New York, New York

The Times has a series of "postcards" from the various places Obama has lived and which, presumably, have shaped his world view. Of course, the one that has the greatest meaning for me is Keven Baker's reverie on New York in 1981 when Baker, Barack Obama, and I all arrived in the city to attend a university on the Upper West Side.

The city was, as Baker describes, a gray, foreboding place. It is true that one of the first things we were told in freshman orientation was, should you accidentally take the wrong subway line and find yourself on E. 116th St., never, ever walk through Morningside Park -- day or night -- to get to the West Side.

I can relate to most of what Baker writes, especially the opportunity for cheap food, the artistic vibrancy of the time, and the movies -- so many movie theaters showing classic films (before most people thought of film noir as "classic") and European art films.

We feasted on $4 platters of Indian food in restaurants on Sixth Street where you could bring your own wine. We went everywhere by subway, riding in gray, graffiti-covered cars where half the doors didn’t open and a single, sluggish fan shoved the air about on summer nights. We took a cab sometimes, when there were five of us and we could get a Checker, one person riding on the jump seat, staring out at the long avenues of the city.

We lived dangerously, I suppose. Everyone’s apartment was broken into. We were told that if we got out of the subway at East 116th Street to never, ever try to walk through Morningside Park back to Columbia. Women would go out to lunch and come back to the office to find their wallets somehow missing from the pocketbooks they had held tightly between their knees throughout the meal.

Late one night, leaving a party on the Lower East Side, we saw a hulking, derelict figure emerge from under a stairwell, ready to do mayhem. When he saw how many we were he frowned and retreated beneath the stairs without saying a word, waiting for the next victim.

It was a gray city, a weary one, an older one. There were, in those days, pornographic theaters in good neighborhoods; Bowery-style wino bars with sawdust on the floor on Upper Broadway; prostitutes along West End Avenue slipping into cars with New Jersey license plates. It was a city, too, that seemed to open up into an infinite series of magic boxes, of novelty shops and diners, delicatessens and corner bakeries, used record stores and bookstores.

Yeah, the record stores and bookstores. Everywhere -- from tiny ones to sprawling ones. Usually with some legendary guy who, depending on the store, knew every record or book in the place. Nearly all of those are gone now, as is the intermingling at the time of rich, poor, and middle class in neighborhoods side by side. And the city felt simultaneously brutally tough and desperately fragile, still reeling from the economic collapse of the '70s, but still determined to make it on its own -- and slightly crazed Ed Koch's -- terms.

One thing I cannot relate to in Baker's memories is dancing "all night at Danceteria." The New Wave and Disco mecca wasn't my cup o' tea...or, more appropriately, my gold spoon of coke. Which reminds me: Baker's memories are pretty complet except for one thing -- the city was awash in cocaine and whatever the multiple middle-men used to cut it prior to sale. It was everywhere, from crack cocaine north of 125th to the lines and lines of it on the coffee tables of the improbably affluent East Campus dorm -- which, just to close the circle -- is a high-rise overlooking desolate, empty, Morningside Park. A big "fuck you" to the residents of East Harlem. Funny he doesn't mention the coke thing. Maybe, like Obama, he came to the city determined not to fall into that particular drain of madness, to be physically and mentally pure (I wasn't quite to strong, at least until a few years later when I stopped after one too many nights of intense, hours long conversation with a complete and utter moron). Nevertheless, its hard to ignore that characteristic of the city and the effects it had on so many people then, people and relationships destroyed.

Anyway, I share Baker's hope that his memories of 1980s NYC will have some effect on Obama's outlook on the needs of our cities, and a reminder of how resilient you had to be to survive back then. Maybe now, too.