It’s Easy To Love New York When You’re Rich

The indelible childhood attachment to place

I’ve never before questioned the roots of my monogamous love for New York City. I don’t go to the theatre, I’m not a “foodie,” the architecture doesn’t thrill me, I’ll go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but only because it’s across the street from where we live now. I’m not an explorer of the different New York neighborhoods. In fact, I seldom go outside the Upper East and Upper West Sides, the single square mile that I’ve always called home. It's as if I’ve willingly put on one of these collars that delivers a shock to a dog when it wanders beyond an invisible fence.

From the age of eight to eighteen, I lived in one of the so-called “good” co-op buildings on Park Avenue–––pre-war, the architectural work of Rosario Candela, full floors except for the maisonette where the William F. Buckley’s lived. My bedroom was the smallest in the children’s wing, so as compensation my parents gave me a playroom off the breakfast room, a sort of far-off, colonial possession reached most readily through the Suez Canal of a shortcut, an interior, back hallway created for the use of the servants my parents hired to cook and clean for us, because that’s what everyone else in their circle did.

My mother purchased the apartment in 1969, all cash as it was the sort of building that only granted admission to the kind of buyer who had liquid assets to buy an apartment many times over. When you bought an apartment in a co-op building like that, you bought “shares” and joined a club of white rich people. The Board of the co-op, composed of residents, had absolute power to decide who could live in the building. They could discriminate not only on the lack of a surplus of ready money, but on the basis of race or religion, a hint of bad taste, or a sign that the money was too new.

So I grew up in an all-white, all wealthy building where even the doormen and elevator operators and handymen were white, none of them with a trace of any foreign background. Jewish families like ours were allowed in, but I suspect we would have been rejected had either of my parents been too obviously Jewish––the name change to Roberts probably helped. As far as I knew, my parents were indistinguishable from WASPs in dress or speech or manners. They had both been raised in third generation wealth.

Before we moved into the new apartment, my mother would sometimes take me with her when she went to oversee the progress of furnishing and decorating it. We lived five blocks north in another Park Avenue building.  I was eight years old and treasured those brief walks with my mother, my hand in hers, a welcome and precious departure from my governess.  

I was reading a sequel to the Wizard of Oz at the time, and, together with my childlike size, the book intertwined to reinforce my awe of the new apartment’s vast space. It looked like nothing other than one of the book’s grand and magical places, a castle, or the palace of Oz itself.

The entrance hallway with its proud, tall columns overwhelmed me. I felt dizzy when I tried to look at where the columns met the ceiling. I’d retreat to the children’s bedroom hall to the furthest room, the one designated for me, where I’d read about the underground army of the Nome King until my mother called me.

Back then, reading was my newly discovered superpower––the magic to be transported completely by a book so that place and time lost meaning. I was in the world of Oz, but part of me must have been in the apartment too. Because I can only remember reading that particular book in that apartment. I remember as well inspecting initials that someone had scratched into the glass of one of my bedroom windows, an indecipherable yet important message that seemed consistent with a fantasy world.   

Over the next decade, habit took away the newness of the apartment. It became merely the place I lived with its own quirks. One Halloween when I took my little brothers trick-or-treating, our rings of doorbells were mostly unanswered and we received no candy, only one crisp five dollar bill.

What did it do to me to grow up in an apartment and a building like that and never question whether it was unusual?

Philadelphia

When I went to college at UPenn in West Philadelphia, I lived in a dorm room like everyone else. I’m ashamed to admit it, but living in a low-ceilinged, cookie-cutter apartment and sharing a bathroom with three other 18 year-old boys with no one but us to clean or make beds was a shock to my sensibilities. I felt I had descended to a form of extreme shabbiness, if not barbarism, and since it seemed hopeless to resist, I embraced it fully.

I never made my bed, slept on a bare mattress, rarely did laundry, ate twinkies and pizza, gained twenty pounds, and probably smelled quite bad. I don’t recall ever cleaning my room. No dusting, no vacuuming, no putting away my clothes. So, during spring break of 1981, when our dorm apartment was burgled, the cop who came to file a necessary but hopeless report glanced into my room and said, “Boy, they really did a number in here.”

