Bye-bye to Dubai (on The Hudson)

“I am the only person I know in our neck of the woods for whom the city does nothing at all. I didn’t feel thwarted or closeted or invalidated in my childhood, which was spent in California and Europe, and New York, for me, always appeared provincial, filthy, needlessly dangerous, and far too expensive, in every way, even in the 1960s. To my jaded Eurotrash eye, all of America seemed, and seems, provincial. Just one week spent in Istanbul or Paris or Cairo or Athens was always worth more to me than possible decades in New York.”—By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“New York used to be cool, and now it’s not. It’s not at all. It is boring and dismaying and stymied; everything potentially cool in it is overwhelmed and inflated and parodied and sold. You can’t even love the absurdity of it because it’s too painful, and we cannot be allowed any more to callously love, for their absurdity, systems that oppress and impoverish. New York City is mediated by money so visibly. Everywhere everything is mediated by money, so perhaps you could make a brutalist argument for how fabulous it is to live with that so in your face, but my face hurts.”—Rebecca Wolff, “So Long, Suckers,” from Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York

Ruminant With A View

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

BRIDGE & TUNNEL New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—7/28/2014—I, myself, will not be making a brutalist argument. I will, instead, be voting with my feet and, shortly, leaving New York literally in my rear-view. Driving along the Hudson, our ancient SUV crammed with valuables (trumpets, icons, my mother’s flatware), I will steal glances at that (brutalist) skyline, and then turn back to the mad traffic just ahead of me, girding myself for the long, fraught, interstate slog south.

At that moment of separation, I will feel very, very little indeed, I predict, except a slight sense of lightening.

My husband, at the wheel of our even more ancient van—“the band bus”—will be experiencing another palette of emotions altogether. I suspect, unseen by me, he will be weeping his heart out.

For a jazz musician of a certain age, for a creative American artist of any age, leaving New York City brings to mind The Expulsion from Eden, The Destruction of The Temple, The Trail of Tears. For a jazz trumpeter who came to the city at 17, and who has, in every important sense, remained here, body and soul, ever since, there is nowhere else but New York. New York City is my husband’s querencia, his lair, the place from which he derives all nourishment, the embodiment of his heart’s desire, quite literally the love of his life.

I understand this concept viscerally, as I have also been compelled, by fate and financial realities, to leave the one place I feel to be home, the place where all my dreams reside, Greece. And, because I am poor, because I am in debt (due to health care expenses), and because I am old, it is now unlikely that Greece will ever be, again, my analog home. For three years, I have lived with this knowledge but, now, to be compelled to add to my own sense of exile, that of my husband?

Reader, it seems too much to ask of us.

From the auctioneers, who came to remove my antiques (which, heretofore, I had imagined would bring a pretty penny in the unlikely event I ever had to sell them), I learned the pieces might bring bupkis. The two burly men from rural Pennsylvania told me, in no uncertain terms: “Everyone is leaving the Northeast now, and everyone is selling their big pieces and nobody wants them: the market is glutted.”

And I knew this to be the case. I did not doubt them. In fact, just after Hurricane Sandy hit, and I saw how utterly helpless New York and New Jersey were rendered both before and after the storm, I realized a mass exodus was in the city’s cards. It was as though, in a flash, the flimsy curtain parted and Oz, impotent and busy at his controls, was revealed in all his ineptitude. In the city, in the Jersey towns, and all up and down the shore, we were helpless before the righteous fury of Sandy. And we are patently unready for the next storms, all of which will surely come; nor for the rising sea levels; nor, really, for anything much at all. New York and environs—the greater metro area—is urban in all the worst ways; and no longer urban in the best ways. It has become, as one New York Times Magazine writer phrases it, “Dubai on The Hudson,” a city of billionaires, a place that has sold its soul. It is no longer anyone’s querencia . . . but for jazz musicians living in a 1940s time warp, apparently.

How to express this to those who don’t live here, or who haven’t lived here in decades?

Remember downtown movie houses without fleas and bedbugs? Remember a city where a decent espresso cost under two bucks? Remember jazz clubs not jammed with Asians snapping selfies even after the MC announces that the band is recording live? Remember new plays, as opposed to revivals? Remember Max’s Kansas City? Remember John’s Pizzeria (on East 64^th, not Bleecker: get a grip)? Remember a time when, if you couldn’t afford Manhattan, there was Brooklyn? Remember publishing? Remember recording? Remember writing and editing for actual money?

Well, the city where those memories were generated died c. 1990, and has been replaced by an imposter wearing black reflective shades. At “Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, aka The Book of Lamentations: A Bitterly Nostalgic Look at a City in the Process of Going Extinct ,” long-time residents can gauge the rapidity of the decline and fall of the urban culture they loved, one extinction at a time.

I, however, prefer just to pocket the pennies I’ll get for my rare, huge, intricately-carved, 19^th-century antiques . . . and move on. My beloved husband plans to commute “home”—back to the city from East-Jesus-in-The-Sticks, where we are moving. I, myself, will be making a stab at blooming where I am willy-nilly planted. At least this time, at the end of this move, I know full well I’m not re-entering The Promised Land, or settling anywhere near El Dorado: I’m being put out to pasture like so many of my creative generation, and I will just have to deal.

My sorrow in leaving reflects only the pain being experienced by my spouse. My guilt in leaving derives from this: I came up to New York to model, at 18, and never fell in love with the place. I am the only person I know in our neck of the woods for whom the city does nothing at all. I didn’t feel thwarted or closeted or invalidated in my childhood, which was spent in California and Europe, and New York, for me, always appeared provincial, filthy, needlessly dangerous, and far too expensive, in every way, even in the 1960s. To my jaded Eurotrash eye, all of America seemed, and seems, provincial. Just one week spent in Istanbul or Paris or Cairo or Athens was always worth more to me than possible decades in New York.

And I remember Max’s Kansas City, and the Chelsea Hotel, and John’s Pizzeria. They just never really did it for me.

So, now that the man I love with all my heart has been priced out of the sole extant Mecca of Jazz, all I can do is empathize; but I cannot grieve with him.

The city which seduced new generations with its music, its writing, its acting, its art is finally killing its golden goose: fleeing are the musicians, the writers, the actors, the painters, and coming in in droves are the billionaires. Not millionaires, mind you, but billionaires.

Absentee billionaires, too, by the sound of it. Foreigners buying up apartments as investments, but not coming here to roost.

It’s a very sad state of affairs from my vantage point, here at the wheel of my SUV. Art galleries full of selfies, empty orchestra pits (the musicians replaced by one synthesizer), and not a bookstore in sight?

Gentlemen, please, place your last orders: it’s time.

Note: The image that illustrates this essay derives from http://www.karmacontinued.com/2012/03/snow-globe.html.