Our New York

She led me there, then followed

My mom at South Street Seaport in 1986

I saw Alicia Keys’ Hell’s Kitchen this week, and it sparked all kinds of New York memories for me. Its Manhattan Plaza setting was a place I’d also spent a lot of time. I ate regularly at the long-gone Curtain Up on the ground floor, had a breakup by the pool, knew people who knew people who were talented enough to live upstairs.

Many of the times I was at Manhattan Plaza, I was with my mother. We went to dinner and the theater regularly, with tickets purchased at the TKTS half-price booth. I fell hard for New York, and claimed it for my own, but I realize now that my mother is the one who introduced me to it, who ran a successful public relations campaign for city life while teaching me to wear my purse crossbody.

When I finally, thrillingly, gratefully moved to New York City to attend NYU, it was not just because I already loved the place. It was to get away from her—yes, she who had built it up to me. We’d lived in the suburbs, a 30-minute ride north of Grand Central Station, and had visited frequently to go to museums and see shows. As I got older, I came not with her, but with friends and even alone, to buy things you could only find in “the city”: out-of-print records, textbooks, trendy but cheap clothes.

Once, in high school, I’d arranged to do research at the lion-flanked New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. I was meeting a friend out front, but when I saw my first “No Standing” sign, I started walking in circles because I didn’t want to get a ticket for standing still. Now those days of being a hayseed were over. Now I was going to be a smart and savvy New Yorker.

The gritty corner of Columbus Avenue and 81st Street in 1979, as seen from my first (cheap) apartment. At night, transients would throw bottles out the window.

Theoretically, NYC was in decline, deep into a financial crisis, excoriated and written off. But it was a young person’s delight. I loved the graffiti-covered subway cars, the conmen and buskers in Times Square. I loved that there was a garment district, a plant district, meat and fish districts, my beloved theater district—and so much more to discover. I loved the filthy old buildings. I loved the edginess of the dark and deserted streets.

After all, those streets led to places unlike anything in the suburbs—or elsewhere. By luck, I’d arrived at the pinnacle of disco and punk rock, and the club scene was insanely fun and accessible. (Except Studio 54, damn them!) Foreign-language and independent films were all over the Village, and early on I got a job at one of the theaters where John Waters came to introduce his latest and Rocky Horror became a midnight movie mainstay. Bookstores were vast, like the Strand and the two Barnes and Nobles on lower Fifth Ave., and I stayed for hours reading and, occasionally, buying. And the people! They operated at a higher, more interesting, level.

Then, six months into my bliss, my mother showed up with my two young sisters. I was horrified…but she settled in on Roosevelt Island and that was that.

Hell’s Kitchen is primarily the story of a mother and daughter, and mine could not be more different from it. But my mother and I did share a love of New York that never wavered. Even though we both moved away in the late ‘80s, we went back separately and together countless times over the years. Her voice still plays in my head when I see a shot of the Roosevelt Island tram, or a projection of the Statue of Liberty against a musical’s backdrop. “My” New York is not just mine, it’s ours.

With my mom at my graduation in Washington Square Park