If you’ve ever lived in or loved New York, do yourself a favor and read this gut-wrenching piece from the editors at New York Magazine’s Curbed. It chronicles all the businesses that have shuttered due to the pandemic that we are still very much living through. Though living in New York means constantly feeling the city change and outpace your image of what it is or should be, this past year crushes that perennial malaise into something larger, something sadder. But the list did spark a lot of memories I’d forgotten about, of a different, more vibrant New York of the past, which for right now is the New York I’m choosing to live in until happier days come again.
If you live in New York long enough — and it doesn’t have to be very long — it gradually becomes unrecognizable. And maybe, you begin to realize, it’s for someone else entirely, someone new or from somewhere else, someone perhaps with more money, more energy: someone circumstantially or possibly constitutionally ignorant of what you took to be authentic about this place when it felt like it was yours. (Nothing makes you feel old like listening to someone talk about what you know to be an upstart as iconic.) It’s too big a city to live in all of it, so you find your corners, your go-tos. Sometimes they are long-running, but mostly they come and they go. It’s part of the Darwinian, self-alienating thrill of the place: More often than not, you outlive your landmarks.