Just finished listening to Adam Gopnik read his tender and nostalgic memoir of his young adult years in New York with his wife, Martha. I was very taken with his story, as we are roughly the same age and arrived in the city at nearly the same time, Gopnik in fall, 1980 and me in early 1979. Gopnik is a native of Philadelphia, as am I, though his family relocated to Montreal sometime during his formative years. He has done a wonderful job of capturing 1980s New York life as it was for the young, ambitious, artistic and broke.
The couple first lived in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, about 50 blocks due north of where I lived in Murray Hill/Kip's Bay. I spent many hours in their neighborhood, which he lovingly describes as it was in those days, full of German and Middle European restaurants... the Ideal, the Kleine Konditorei, to mention just two of the best-known, small shops including second-hand and thrift stores, and many older people who were beginning to die off. Rents there and in my own far-East neighborhood were still low.
Gopnik and his wife had no money and first lived in a tiny room, but they made their ways and their marks. Gopnik ultimately became a writer for the New Yorker, an aspiration of many, achieved by very, very few and Martha worked as a film editor. Along the way, they moved to a not-very-glamorous Soho loft (before that neighborhood became the province of the very rich), and met a number of well-known artists, writers and others (I did not share this accomplishment with them, I'm sorry to say).
I love Gopnik's stories about the tenor of the city, the people he met, and the work he did before and during his time at the New Yorker. There is a deep, but sweet-flavored well of nostalgia here for a city that has ceased to exist as he and I knew it, and it was wonderful to drink it up and make a visit to those lost places.
I recommend this book for all New Yorkers past and present (and anyone who loves the city), especially those of a certain age, who knew the city as it was when we were young.
The couple first lived in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, about 50 blocks due north of where I lived in Murray Hill/Kip's Bay. I spent many hours in their neighborhood, which he lovingly describes as it was in those days, full of German and Middle European restaurants... the Ideal, the Kleine Konditorei, to mention just two of the best-known, small shops including second-hand and thrift stores, and many older people who were beginning to die off. Rents there and in my own far-East neighborhood were still low.
Gopnik and his wife had no money and first lived in a tiny room, but they made their ways and their marks. Gopnik ultimately became a writer for the New Yorker, an aspiration of many, achieved by very, very few and Martha worked as a film editor. Along the way, they moved to a not-very-glamorous Soho loft (before that neighborhood became the province of the very rich), and met a number of well-known artists, writers and others (I did not share this accomplishment with them, I'm sorry to say).
I love Gopnik's stories about the tenor of the city, the people he met, and the work he did before and during his time at the New Yorker. There is a deep, but sweet-flavored well of nostalgia here for a city that has ceased to exist as he and I knew it, and it was wonderful to drink it up and make a visit to those lost places.
I recommend this book for all New Yorkers past and present (and anyone who loves the city), especially those of a certain age, who knew the city as it was when we were young.
