Valerie has been telling me stories about her hometown since the very moment I first met her, many years ago. I remember hazily the first months of our acquaintence, surrounded by the chaos that was Ann Arbor's East Quadrangle, everyone desperately getting to know one another and differentiating themselves from the rest: atheletes, geeks, socialites, pyromaniacs, druggies and recluses. And then there was Valerie, the New Yorker. The poster on the wall said it all: "The New Yorker's view of the world." Three quarters of the drawing contained the Manhattan Skyline, with a small road passing by a miniscule Chicago through empty green plains on the way to a distant, nearly inconsequential Los Angeles.She told me about the building she grew up in, with neighbors like John Lennon and Lauren Bacall. She watched the filming of Rosemary's Baby from her mother's window. She related walking daily by the buildings that were used for the haunted skyscaper in Ghostbusters. Places I'd seen in movies were simply home to her. There were stories about going to summer camp, frightening parables set in the subways, and mutterings about going to school with people who would later become well-known entertainers.
I had never been to New York. My only knowledge of the city had been through songs, films, the news media, and a very foggy view several years earlier from New Jersey. I'd also been carrying around memories of many children's stories based in New York, which I would recall again during this trip. The messages were mixed. New York was presented as a tough city, filled with harsh, rudely-speaking people. It was cold and hard, yet also beautiful if you knew where to look. Dangerous, yet charged with potential.
When Valerie offered to take our mutual friend Wendy and I on a trip to New York and promised to show us the town as only a native could, I was excited by the idea. I was surprised at this excitement, since much of what I'd heard about New York had been negative. But an unmistakable thrill somehow awoke inside me at the suggestion that I might walk those streets, wander the parks, see the landmarks, and meet the people. This wasn't the excitement of someone unaccustomed to travel: I've been much farther away, in places far more foreign. But unlike those far away places about which I knew so little before visiting, New York was a place I'd heard and read about, seen on television, in movies, and on stages since my earliest memories. New York was somehow already a part of me, even though I'd never actually been there.
This exhibit can not possibly communicate to you the magic I felt during that Memorial Day vacation to New York City. There are too many sounds, smells, tastes, and stories that had to be left out. Too many photos missed, too many performances gone uncaptured, and too many people who meant far more to me than my incomplete descriptions of them could convey to you. The most I can hope for is that you'll catch a glimpse of its beauty in these photographs, and a sense of its energy in these words.
| It depends on who is looking at the tenement walls: Whether he's coming home or passing through; You can walk the streets and find so much to criticize, But that would be the easy thing to do. 'Cause there's beauty in the concrete, if you see it with your heart; The sidewalks only hurt you if you hate them from the start. The Fifth Dimension |
