Book review: Stories from New York and its people that are heartwarming and harrowing
Times Square in New York City is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District
I LIVED in New York for years when young and thought I knew the place inside out. I thrived on its incredible energy and astonishing cavalcades of every type of people they make. I probed its subcultures and bars and jazz clubs, and I constantly uncovered secret gems, including my wife Jamie who I met in Central Park.
One day while walking down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn – my home borough with 53 languages spoken -- I met Muhammed Ali with an entourage of Arab kids. The most famous person on earth looked at me with my hands in Jamie’s and said, “You in love.” And I was, and even felt the same about New York. But years later after reading Craig Taylor’s New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time I am wondering whether I missed many things. Taylor corrals under one roof so many of the remarkable characters who populate “the city that never sleeps” that it amazes me anew. Somehow the author blends scores of marvellous human stories, told in each individual’s own words, into a kind of magnificent chorus of human striving, which sometimes swells to an absolute crescendo in New York. If you wish, it’s easy flip around to what most appeals.
But there is a kind of hidden purity running throughout this book, partly owing to its methods. For six years Taylor wandered the remotest reaches of this vast city, talking to hundreds of people for hours before winnowing his subjects down to 80 or 90, and to those often returning repeatedly. Always he used a tape recorder to capture his subject’s idiosyncratic voices and cadences, a technique many young journalists sadly never learn today.
Car thieves and con-men, a five-grand-a-bottle sommelier, tutors for the ultra-rich, a pizza fanatic gone round the bend, cameramen questing to capture the most transcendent New York moments in all the constant motion -- they're all here. You’ll even meet a shrewd Kerryman with a mad map of New York’s best sidewalk cracks and curb sides for tripping over and filing lawsuits. A garden of earthly delights.
As the loosely organized sections proceed – named things like “Nonstop Hustle” or “Crime and Punishment” -- the stories deepen. On the streets of Lower Manhattan, a cop remembers the crunch of skull fragments around the World Trade Center as he begins to tell of the horror of the holocaust of 9/11. The profiles from hospitals overwhelmed by the first wave of COVID-19 – which hit that city like a tsunami – are equally harrowing.
Things grow ever more existential. Taylor finds a shaman with rubber bones in Michael Rodriguez, the man who keeps jumping off roofs – three times in all – and surviving. He is aiming to get close to God. The seeker is still dazed as he walks into a bodega. “I’m seeing angels walking into the store and buying groceries. And I’m like, ‘What the hell? What kind of currency do they use?’ That’s what was going on in my head. And I am trying to figure out am I alive? In my mind, I was dead. I was a dead dude. I was thinking, Heaven looks like the South Bronx.”
Also great is the story of Michael dos Santos (“of the saints”) -- his mother a torch singer from India, his Puerto Rican father gone missing – who toils long hours over making bagels in a Jewish deli. But on Sundays Michael, an inspired Sinatra imitator, slicks back his hair and hits the nursing home and hospice circuit in Queens to serenade audiences of 80- to 100-year-olds, a few of whom he half keeps alive. “They love to sing along to ‘My Way’ … Some are in wheelchairs. Some of them are just lost, but when ‘My Way’ comes, they all remember… They’re feisty, even at this age. In New York, they keep on going.’
Taylor’s book is like an epic travelogue. But instead of following the Silk Road, he just jumps on board the A Train to Harlem, or a rickety bus to the Far Rockaways. He also or rides around like a bounty hunter in the banged-up van of Dan Bauso, a personal injury lawyer out of “Kojak” who is impassioned to share his every last New York epiphany. But even as the characters keep “coming at you” – as life does in New York – in apparent randomness one always senses an underlying purpose at work.
There’s great story telling here. Certain segments dealing with heights are so vivid they nearly made my pulse race. Take Marvin Abrams, a window cleaner with a squeegee in hand dangling from a belt each dawn hundreds of feet upside the great avenues so that the thousands in their glass hives can see. Far scarier is the story of Jason Nunes, an electrician alone clinging to the communications needle far above the Empire State Building and almost losing his grip and his mind in 60-mile-an-hour winds. His perspective on the Big Apple is unique.
Wonderful fun comes from Taylor’s visits to the famous Queens Museum exhibit that lays out the panorama of New York – every last street – in one vast, meticulously sculpted scale model half the length of a rugby pitch. Here like Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant, the author gets to stride up the Hudson River and tiptoe through the tulips in Central Park, while touching at the tops of skyscrapers and clambering over the George Washington Bridge. That makes for some droll story telling.
Taylor, a Canadian, worked his way up to this great saga via a similarly far-reaching urban portrait called Londoners and a previous lovingly detailed depiction of the English countryside, Return to Akenfield. Yet despite his remarkable gift for getting his subjects to open their hearts and share their life stories, he is near monkish in his own self-abnegation. He appears to avoid personal publicity at all costs.
In New Yorkers, the only glimpses of the British Columbian are seen through several interludes dealing with his volunteering at a Lower Manhattan homeless shelter. There he befriends a brilliantly acerbic but disoriented Vietnam veteran who lives on the street -- Joe. Their intriguing but almost indecipherable relationship grows, and the troubled Vet begins spending Sunday nights in Taylor’s humble flat, leaving ever larger stacks of empty grocery sacks behind as forget me nots.
For many, New York is ultimately a lonely, and soul-wracking place. Taylor never really seemed to crack the codes that make it a bright and exciting springboard for the countless young people who keep pouring in. They call it the “Green Wave” when you are driving down Broadway at midnight and every traffic light goes your way and you feel like this night of all nights is yours. It would have been good if Taylor found such moments, too. But he sure finds other worlds aplenty in this great extravaganza of New Yorkers.
- New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time
- Craig Taylor
- John Murray Publishers, €19.99
