@nounnewyork
Last week I moved out of my West Village apartment. The stores on my street boarded up, the hustle and bustle muted to an eerie silence, a cellist harped and mourned on the corner of Bleecker, it felt like I was attending New York City's funeral.
As I cracked open my apartment door a maddening silence conjured feelings of grief and nostalgia. The seasons had changed, but my apartment remained cocooned, a sealed time capsule amidst the rubble.
My winter coats staggered in my closet where I left them, my bed half made, bills in piles on my living room floor- all remnants of my formerly booked and busy life, serving as blatant reminders of the evanescence of all things -all that we fail to appreciate- until they're gone.
Like most New Yorkers that fled in March, I left with a small suitcase and blithe optimism that I'd be back in only a few weeks. Little did I know that the city as I knew it- was about to change forever.
The window of my Perry St. apt March 2020
For as long as I can remember the West Village has been my favorite neighborhood in the city. When I visited as a child, I would venture there for inspiration and stake out a spot to sit and people watch. To a kid from suburbia the Village was refreshingly diverse and eccentric. Every corner bloomed and buzzed with personality.
Then I found Perry st. Alexa play "At Last" by Etta James.
It was all the jazz of the Village infused with a certain elegance. A sort of lovers lane perched right between Bleecker and Charles- its trees give it a Faulkner-esque vibe. City bikes lined up perfectly, brownstones etched with vine clads and long romantic stoops. Then on the surrounding blocks, Bleecker, Greenwich, and Hudson, lie stretches of miniature shops, old apothecaries, and quaint brasserie type restaurants like Bar Sardine- my favorite spot.
To the west towards Bank St. are quiet cobblestone streets that lead you to Hudson River Park and down into Meatpacking. Then, theres nothing like a sunset off of Charles St.
Sunset off Charles and the West Side Highway April 3rd 2019
Home to Sex and The City's Carrie Bradshaw, Perry St. has never been anything short of iconic.
Some other luminary neighbors include Julian Moore and Liv Tyler. On167 Perry, Hugh Jackman.
But I didn't move to Perry Street to scope out celebs or for the clout of the address. [flips hair: "I live in the Village"]. I moved to The Village because, to me, amidst the screams and skyscrapers was a friendly neighborhood, a small taste of the old New York untouched by the sordid commercialism that plagued the rest of the city, sprinkles of the Billie Holliday and the Bob Dylan New York.
The Village-a dreamlike, sequestered patch of diagonals, embodying the vestiges of New York that everyone longs for.
But while the Village maintains a romantic front, I realized when I moved there, that it didn't feel real anymore, as if too carefully curated, a movie set that lacked its central characters.
The facade of the old Village remained, but in the shadows of historic buildings was a commercial underbelly. The creative persona that the Village thrived on had been stifled by "high rent blight".
The culture infused, quirky shops, I had stumbled into as a child had been outmoded by high end contemporaries like Annie Bing and Maje. Village Bohemia still flourished but had taken on a more polished commodified form.
Enter the "Bobo": Bourgeois Bohemian. The quintessential Village outfit: sustainable but expensive, intellectual yet aristocratic.
Expensive flower children dressed in LoveShackFancy and Reformation puff sleeves gracefully hail a cab off Hudson. Dorky wall street types prance onto Perry in the morning to catch a city bike.
The bohemian dreamcatcher, once an authentic weave of unique threads now came at a lofty price. We chased out the very artists and writers that spawned the bohemian milieu, making way for slightly creative tech nerds and hipsters with trust funds.
There lies the very irony I have discovered about the Village appeal- its identity has been expelled by the very people who seek it.
How long before the Village is just an extension of Soho with more trees?
Now that the virus has left the few candid pleasures that remain cash strapped, I fear any semblance of sentimentality the Village still has to offer could be pushed to the brink. How many of those idiosyncrasies that breathe life into an asphalt jungle will withstand this crisis.
On the corner of Perry & Bleecker a cellist plays Bach's Suite No.3 in D Major. I recognized it immediately.
I'm not sure what will happen to The Village but I know "a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions", perhaps the same applies to The Village which has a mind of its own.
Once in a while, I'll start to ponder a different path in which I did continue to live in that Perry apartment! The people I could have met. Evening strolls through Charles, through West 4th, and on to Christopher.
I picture myself sitting in the corner of Bookmarc and peeking into the windows of The End of History.
I miss my friends at Bar Sardine and my friends at the bodega on Charles St. I miss Sunday morning visits to Magnolias.
I still love New York and I love it even more for its ability to mettle through this crisis. Its tenacity is more potent than ever.
But that magnetic luster that sealed its grip on me feels like it- vanished. The once buzzing brasseries down my street are defunct. The streets are asleep!
The city's now an eerie shadow of our old lives, a vat of nostalgia covered in dust. It all feels so very wrong.
I'll always kind of feel like a wimp for leaving New York when it needed me, but I also feel like the city needed to breathe and in hindsight, maybe so did I.
