Heart of the City (5 page)

But there are other, more legitimate reasons. New York is America’s most populous city, and its best-known. Even before Ellis Island opened its doors to the world’s unwashed, the city served as America’s immigrant gateway, an enclave packed with people of every tongue and color. More so than in any other American city, routine contact with strangers is a fixture of public life. Squares, parks, landmarks, museums—even the subway—were in some ways perfect laboratories for the questions that had captivated me. Unlike schools, offices, or houses of worship, public places often draw people with little in common. In big cities, they attract so many tourists that any two strangers—or “unacquainted dyads,” in psychology lingo—could well share nothing so much as citizenship, let alone a ZIP code. They were good spots, I thought, to isolate the romantic effects of place.

NEW YORK City was not built to be beautiful. The commissioners who drew its seminal 1811 street plan rejected the rounded forms of places like Washington, D.C., in favor of a simple grid of narrow streets and wide avenues. New York was a financial capital, and its layout, they felt, should reflect economic exigencies. The commissioners wrote that they considered whether “to confine themselves to rectilinear and rectangular streets, or
whether they should adopt some of those supposed improvements, by circles, ovals and stars, which certainly embellish a plan, whatever may be their effects to convenience and utility.” In the end, they decided that “they could not but bear in mind that a city is to be composed principally of the habitations of men, and that straight-sided, right-angled homes are the most cheap to build, and the most convenient to live in. The effect of these plain and simple reflections was decisive.”

Because the city was ringed by water, they reasoned, residents would have plenty of fresh air. So why waste precious space on parks or public squares?

But by the mid-nineteenth century, as New York became the country’s most populous city and its financial stronghold, its elite clamored for equal footing with the grand capitals of Europe. Great cities, they saw, needed great public spaces. Civic leaders and philanthropists pressed. Soon, a pantheon of visionaries built: Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux, Whitney Warren, Richard Morris Hunt, Stanford White, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, and Ignaz Anton Pilat. Before long, the grid sprouted one of the country’s most impressive collections of landmarks and public spaces: Central Park, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, Washington Square Park. I was drawn to these places not just for their outstanding design. It was also that, in a city determined to remake itself every few years, these places were survivors. Over a yearlong search, I tracked down couples who had met by chance in each of those seven places and in two others—the subway and the street—that I saw as cornerstones of New York’s public landscape. The couples’ stories are this book’s heart.

Olmsted was rhapsodizing about his newly built Central Park and Prospect Park in an address to social scientists in 1870, but he might as well have been talking about any of New York’s extraordinary public places. Inside, he said, you will find people
“with an evident glee in the prospect of coming together, all classes largely represented, with a common purpose, not at all intellectual, competitive with none, disposing to jealousy and spiritual or intellectual pride toward none, each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of all others, all helping to the greater happiness of each. You may thus often see vast numbers of persons brought closely together, poor and rich, young and old, Jew and Gentile.”

These places not only bind people of widely different circumstances. They also hurry heartbeats and flood veins with adrenaline. Lean from the wind-lashed observatory atop the Empire State Building and look down, your stomach dropping, at a city becalmed. Steam across New York Harbor until the sheer mass of the Statue of Liberty overhangs you, upsetting every sense of earthly proportion. Wade into the permanent sunshine of Times Square at midnight and lose yourself, for a moment, in the madness of crowds. And pleasure? It is everywhere. It is in the sight of Alice of Wonderland in Central Park, and in the voices of folk singers in Washington Square Park. It is in the flutter of whispers along the arch at Grand Central Terminal, and in the sanctuary hush of the back galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

People. Adrenaline. Pleasure. The makings of attraction are all there.

THE COUPLES in this book hail from across America and the world. Most don’t live in New York City. Some never did. What mattered to me was that they met there, in one of its iconic public places. Each of the nine stories begins just before that chance meeting—when they are strangers, oblivious to how, in moments, their lives will irrevocably change. The stories, each a separate chapter, span from the early 1940s to the present. A look at where the couples are now appears in a set of postscripts at the end of the book.

