complain that life was much more fun when everyone was running in circles:
Say what you will about the devil, at least he wasn't antiseptic. We didn't
come to hell for the croissants.
But the lament has a subtler and more poignant side, too. All of us, right and left, make the new Times Square a butt of jokes—how sickening it still is to be forced to gaze at so much sleaze and human waste, to watch the sheer degradation of people forced to strut their wares in lust-inducing costumes before lip-licking onlookers, until at last
The Lion King
is over and you can flee the theater. These jokes are compulsive and irresistible because they speak to our embarrassment about our own relief, and to a certain disappointment, too. Safety and civic order are not sublime; these are awfully high rents to be paying to live, so to speak, in Minneapolis.

Still, croissants and crime are not lifestyle choices, to be taken according to taste; the reduction of fear, as anyone who has spent time in Harlem can attest, is a grace as large as any imaginable. To revise Chesterton slightly: People who refuse to be sentimental about the normal things don't end up being sentimental about nothing; they end up being sentimental about
anything,
shedding tears over old muggings and the perfect, glittering shards of the little crack vials, sparkling like diamonds in the gutter.
Où sont les neiges d'antan?:
Who cares if the snows were all of cocaine? We saw them falling and our hearts were glad.

The more serious argument is that the transformation is Parisian in the wrong way: the old bits of the city are taken over by the rich (or by yuppies, which somehow has a worse ring) while the poor and the unwashed are crowded right off the island. By a “city,” after all, we mean more than an urban amusement park; we mean a collection of classes, trades, purposes, and functions that become a whole, giving us something more than rich people in their co-ops and condos staring at other rich people in their co-ops and condos. Those who make this argument see not a transformation but an ethnic cleansing, an expulsion of the wrong sort. Still, it is hard to compare the
Mad Max
blackout of ’77 with the
Romper Room
blackout of ’03 and insist that something has gone so terribly wrong with the city. No one can credibly infer a decline, which leads us back to the Times Square Disneyfication jokes. And toward remaking the old romance.

It is a strange thing to be the serpent in one's own garden, the snake
in one's own grass. The suburbanization of New York is a fact, and a worrying one, and everyone has moments of real disappointment and distraction. The Soho where we came of age, with its organic intertwinings of art and food, commerce and cutting edge, is unrecognizable to us now—but then that Soho we knew was unrecognizable to its first émigrés, who by then had moved on to Tribeca. This is only to say that in the larger, inevitable human accounting of New York, there are gains and losses, a zero sum of urbanism: The great gain of civility and peace is offset by a loss of creative kinds of vitality and variety. (There are new horizons of Bohemia in Brooklyn and beyond, of course, but Brooklyn has its bards already, to sing its streets and smoke, as they will and do. My heart lies with the old island of small homes and big buildings, the sounds coming from one resonating against the sounding board of the other.)

B
ut those losses are inevitably specific. There is always a new New York coming into being as the old one disappears. And that city—or cities; there are a lot of different ones on the same map—has its peculiar pleasures and absurdities as keen as any other's. The one I awakened to, and into—partly by intellectual affinity, and much more by the ringing of an alarm clock every morning at seven—was the civilization of childhood in New York. The phrase is owed to Iona Opie, the great scholar of children's games and rhymes, whom I got to interview once. “Childhood is a civilization with its own rules and rituals,” she told me, charmingly but flatly, long before I had children of my own. “Children never refer to each other as children. They call themselves, rightly, people, and tell you what it is that people like them—their people—believe and do.” The Children's Gate exists; you really can go through it.

But why such a fuss about children in New York, or anywhere?
I hear some level head (not you, reader) sigh.
Cant we simply accept childhood, really, as children do, as just a preface to personhood?
If love of one's children is a natural emotion—Dr. Johnson thought not, but Mrs. Thrale, quite rightly, I'd say, told him he was full of it—to love
one's children nearly to the exclusion of, or at least above, all else, is a different thing, at least for a man. An obsessive love of our children is proof that we are unhappy about something else, Queen Marie of Rumania once said—and who am I, are we, to argue with Queen Marie of Rumania?

Struggling to reflect on a subject about which I cannot help but obsess—my heart lifts when they wake up and falls a little when they go to school, and I feel myself possessed by the kind of compulsive all-day mindfulness once the exclusive province of mothers—I see that this is a product, a “construction,” of one particular period, a paternal archetype no less historical than the distant father who left nursing to the nursery even if the magnitude of the love he felt was no less or greater than we may feel. Kenneth Clark kept his children in an entirely separate house on his property; they were led in to say good evening just before the grown-ups sat down to dinner, and then they were dismissed again. Yet in his autobiography, Clark writes that nothing in his life had given him as much joy as his kids, and I don't doubt that, on his own terms, he was telling the truth.