A Sipress cartoon in the current issue of The New Yorker(April 28) features a happy tourist wearing an “I ª NY” t-shirt. She turns to the stranger sitting next to her in the subway and asks, “Excuse me sir—which is better, Queens or the Bronx?”
I would be the wrong person to ask, as I rarely travel into the grid, let alone to other boroughs. Occasionally, I go uptown for the usual reasons: to walk in the park, take in a play, spend the day at a museum, or go to the doctor—always a destination trip. I have one good friend still who lives up there—mainly, however, it’s all about revisiting scenes from my childhood and the bag of mixed emotions that invariably attends these excursions.
Other boroughs? Not even Brooklyn, except for BAM and the Botanical Gardens, entices me. I lived in Brooklyn on several occasions, having married into it a long time ago. Now I think of it as one big youth hostel—a bourgeois ghetto. When I was a kid, we got to mix it up. New York City was cheap. The West Village was cheap! No one wanted to live in town. It was dirty and dangerous. Poverty and plenty rubbed elbows. These days, you have to pretty much cross a riverto see the poor, which I did in both directions over the weekend.
Last Friday, I took the PATHtrain and then a community bus to visit a friend who lives in Union City. In 1979, at the height of the punk era, Marcus Reichert directed a film starring Debbie Harry called Union City. The town hasn’t changed. Homemade commercial signs, abandoned clinics, dollar stores: grit permeates every corner of the main boulevard under a wide-open sky. Very few high rises disrupt the view of the Ramapo Mountains beyond the smoke stacks that spout freely in eastern New Jersey. I felt like Jodie Foster in Elysium, touring the planet. Slumming, I was slumming. However, my friend is thriving there. His eat-in kitchen has a big window. How much would his apartment cost in the West Village? It is the recurring question, a constant refrain: ‘How much would this cost in my hood?’
The next day, I took the E to visit another friend in Jackson Heights. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the area is charming and genuinely exotic. First, my friend took me on a tour of “Little India,” where the main commercial street is lined with jewelry stores full of gold, dangling earrings and lavish pendants, and the clothing-storewindows are stocked withbright saris and lush wedding costumes. Color abounds. The little residential streets are clean, and the white pear trees bloom, same as they dohere. Next, my friend took me to the apartment where he is renting a room. The apartment,in an elevator building similar to the one I live in, is a large two-bedroom, with windows on as much as three sides. I am rent-stabilized, but my neighbors on the same line are paying upwards of $6,000.00 a month to live in a smaller version of the apartment I saw in Jackson Heights. A traveler from a distant culture or another time might be hard put to see why one person pays more than three times as much to live in a certain place that looks, to the untrained eye, pretty similar in a lot of ways.
I got to thinking, what makes this neighborhood so desirable? The immediate answer is the winding cobblestone streets and the elegant Georgian townhouses, the proximity to the Hudson and many subway lines, the shops and restaurants—and the neighborhood’s history.Nevertheless, it’s more than that—goes deeper than all of that. A generation ago, the West Village was working-class, otherwise inhabited by painters and writers. This seems to be the story of our great city. Which is better, Queens or the Bronx? Only the artists, our urban pioneers, know the answer.
