By Sophie Gruetzner
It was the summer of 1999. Not only was it the last summer of the century but also the hottest summer in New York City in years. “The Big Apple is finally coming out of the oven,” read the headline of a prominent city newspaper when temperatures dropped below 100 degrees. It was the summer I graduated from high school in my native Hamburg, Germany. I arrived at JFK just two days after my senior prom.
I passed immigration, got my giant old aluminum suitcase off the luggage belt and, when the sliding airport doors opened, the hot humid air hit me like a hammer. I took a deep breath in, filled my lungs with the sweet and slightly sickening smell of hot trash and concrete and a bedazzlingly happy thought struck me: “I’m home!”
But let me start a little earlier: When I was eight years old, I decided I wanted to become a writer. Four years later, my parents took my older sister Katrin and me to New York. This was when I made another decision, which felt more like a promise: that, at some point in my life, I would live and work in New York City.
At the age of 18, I took myself up on both these promises: I had landed an internship at a big German publishing house’s U.S. office and would be living and working as a writer in New York City—if only for three months. But three months turned into three years.
These years felt like a crash course in growing up and I think I owe it to the period in which New York became my home, despite being born and raised almost 4,000 miles away: It was my first home away from home; I had my first own apartment here. In fact, I lived in six different places, from an old railroad apartment in the East Village with a bathtub in the kitchen to a shabby $850/ month one-bedroom in Chelsea. I had my first job here, my first bank account, and it was also here that, for the first time, I felt utterly alone: I didn’t know anyone in the city and would fill my weekends reading tons of books, magazines, and newspapers either in Tompkins Square Park or in the secret garden of an old seminary in Chelsea. (The garden is not that secret anymore: The chic High Line Hotel opened there in 2013.) Luckily, my loneliness only lasted a couple of weeks: I made friends I’m still close with to this very day.
Another thing I loved doing back then was watching the locals taking their dogs to the big dog run in Tompkins Square Park. There and then I made yet another decision: Should I ever get my own dog, I’d name him or her Tompkin. A few years later, in 2004, Tompkin came into my life: a wonderfully odd, bright, and very special rescue dog from the streets of Spain. She’s been by my side wherever I lived, from Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin to (every now and then) Paris and now permanently New York. Tompkin will turn 13 in October. We plan on celebrating in Tompkins Square Park’s dog run. Stay tuned for Part Two of my story!
Sophie Gruetzner is a new Contributing Editor at WestView News and can be contacted at tompkin.superstar@gmail.com.
After graduating from Gymnasium Blankenese in Hamburg, Germany, Gruetzner wrote for different German newspapers and magazines in New York. She then moved to Munich to attend journalism school. Since 2013, she’s been InStyle Germany’s U.S. Editor at Large, in New York. She resides in the West Village with her rescue dog Tompkin.
