Remembering Silicon Alley

New York City neighborhoods are world famous -- Wall Street, Harlem, Park Slope, Flushing, Greenwich Village, and many others. They have identities all their own, little cities within the big city. These neighborhoods have been around and evolved and changed for centuries.

But there's one neighborhood that only lasted for about eight years -- a fleeting few blocks that had a big moment before it vanished (not literally but figuratively) completely.

In the 1990s, as the Internet and tech sector conquered the world, the capital of it was (and is) Silicon Valley in Northern California. Here in NYC a mini-tech sector sprang up at the same time on Broadway between the Flatiron Building on 23rd Street and Union Square on 14th Street.

It was called Silicon Alley. 

Most of the businesses there were "dotcoms", burgeoning Internet companies that helped new users do things like buy groceries and pay bills and other stuff. Their business plans were dubious but held promise. The Internet then was still very disorganized, you didn't have an "everything store" like Amazon yet -- and these new companies were trying to claim the parts of the Internet that Amazon would eventually conquer.

But then, between 2000 and 2003, the original "dotcom bubble" burst. Many of these companies, turning no profits, vanished, and the buildings they occupied fell vacate (for a while) -- and Silicon Alley ceased to exist.

Silicon Alley RIP, 1995-2003. 

I hadn't thought about Sililcon Alley for a long time until I discovered that the great author Thomas Pynchon wrote a book in 2013 called Bleeding Edge about Silicon Alley circa 2001 and during the events of 9/11. (There's a new movie based on another book by Pynchon that's opening soon called One Battle After Another that I can't wait to see.)

You see, yours truly actually worked on Silicon Alley for about nine months, from the Summer of 2000 to the Spring 2001. I blogged a little about it back in March, and it was, hands down, the WORST job I ever had. It was such a horrible place with such loathsome people that I'm shocked that I lasted there for almost a year. And not long after I vanished from the job, Silicon Alley vanished as well -- altough the company seems to have been bought by some other company later on so I guess it did okay.

What's interesting to me is to realize that my time in Silicon Alley corresponded to the same time as Pynchon's novel -- and to the same time when Silicon Alley was starting to fall. Believe me, it did not feel like I was living through a historical epoch at the time (I had left before 9/11 happened). And I hated working there so much that I just wanted to get out ASAP. But it seems that I was a part of a fleeting moment of Manhattan history, I was there, I was a witness ... even if I didn't want to be.  

And it's a reminder that today's torment is tomorrow's anecdote, yesterday's misery is today's good story. Life is truly strange.