But of course, mine was the only room left intact. Anything valuable had been buried beneath mounds of mess.

It was in West Philadelphia that I felt most like a New Yorker. In my freshman year at Penn, October 1980, the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series, the team’s very first victory in the long, benighted history of that franchise.

The chant that night on campus was “Yankees Suck.” But the Phillies hadn’t defeated the New York Yankees. They’d defeated the Kansas City Royals.

This confirmed my bias that NYC was the ungraspable measure of comparison for those doomed to live elsewhere. I would have loved to confront the chanting mob of Philles fans, addressing them with the attitude of entitled arrogance I deployed back then for my strictly internal adolescent rants.

May I inform you that when a New York team wins a championship, New Yorkers do not care about the defeated team or the defeated city or their defeated fans. New Yorkers don’t care about you or Philadelphia. You do not matter to us. But, apparently, for you, New York is always top of mind.

I would have been torn to bits. Philly sports fans are fierce and vicious.

Back Home

I graduated from Penn one year early in 1983, testament to my desire to get back to New York as soon as I could. I lived at home for that first year and, absurd to think about it now, often let my paychecks accumulate uncashed.

On weekends I used to take home from the office a dot matrix printer and the first generation portable Compaq computer––weighing in at twenty-eight pounds with a miniscule screen. I spent my weekends working on Lotus 123 financial spreadsheets. I was the star of my analyst class and discovered my drive to succeed and make money.

Then in the fall of 1984 I met my future wife Debbie. Suddenly where I lived was irrelevant as long as I lived with her. And falling in love gave me a new superpower. I was able to know what would make Debbie love me back, and it certainly was not giving voice to my supercilious entitlement. All of that needed to be cast aside, deeply submerged.

But as James Joyce put it so well in “Ulysses”

“There are sins or…evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait.”

These memories grow “dim,” and we can convince ourselves they were never there. But then

“…they will rise up to confront him in the most various circumstances…shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.” ¹

Reading Joyce’s words, I understand why I immediately became enchanted with the apartment Debbie and I live in today. It summoned up the most magical part of my childhood, the long ago wonder of a little boy at the prospect of living in a castle.

It now seems clear to me that the origin of my love of New York is impossible to separate from  growing up in a massive and beautiful apartment in a safe and clean neighborhood and having my every need catered to. And while my marriage and our children became the center of my life in New York, the luxury of my New York childhood and the stories of my mother growing up in the Pierre Hotel were always with me, an unfulfilled desire, “silent, remote, reproachful.”

Silent and remote seem accurate, but is reproachful the right word? Yes, and doubly so in different ways. An ambition attached to a material possession like a grand apartment is shallow and reproachful as a matter of character. But my ambition was real so there was also self-reproach, no less shallow, at the long time it took to fulfill it.    

As a boy, I’d spend summers on the Jersey shore in an area dominated back then by wealthy Jewish families who tended to live in the same sort of good Park Avenue buildings we lived in and who belonged to the Hollywood Golf Club and one of two beach clubs.

My parents had an ordinary ranch house, but my maternal grandfather had a large stone house set amidst beautiful lawns and towering trees. Like our city apartment, his house sparked in me a similar impression and craving. Driving home with my mother after one childhood visit to my grandfather’s house, I said that when I grew up I wanted to live in a “mansion.”

My mother stopped the car and spun around from the driver’s seat to chastise me. Never say such things, she told me, it makes you seem spoiled rotten.

But she didn’t tell me not to want it.

Question for the comments: Did your childhood home have a lasting influence on you?

All subscription revenues go to the Robin Hood Foundation, an organization dedicated to fighting poverty.

A 1922 cartoon by John T. McCutcheon that likely influenced the famous 1976 New Yorker cartoon by Saul Sternberg, View of the World From 9th Avenue

1. “There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim, let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquility of the evening or at the feast, at midnight, when he is now filled with wine. Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut him off from the living but shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.”