On Location

Robin asked me what it's like living in a town that you can see so often on TV and in the movies: "Sex and the City"; "Ugly Betty," "Seinfeld," "Friends," Woody Allen movies ad nauseum. She didn't ask, but might have, what it's like living in a place where there are also so many literary associations: from Holden Caulfield and Harriet the Spy's Upper East Side, to Henry James's Washington Square and Walt Whitman's Brooklyn Ferry, or to "The Emperor's Children," which I recently completed, set in contemporary New York City.

I guess the short answer is, it is strange. Real places, fictional people. There is that shock of recognition, as I recently had watching a Woody Allen film from 1971 ("Bananas") at Film Forum, when a brief scene suddenly put Mr. Allen and his girl at the Promenade, which faithful readers of this blog know is a place I visit almost daily. "Wow!" I thought. "The Promenade circa 1971!" And stopped paying any attention to what the actors were saying to try to figure out how things looked different or the same. Manhattan was barely glimpsed in the distance, only a brief hint of skyline. The same blocky buildings sticking out into the water from the Brooklyn coastline. The WTC twin towers would have been still under construction at that time, but the camera missed them. There was a good look at a large, square building near the water that now sports a giant banner advertising its conversion to luxury condos; needless to say, the banner was not there. Otherwise, it looked exactly like now, and I found that oddly comforting.

Depictions of New York often seem hilariously unrealistic, like the giant apartments the "Friends" characters lived in or the hermetically sealed, cushy Upper West Side existence of so many Woody Allen characters. But then, there are many New Yorks; it's a hard place to take in in its entirety. Who's to say there are not people out there who actually live in such a world?

The other funny thing is the sense I get sometimes of feeling as though I myself have suddenly stepped into a movie or a book. It's that odd feeling when you are confronted in reality with something you have read of or heard of or seen on TV a million times, the visual cliches of New York. I get this feeling a lot in Rockefeller Center, in Grand Central Station, outside the public library on 42nd Street with the famous lions, looking up at the Chrysler Building, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. Look, here I am! You want to find the camera and wave: Hi, Mom!