Pete Hamill's Downtown

Nobody truly knows New York, not even most New Yorkers. The city is too large, too dense and layered to be intimately known by anyone. I was born here, the first son of Irish immigrants, during the first term of Franklin D. Roosevelt. I grew up on the streets of Brooklyn, attended schools here, and worked for more than 40 joyous years as a reporter and columnist on the newspapers of the wider city.

Still, like Eugene Sue contemplating the mysteries of Paris, I remain humbled by my own ignorance. I still work at knowing more about the place where I live. I hope that when I lie down for the last time on some hospital bed, I can console myself with the notion that I knew my home place. I know I will fail.

In every great city, there is a visible place of streets and avenues and splendid buildings. That city is knowable. When friends come to visit from abroad, I take them to the Battery, where the Dutch founded their tiny trading post in the early 17th century. At the sea wall, we can gaze out at the great harbor, fed by the sea and the rivers that flank the long skinny island of Manhattan. Look: there it is: the harbor that made the city possible. Look: there's the immense statue of our most famous French immigrant, holding the torch of liberty aloft, facing Europe; and look, just beyond. That's Ellis Island, from which so many millions came to this city with battered luggage filled with rough clothes, a few tools, perhaps a wrapped square of sod from Ireland, or a kettle from one of the shtetls of Eastern Europe, or a packet of earth from Sicily or Calabria—along with immense quantities of hope.

Such people are now part of the other New York, the human city that is invisible. All of its citizens are now dead. You can sense the vanished New Yorkers on a visit to the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street, just off Delancey; or in the photographs of Jacob Riis and others, or in the novels, poetry, histories and biographies made by the descendants of those immigrants. They are proof that the messages of the Statue of Liberty and the museum on Ellis Island were not based on a sentimental lie. Those millions of European poor people who came through that harbor gave New York their muscle, their intelligence, their rough love of freedom—and their American children. Yes: some failed, and went home. Yes: there were some criminals among them. But the overwhelming majority resembled today's immigrants from other parts of the world: they came to work. And from the subways and sewer lines to the towers of the skyscrapers, they built the still-visible city of New York.

Alone, or with friends, I leave the Battery and head up Broadway, the longest street in Manhattan, and always feel the presence of those men and woman. This older downtown city was the product of their intelligence and muscle. But it was also a place that gave safe harbor to others. Whitman walked here, and Poe, and Melville. Right here, on Broadway, in the city of horses. There to the left is Trinity Church and down there on the right is Wall Street. On these streets you could once see Aaron Burr making deals, and John Jacob Astor founding the New York religion of real estate, and Alexander Hamilton arguing for an American aristocracy. Poor Hamilton is buried in the Trinity churchyard, killed in a duel with Burr. And we have two million new immigrants among us now who never heard of either man.

Keep walking north on Broadway, and you'll come to City Hall Park, a lovely green place. On good days, I like to sit on a bench and look up at the intricacies of the Woolworth Building, imagining the lives of Italian stone carvers, or look upon what remains of Park Row. In the invisible city of my New York, Park Row is still lined with the rowdy offices of the great newspapers, and on any given day you might glimpse Joseph Pulitzer or Richard Harding Davis or, pale and trembling, a young man named Stephen Crane. Pause, be still, reflect: you can see them all. They are there. Believe me. They are encoded in our DNA, along with all those immigrants, our great poets and artists and musicians, our sinister felons, our glorious rogues, our quiet heroes. There have been very few saints here, and we certainly don't know their names. We had people better than saints: Robinson and Reese, Snider and Campanella, Hodges and Mays and DiMaggio, to mention only a few. They helped us imagine that anything was possible in this city. All you had to do was work. At something you loved.

The names and locations of our treasured places are in all the guidebooks. You can find the names of the great restaurants in other books. But if you are to dig a little deeper into the soul of New York, you must walk its streets. Here, as in all great cities, the more you know in advance, the richer you'll be. Here you must surrender to the invisible city. And pay attention to the people you pass in the streets, people you'll never see again. That Mexican woman hurrying out of the subway to clean the apartments of strangers: she's my mother. That Chinese man carrying tools in a leather bag is my father. Their American children are in school. Soon they will get to Whitman. And Melville. And Poe. Soon they will discover our endless treasures. Soon. The day after tomorrow.