What New York City Is, and What It Isn’t

It’s a city for the young. And also everyone.

I moved to New York City when I was 24, which is older than I felt at the time. I’d never been to New York City before I lived there; moving there is not something most people who grow up in small rural Midwestern towns consider a realistic possibility, or even anything particularly aspirational. It’s hard enough to get out in the first place; if you were ambitious, maybe St. Louis, Indianapolis perhaps, or even, if you were taking a huge swing, Chicago. New York City might as well have been China, or Mars.

It almost didn’t happen. I was working for The Sporting News in St. Louis at the time and had applied for a job with The New York Times Digital, which back then was an entirely different company than The New York Times. This was during the initial dot-com boom, which meant that, at that moment, people who worked for the newspaper were irritated that the people who worked for NYT Digital all had stock options that would someday, obviously, make them enormously rich and leave those print chumps in the dust. It was an extremely desirable position — it would be my job to take the stories from the paper and put them online, essentially what I was already doing at TSN — and when I interviewed with them during the summer of 1999, I was pretty sure I was gonna get it. I then didn’t hear from them for three months. During those three months, I finally got comfortable in St. Louis, a city I’d only lived in for a year; I starting writing more, a relationship I was in got more serious, I began looking into nicer, longer-term apartments, downtown, maybe even Soulard. The Sporting News was thriving at the time, I could surely stay there for years, I was only two hours from my parents and Mattoon and could see both whenever I wanted, and there were of course all the Cardinals games I could get to. I could live in St. Louis, I remember thinking. I could just stay here.

Then the NYT called and offered me the job. I asked my dad what I should do. He’d never been to New York City either. “That’s a pretty good paper, isn’t it?” he said. Even then, you couldn’t say no to the NYT.

My father, when I talked to him then, was the age that I am right now.

A month later, just a week after Y2K, I packed three bags and got on a plane, with my cat carrier, to the city I’d never visited before and the city where I would live for the next 13 1/2 years.

My first five years in New York City were an undeniable professional failure. I, foolishly, left the NYT Online job three months in to work for a hot web startup called Novix Media, a purported “MTV For The Web Generation,” which was founded by the guy who co-founded George magazine with JFK Jr. but who had no idea how to run a website, or really any news organization. The Novix Media promotional video is the perfect dot-com boom artifact.

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Once that company inevitably went under (though we did get to do some fun stuff in the meantime), I spent five years in the wilderness, floating from temp job to temp job (I was answering phones at a doctor’s office on September 11) and occasionally latching on as a (terrible) business reporter for trade publications, whatever I had to do to pay my rent. But those five years were when I figured out everything. I learned who I was, what I cared about, what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be, what sort of people I wanted to surround myself with, what all of this was supposed to be about. I wrote constantly, for no money and no readers, but what mattered more was that everyone in my life was trying to be something: We were all young and hungry and ambitious and wanted to do everything all at once. We went out every night and constantly met new people and made bad decisions and shedded old selves and found new ones and just barrelled forward like the stupid, glorious children we were. We were not actually children, of course; the period I am describing lasted until I was nearly 30, until it was getting a little bit too late to start over and do something else. But that was just as important as any of it too. It was the time when we all decided this is who we were and who we were going to stay — the time we zoomed past the point of no return and just committed to what we were trying to do, whatever it was we were trying to do, because we were in New York City and this is the place where people could do what it is they were trying to do, a place where you could tap into the energy that seemed to vibrate through the sidewalk, the place that, when you got on the right frequency, it felt like you were connected to it like it was the blood that flowed through your veins, where you could do anything and be anything, my god, where else on the planet could you possibly want to be?

Then, just before I turned 30, I would finally catch my break. I’ve been a grownup since. It was probably time.

I would live in New York City for another decade after that. I would make new friends, I would take new jobs, I would meet people I’d know for the rest of my life, I would watch relationships burn out and fade away. Then the real growing up happened. I met my wife there; my son William would be born there. Big plans started getting made, and, slowly, they didn’t involve New York anymore. It was not a determined, gotta-get-out-of-here decision to leave. It was a very New York City set of events: The landlord sold our building and we had to move out of the apartment we loved; the new place was too far away from everything; we couldn’t afford anywhere where our kid could play outside; we did not want to move to New Jersey or Long Island or Westchester; we were not eager to be positioning ourselves in the NYC school market while our kid was still in diapers. The madness of discovery faded; a foundation, something to build around and upon, became more important.

So we moved. I’ve been in Athens, Georgia since June 2013. At the end of next year, I will have lived in Athens as long as I lived in New York.

I miss it. Obviously. It’s not a place for me anymore. I feel very old in New York City now; being here reminds me of my past more than it connects to me of my present. But it always feels good here. New York City is, for me, a place of empathy. I truly believe it is fostered here. It’s a place where everyone is always out there on ground level with each other, walking past and alongside each other, having to truly look at each other. It’s not something I get in Athens, or have ever gotten anywhere else — that sense that a million different types of people with a million different types of backgrounds all have to rub shoulders and figure out how to peacefully co-exist. And they do: I never felt in danger in New York City, and that was because of its people, and that they are everywhere, and while you are expected to take care of your own business and to keep moving, if you someone needs help, people are there for you: I have seen it, and I still see it, walking down the street today. New York is a collective: It is a place where everyone is tied to everyone else. It is not a place for patience; as Jonathan Lethem said in Motherless Brooklyn, “tell your story walkin’.” But their story is your story. It’s the same story. I do miss that. I miss that hum, the frequency everyone’s on, even people you don’t know, people you never will. You’re always a part of something larger. You all have to do it together. It’ll never leave me.

There was a time when I came back here all the time, to meet with my editors, to tape my television show, to do book events, to visit old friends. But that has started to fade too.

until I arrived Thursday night to prep for the marathon tomorrow, I hadn’t been back since. I still have friends here, but a lot fewer of them: Most of the old crew of the aughts are long gone. It no longer feels like my home, or anything close to it. I might as well be a tourist; I actually let the bellhop in my hotel call a cab for me yesterday, like a damn yokel.

This is, of course, one of the great things about the city, maybe the greatest thing: It churns along regardless, no matter who’s here, no matter who leaves, whatever stage anyone may be in their life, independent of whatever big plans we may or may not have for ourselves. New York City is constantly changing but also forever New York City: I look out the window and I see the same people plowing forward and trying to find what they are looking for that I saw 25 years ago. Some are just passing through, but for most people, this is their home; their entire ecosystem, a steady pulse with a rhythm that gets into your skin and never leaves. I could still feel it when I walked the streets this morning and will still feel it when I run them tomorrow. It really will always be a part of me. It is a beautiful place — warmer, more easily shared than people realize — with a collective spirit that’s unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been. It is a place with every single different type of human being and — perhaps precisely because of this — it’s the one place I’ve ever lived where people truly are all connected. There is nowhere like it.

I was 24 when I moved here. I was 37 when I left. For 13 years, it was my home. I learned who I was here. I visit it wistfully, a different person than I was when I lived here but as enraptured with it as ever. It is not the place I left, but it is also exactly the same. I will be here the rest of this week, including Tuesday, Election Night, which should be a very historic evening in the city. This place is forever a part of me. I am better for it, and I am grateful. There aren’t many who were ever here who aren’t.

Originally published at https://williamfleitch.substack.com.