While it may not be deserving of its title as "the Greatest City in the World", New York is certainly endowed with something special. Here in this city, I was born just south of Central Park on a freezing January day in 2004. My parents had been living there since the late nineties and, I suppose, had been cemented as real New Yorkers after witnessing 9/11. My earliest memories are from our apartment on the upper west side, though they are few and far between; most of what I can recall of my childhood is from after we moved downtown when I started kindergarten.
At first, I remember looking upon the towering brick buildings of our new neighborhood with some contempt. Stuyvesant Town, a residential complex situated just above the East Village, seemed to me like an ugly maze. Even at such a young age I had a firm dislike of what I now describe as soulless, modern architecture. But Stuytown’s “Towers in a park” layout, something that had resulted in the failure of many other similar complexes, proved to be a success. It worked because it had enough money going into it to maintain the landscaping, the public amenities and the buildings themselves. And the space between buildings wasn’t just filled with empty, open land; rather, there were playgrounds, sports fields and a fountain all contained within it. The Oval was the centerpiece, a path that surrounded a vast lawn spotted with tall trees along the edges.
Stuytown was a place of community by design. It was safe, too, so when my parents started letting me out of our tiny, dark apartment where I felt very much like an indignant prisoner to walk to school on my own, they felt comfortable with my after-school wanderings around our neighborhood with my friends. In the summer, we’d hunt for fireflies in the bushes surrounding the lawn, and sit and watch the movies they’d sometimes play there for everyone. Everything within Stuytown seemed perfectly manicured, but still, it gave me a childhood that felt free.
Despite my extensive knowledge of my neighborhood, I hadn’t ventured outside it on my own that much by the time we moved upstate to the Hudson Valley. I was only twelve, of course. But after a few years, I began to long for what I hadn’t explored. Lucky for me, when I was 15 my uncle moved to Brooklyn. Only 20 at the time, he instantly became a cool older brother to me. I began taking the train down to stay with him on some weekends, and I’d spend my precious time there doing any of three things; hanging out at his place with his six other roommates and whatever company they brought over, wandering the East Village and Chinatown, or taking the train out to Brooklyn and Queens where my friends and I would explore abandoned industrial buildings or train tracks.
The city to me was a place of wonderful chaos, so different from the miserable days I’d spend at school or at home over the pandemic, but my understanding of it changed when I discovered the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space. Here, I volunteered and learned about the history of the East Village and the community movements that ensured its survival during the 70s and 80s when the neighborhood had fallen into ruin due to the Fiscal Crisis. I learned about the community gardens, started by the Green Guerillas who threw seeds into vacant lots, and the squatters who took over abandoned buildings and turned them into unique, livable homes, much to the dismay of the City authorities. After high school, I interned at the Municipal Art Society, an organization originally established 130 years ago to preserve the city’s public art. My job was to sort through their archives containing thousands of news articles on everything related to the city, from skyscrapers to trash. I now looked upon my childhood home with both my long-standing curiosity and a new understanding of its past and present. Even though I no longer live there, I know NYC more than I ever have, and my love for it has only grown stronger.
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