Ghosts of New York

This past Thursday, I returned to my hometown, New York City, for the first time in just over a year and it's both surreal and depressing. The change from even just a year ago, in terms of just how low the city has deteriorated is shocking. Vacant stores abound, the stench of marijuana is omnipresent as well as at least two or three vagrants doped out, passed out or otherwise shambling around like zombies on almost every corner. I have been on the subways as well as the Long Island Railroad at least twice a day since I arrived and mercifully, I've not encountered any Michael Jackson impersonators, sane or otherwise, or packs of racist she-devils of the pigmented variety sporting to bash a white guy in the face in the name of justice, or something.

In the immortal words of Dr. Bones McCoy, "It's dead, Jim." Strange though in that while still living here in the aftermath of the lockdowns and the mostly peaceful rioting of 2020, I was inured to all of it or perhaps accepted it as par for the course. And then, I remembered the golden age of the Giuliani into early Bloomberg era and thought, "What the hell am I thinking?!" Even without the nearly instantaneous decline and fall as soon as DeBolshevik assumed control, New York had been undergoing drastic change since before 9/11 and certainly in its aftermath. Overdevelopment and the destruction of the "neighborhood-ness" of even Manhattan, where you still had one-off mom-and-pop type businesses changed the essence of the city, and not for the better. Then, there's the cost of living. It was never cheap but even in my younger days, you could still get by on minimal salary. Not anymore. I went and had two appetizers and a glass of wine at one of the few regular restaurants the wife and I frequented and it was $75.00.

I do understand that things change. It's inevitable. On the other side of the spectrum, preservation can even go too far and stifle necessary growth. But, that's not really the case with this town. Horrendous politics, insane schemes to inhibit vehicular traffic, corruption and of course leftist liberal social policies that have once more brought the city to the brink of ruin have made leaving this place a no-brainer.

Still, as I walked a mile or so downtown from my hotel – itself a bizarre experience – to my former apartment, I had the urge to reach in my pocket for my keys to go upstairs, make a coffee, kick off my shoes and get on the computer. Until I realized . . .

Walking the streets, I felt like Bruce Willis in 6th Sense trying unsuccessfully to turn the door knob. A ghost lost in a world that once was. And that's the problem: I want to come back to New York but it's impossible because the New York I want to come back to is no more. Aside from my last surviving nonagenarian relatives and a handful of schoolmates, there is nothing for me here, but memories.

It's sad. I wanted to live out the rest of my life here, but it was not to be. Despite everything, I hope that this incredible place somehow can rise again. Then again, the rest of the country is heading in the same direction.

Oh well. One more day and then I depart for my new home. But, you can take the kid out of Brooklyn, but you'll never take Brooklyn out of the kid.

posted by J.J. Sefton at 12:00 PM

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