Frommer's New York City 2007
Chapter One
The Best of the Big Apple
"Of the city's five boroughs, Manhattan, in particular, refuses to remain as it was. It
is dynamic, not static. What seems permanent when you are twenty is too often a ghost
when you are thirty," Pete Hamill writes in his book Downtown: My Manhattan.
And the longer you live in this town, the more ghosts you will encounter. But New
Yorkers adapt ... sometimes painfully. Hamill explains: "The New York version of
nostalgia is not simply about lost buildings or their presence in the youth of the individuals
who lived with them. It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent
presence of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same.... Irreversible change happens
so often in New York that the experience affects character itself. New York toughens
its people against sentimentality by allowing the truer emotion of nostalgia. Sentimentality
is always about a lie. Nostalgia is about real things gone."
But though we might mourn loss, we also anticipate and expect change-it's part
of our way of life. We know th ... read full excerpt from Frommer's New York City 2007 ebook
