Vol. 38: You can’t go home again?

Searching for the past, in New York and Philly

         If you’re my age, you may recall this “Twilight Zone” episode from the ’50s:
A successful New York executive begins experiencing painful flashbacks to his pathetic childhood, when he was a bespectacled twerp, suffering constant tauntings and beatings by the local bullies. These memories ultimately draw him from his cushy Upper East Side high-rise back to his old slum neighborhood in lower Manhattan, where he finds to his astonishment that nothing has changed: The streets, tenements, and corner groceries still stand, and so do the bullies who once teased and smacked him around. What’s more, the bullies are still kids, and they resume picking on our protagonist just as if he never left or grew up.
         A new twist on that story was provided last week by Jordan Barowitz, a New York public affairs consultant (he was once Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s deputy press secretary). Writing in the New York Daily News, Barowitz, a lifelong New Yorker, portrays the futility of rediscovering one’s past in a constantly changing city.
        “Walking up Third Avenue in the East Village,” he writes, “I have trouble keeping track of if I am headed to high school as a teen, on my way to meet friends at a bar in my 20s, or meeting my teenager at their orthodontist in my 50s. At a Knicks game, I blink and wonder if I am sitting next to my high-school basketball teammate watching Patrick Ewing or with my kids watching Jalen Brunson.” (To read the full article, click here.)

My old West Side hangouts

         The exciting thing about cities is that they’re always changing. The terrifying thing about cities is that they’re always changing. Barowitz (full disclosure: a friend of mine) takes a different tack: No matter how much New York’s neighborhoods and ethnicities and buildings may have transformed over the past half-century, he argues, “I have come to realize that they do not change as quickly as its inhabitants do.” In the end, Barowitz wonders: “Has the city really changed, or is it just me?”
         I can empathize. I was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but I haven’t lived there since 1960, when I left for college. After my older daughter moved there in the 1990s and then delivered twins in 2004, I readily volunteered to push their stroller around my old neighborhood, hoping I might spontaneously bump into one of my buddies outside our habitual hangout— the Esquire Coffee Shop on Broadway near 86^th Street— or down at the basketball courts or the ballfields in Riverside Park.
Yet in the subsequent 20 years, I don’t think I’ve encountered a single familiar face from my childhood. Have they all moved away? Or did I pass them without recognizing them, or without their recognizing me?

Stokowski’s ghost

         Center City Philadelphia, my home for the past 51 years, seems a different story— at least at first glance. Here I live within walking or bicycling distance of a major university, one of the world’s great orchestras, one of the world’s leading music schools, some of the world’s most famous art collections, some of the best restaurants on the East Coast, and dozens of professional theater and dance companies. In this vital but accessible incubator space, any citizen so inclined can rub elbows with world-class talent and genius on the level of Thomas Eakins or Leopold Stokowski or Ethel Barrymore or Benjamin Franklin. (My own Center City neighbors have included E. Digby Baltzell, the Penn sociologist who was America’s leading authority on the WASP upper class, and Anne d’Arnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)
         Back in the ‘80s, when I was simultaneously editing the alternative weekly Welcomat, writing a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and contributing articles to Town & Country, I made a practice of taking my lunch once a week on a park bench in Rittenhouse Square. Here, inevitably, a steady stream of familiar faces would stop by to renew acquaintances, offer news tips, and suggest story ideas. There’s no venue in New York quite like Rittenhouse Square when it comes to facilitating human connection— with the past as well as the present.

To be 25 again

          I think here of my friend Lorrie Caplan, a native Philadelphian and abstract watercolor artist who first made a big splash in Center City by organizing an all-gal roller-skating messenger service in the ‘70s. Lorrie subsequently moved to New York for ten years, then got married and followed her husband to California and then Colorado. But her husband died five years ago, and last year Lorrie moved back to Philadelphia after an absence of 42 years. She took an apartment on Rittenhouse Square and opened a gallery there as well, and seemingly in no time she was reconnecting with old friends and making new ones, not to mention drumming up potential patrons for her art works. On a visit to her alma mater, she somehow talked herself into a place on Northeast High School’s Alumni Wall of Fame. Thomas Wolfe and Jordan Barowitz may think you can’t go home again, but Lorrie’s story suggests that you can, at least in Philadelphia (especially if, like Lorrie or me, you’re an extrovert).
         “The Square is my wingman,” Lorrie tells me. “I love to hear the old people tell their stories. The streets in town are filled with memories. I feel like I’m still 25 years old.”
         And yet…. Like Lorrie, I too still frequent Rittenhouse Square. But for me, something has changed. Many of the Square’s sunbathers, frisbee players, chess players, and parents pushing strollers weren’t even born when I started hanging out there. On warm days, I still enjoy people-watching from a Rittenhouse Square park bench while combing through my pile of unread newspapers and magazines. But these days, I rarely encounter anyone I know, or who knows me.
“I will sit here until I see a familiar face!” has become my mantra. But sometimes I must sit there for hours. Even Philadelphia has become a city of constant change.

The last trace of his childhood

         Not long ago, I was fixing my bike outside our townhouse on a narrow street a few blocks from Rittenhouse Square. A couple in their 30s walked by. Suddenly the man asked, “Are you Rottenberg?” When I answered affirmatively, he explained that he had taken piano lessons from my wife, more than 20 years earlier. In the interim, he said, his whole life had been uprooted: His parents had moved him from Center City to New Jersey; then his mother was killed in an auto accident; then his father had remarried; and only now, newly married himself, was he returning to the neighborhood where he had grown up.
         “Barbara’s home right now,” I told him. “Why don’t you come inside and say hello? I think she’d be happy to see you.”
         So I took the two of them into our house— the sort of spontaneous act that would be inconceivable in a high-rise. Once inside, Barbara led them up a half-flight to her studio, with its two pianos, colorful posters, stuffed animals, and musical toys, all faithfully maintained for 40 years to provide a welcoming environment for young children. When our visitor entered the studio, he burst into tears. “This is all that’s left of my childhood!” he exclaimed.
         “Every act committed since the dawn of time has somehow been preserved somewhere,” I wrote in 1968, when I was 26 and searching for traces of the past in rural Jay County, Indiana. William Faulkner had written something similar years earlier, in Requiem For a Nun: “The past is never dead. It's not even past." I still feel that way. But in what forms does our past survive? That is the question.

To browse the complete archive of Dan’s past columns:

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com