Walking By Old Apartments

On potentialities of personal skylines

Fall is the most nostalgic season, and one meant for aimless walking. Here in New York, the days have been warm and dappled, and many of the roads are still closed to cars as part of the city’s outdoor dining initiative. There’s a guy on my street (an absolute legend) who sits on his stoop just about every rainless night, drinking beer and playing air guitar to punk music he blasts from a portable speaker. At my local coffee shop, it’s gotten downright competitive to get a table outside, so people have resorted to sitting in lone cafe chairs facing no direction in particular. You get the sense everyone is just happy to feel the sun and the air on their skin a bit longer. 

This end-of-summer lingering, as always, is steeped in some sense of urgency. The high of rediscovering morsels of normalcy through June, July, and August is wearing off, and autumn’s new cool air churns up memories of ambulance sirens and boarded-up restaurants and, if you're so lucky, the malaise of endless days confined to life indoors. 

I’ve been walking a lot, like many people in this city do, with urgency at my heels and nowhere quite so urgent to be. And without any real plan to, I’ve been walking by the facades of my old apartment buildings. The pull, I think (and this seems obvious to say) feels tethered to the familiarity these places promise. Ants find their way back home through their memory of terrestrial cues in the landscape. I like to think of myself as guided by something similar when I go on these walks. You recognize an Italian church that marks the halfway point to the subway station here, or a familiar tree pushing up through the sidewalk over there. Soon enough, you arrive at the clouded glass doors of a pre-war building you used to call home, peering into the hallway like a phenomenal creep. 

The terrestrial cues of this city are always changing. You can’t revisit an old neighborhood without noticing how much has transformed and gone on living since you were there. There’s always new storefronts or fancier coffee shops or the same idea of a restaurant, just repainted and gussied up. The bodegas are the strongholds, unchanging even in the response they provoke in you: Do I have time to grab a seltzer? It’d be good to have some chocolate at home. (Nevermind, the card minimum.) In a landscape both familiar and strange, reenacting even the most basic rituals can be a comfort.

In a 2001 essay for The New York Times Magazine, just two months after 9/11, Colson Whitehead wrote about New York's eternal rearranging of itself. He describes how each person has their own New York City skyline: a private and ephemeral constellation of places that appears for no one else but its beholder. Each personal skyline is made up of the pinpoints of ordinary life— the dry cleaner, the printing place, the bodega that makes your coat smell like panini— strung together and bound tightly by routine.

But the physical existence of your personal skyline appears as a flash. Your favorite pizza joint, Whitehead writes, becomes a travel agency (this 2001 example only proves his point…a better reference today might be an online retailer’s brick-and-mortar pop-up), which will eventually become a Chillhouse or something just as savvy. Whitehead is interested in the aftermath of disappearance; how the certainty of losing your favorite places constructs a particular relationship between before and after. He writes,"You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.”

To live in New York is to know this nostalgic feeling intimately. In times of upheaval— when the changes are doubly accelerated and terrifying— it can feel like you’re dissolving into the mirage, too. When we move homes or say goodbye to old neighborhoods, we also leave behind old selves. Our old haunts contain ghosts, bearing witness to our longing, our loneliness, our triumphs, and our secrets. Our skylines have seen where we’ve ugly cried in public against our best efforts to hold it together and cataloged the micro-moments of recognition between two strangers in a city of anonymity. 

We say the people make a place, but part of New York’s promise is that just being in the orbit of such rapid reinvention will wrap you up in the process, too. Our skylines imprint themselves upon us. This is part of what makes revisiting old apartments such a clarifying experience. "The disappeared pizza parlor is still here because you are here, and when the beauty parlor replaces the travel agency, the gentleman will still have his vacation. And that lady will have her manicure."

Nostalgia, for what it's worth, is a complicated emotion, and one that is misrepresented often as a desire to go back to the way things were. The ‘nost’ in nostalgia is Greek for 'a return home’ and the ‘algia’ describes the pain of witnessing that journey. I think its truer meaning beckons the act of reacquaintance. Nostalgia seduces. It draws us in, promising comfort but producing something else: a foreign feeling in a moment of openness.

As much as “unprecedented” has been the word of the year, I’ll remember 2020 as the year of reacquaintance. I became reacquainted with my parents as a daughter, usually hundreds of miles away, while we lived together as a family under one roof for the longest stretch of time in a decade. Without a job for the first half of the year, I became reacquainted with a more fragile version of myself without formal structures propping up the work I spent my days doing. And I became reacquainted with New York, seeing its streets with new eyes on the long way home instead of more expedient paths, coming newly alive at the sight of my elderly neighbor walking his tiny dog named Parker.

To return to a familiar place with unfamiliar feelings, I think, represents immense possibility. If you want it, that’s what nostalgia can be; an invitation for reinvention. No matter how many times you’ve seen that dumb glittering vista of Manhattan from the movies, the bridge view over the East River always leaves you soft and wordless. What emerges is your personal skyline, built by loss and change of rosier varieties, inviting you, as it always will, to see yourself anew.