NYC Turns, Turns, Turns ...

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 and Pete Seegar taught us well: "To everything there is a season ... a time to live, and a time to die ... a time to break down, and a time to build up ... a time to mourn, and a time to dance ... a time to keep, and a time to cast away ... and a time to every purpose ... turn, turn, turn ..."

The yin and yang, the ups and downs, the hopes and dreams realized and dashed, the constant churn -- or turn -- of existence is something that you only begin to fully appreciate as you age. Life is never a permanent up or down escalator. In fact, as we get older, accepting this constant "to everything there is a season" fact of life -- and not just accepting but cherishing it -- is what makes the craziness and vicissitudes of aging bearable. It's a basic tenet of survival -- things happen, things change, sometimes for better, often for worst, but they are inevitable. Accepting them with grace is a greater part of wisdom.

Of course, in this day and age, there are lots of people who either can't or won't accept what the Bible and our greatest folk singer taught us. They go in the opposite direction -- trying hopelessly, miserably, quixotically to reclaim their youths, reclaim their pasts, reclaim times gone by. They express this in both harmless and harmful ways, like reveling in cultural nostalgia (harmless) or voting for Trump (harmful). F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about this yearn for regression in his last, brilliant line of The Great Gatsby: "So beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

In NYC, we see this "turn" all the time, in ways both big and small. Concurrently, we also see the desire, in varying ways, to recapture the city's past.

For example, the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn: this area has a rather bi-polar identity, as both the ultimate liberal hipster mecca and the home to the very conservative Orthodox Jewish community. But did you know there is highly Italian part of it? It's fading away, and the people there seem to accept that their neighborhood and the times have changed, as this article and its amazing photographs demonstrate.

Two recent deaths also show how people in our past made the city's present and future turn for the better. I love reading about New Yorkers like this because, without them, our city and its culture would be poorer. Genevieve Oswald created and curated the dance archive at the public library for more than 40 years. And Henry Stern was the Parks Commissions off and on for almost 20 years (from 1983-2001), the longest serving and probably most imaginative commissioner since Robert Moses. 

*Side note: I tried interviewing Henry Stern for this blog several years ago. I emailed him at an organization he ran, and got a rather weird message in reply that I didn't understand -- it wasn't an outright rejection but it certainly didn't read like an acceptance. It was more like, "If you call this number, something might happen but don't expect it." I never did call. His was one of a few interviews that just never quite happened.

Anyway, they were both great New Yorkers, they made it "turn" for the better. May they RIP.

Moving on ... I was a teenager in NYC in the 1990s. As much as I'd like to say it was a special time and place to be young, it sure didn't feel that way at the time. Honestly, I was a complete loser (unlike now, where I'm only a partial loser), and back then I had no money, no girlfriends, few real friends, and lots of school work. Le ugh. However, as the 21st century so far has given us 9/11, two endless wars, more and more mass shootings, more and more man-made natural disasters, the financial crises, and Trump, it's easy to look at the last decade of the 20th century as some of kind of "end of innocence" even though it really wasn't. In recent years, there have been movies about being a teenager in the 1990s, both in NYC and elsewhere, including The Wackness from 2008 and more recently one called Landline (I actually went to high school with the person who made it but didn't know her). This article is about these movies and their 1990s nostalgia is both misplaced and yet totally understandable (also, this year is the 30th anniversary of the classic NYC romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally which, in many ways, was a '90s movie even though it came out in the last year of the 1980s).

Things in NYC and the world have "turned" since the 1990s -- in some ways for better (the smartphone, the smoking ban, lower crime, Barack Obama) and, obviously, for worse. I know for me things have actually "turned" for the better, but even I sometimes looked back misty-eyed at the Clinton era.

And in understanding how the times "turn", no New Yorker explains not only history but power -- and how people in power made history -- than Robert Caro. Author of the Robert Moses tome The Power Broker and the Lyndon Johnson series, Caro has just published a book about his working life (literally titled Working). His advice to aspiring historians? "Turn every page." Turn over the pages, the materials, the people, the metaphorical rocks of the past to understand how our present was formed and how we are forming our future. 

NYC, like the world it exists in, turns forever -- and it is we who do the turning.