I am deeply indebted to the couples for their good humor and patience with what must have seemed like an onslaught of questions about some of the most intimate moments in their lives. Their willingness to make their stories public, I discovered, often had nothing to do with vanity. Several saw their first encounters as an affirmation of the everyday miracle that is New York. Others said they simply wanted to set something beautiful in the world.

Surveys show that even with the rise in Internet dating, most people still meet their partners through their circle of friends. In one recent study, just 6 to 9 percent of married people reported meeting their spouses in a public place, though what share of those meetings were chance encounters is impossible to tell. Still, there is an undeniable poetry to love born of chance. And for such a chance, there remains a stubborn yearning. To find believers, you need look no further than the “Missed Connections” or “I Saw You” listings that fill the back pages of newspapers and websites.

In Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
, Rosalind says of the chemistry between her sister and Orlando’s brother, “No sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved.”

For many of us, such meetings will never overspill the banks of fantasy. Then there are the few—might it be you?—with the luck, or sense, to be in exactly the right place.

To write these stories, I conducted hours of interviews with each of the couples. In most cases, I first spoke with husband and wife separately, by phone, to capture the start of relationships from each spouse’s point of view. In some cases, I also talked with friends and relatives to help flesh out parts of the story. Then I visited each couple in person—trips that took me to California, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia, and across New York. Most of the couples were unflinchingly generous, sharing not just the details of their lives but photos, notebooks, newspaper clippings, letters, drawings, timelines, and diaries. I complemented the interviews with library research on New York City architecture and history and with extended visits, with a camera and notepad, to the places where the couples met.

In the interviews, I pressed the couples for details of conversations during their first meetings. I asked about their thoughts and feelings at turning points in their stories and about their broader values, fears, and aspirations. I also wanted the specifics of key scenes: what places looked and smelled and sounded like. In some cases, however, many years had passed since the events. Where memory fell short of perfect, I allowed myself to imagine plausible dialogue and minor scenic detail. In every instance the imagined dialogue or detail was an outgrowth of what I knew of the couples, the places they inhabited and their times. In the interest of bringing these stories to life and deepening their larger meanings, I permitted myself this small artistic license.

For reasons of privacy, couples were given the option of changing their names. Three of the nine chose to do so; the use of pseudonyms in those cases is noted in the postscripts at the end of the book. The names of minor characters in some of the stories were changed.

Green

CENTRAL PARK

The chill fingers of fall touched down in the city, and Joey Filip, eighteen, pulled her jacket tight as a gust of wind rattled the awnings over the store windows on Fifth Avenue. Shivering, she paid a street vendor a nickel for a box of cigarettes. She had never smoked before, but on this cold September day in 1941, with clouds unfurling across the sky, she liked the thought of drawing hot smoke into her lungs. Of burning inside.

“You’re going to hell,” her mother had shouted a few weeks before, as Joey ran down her driveway in Passaic, New Jersey, with a sack of clothes. Her father, the only person she felt had ever understood her, had died in July. Her mother, an observant Catholic, had demanded she follow her older sisters into a convent. Joey ran away from home instead.

Her first night in the city, she slept on the subways. She needed a job, but would anyone in this big city hire a mill hand with little education and no one to vouch for her?

On her left, the stores with glittering things in the windows gave way to the arching trees of Central Park. Joey, her feet throbbing, turned onto a path that dipped through greens planted with tall elms.

There must be benches here, she thought. Maybe even a hiding place, where I can lie down for the night. She studied the spaces between the trees, some so close together they shrouded the understory in shadow.

A cackle from somewhere behind her right shoulder made her jump. She turned to see a pair of women in fur coats, with jewels at their throats and gentlemen on their arms.

“Charlie, you in the mood for a highball?” one of the women said.

“When is Charlie
not
in the mood?” said the other, as the group exploded in a howl of laughter.

Joey ducked away to let the group pass. They showed not the slightest awareness of her.

EVERYWHERE Quartermaster Third Class Willis Langford looked in Central Park, there were girls. And the variety! Rounded and thin. Some with the rouged cheeks of angels, others with the darkened eyes of devils. There were broads and dames. Sweet patooties and shebas.