<inhaling ghosts exhaling memories>

I can't explain why downtown makes me weep. Frankly, all of New York City does this to me. I am haunted by the place I live. On its streets nostalgia constantly threatens to overwhelm the pulsing reality of the present. The joy and regret of memory flashes from every sunlit surface, replacing what is before me with what was. As I do this I remember doing it before. As I see this I remember seeing it before. And who I saw it with. And who I was then. And everything we hoped.

I feel this everywhere, but especially downtown. It's the oldest part of the city, and so the most haunted.

I was born in this town, and I held my mother's hand as we hurried through the half-light of Grand Central. "Look up," she said: 125 feet above me (but it might as well have been an infinite distance) murky ceiling murals depicted Zodiac figures at play in the night sky.

You have to imagine how the distant painting overhead felt to a five year old child in an echoing concourse, 275 feet long, 120 feet wide. The blur and rush and footfalls of the people hurrying all around us in the vast gloom; the sense that all this sound and motion was falling away, falling into a silent forgotten present as I gazed up forever at the smoky ceiling, its imagery obscured by decades and darkness.

That is midtown for you, and midtown is the part of New York City you've seen in all the movies. No matter where you live, you've been seeing midtown New York City all your life. When the filmmakers moved downtown, it was usually to tell some sad tale of Bowery drunks or Lower East Side heroin addicts, and those kinds of pictures rarely sold tickets. The locus and glamor of New York City only moved downtown in the popular imagination when Martin Scorsese started making his films.

I moved back to New York City in 1988, and within a year it had taken away from me the thing I most cherished. But even before that, I had already moved here in my mind.

My brother was here, and for years my then-girlfriend and I would drive up from Washington, D.C. to spend weeks or weekends in the places he lived. Hoboken, then the Chinatown-Soho border, then Tribeca, and then the East Village.

Eventually I was single again, and living in midtown New York. I drank downtown. I drugged downtown. I worked downtown. I cannot go downtown—and I am always going downtown—without remembering everything. (I drank and drugged and worked in midtown too, but it does not haunt me the same way. Its crowds and skyscrapers are more familiar and more anonymous than those of Soho and Chinatown and Noho and the East Village. Fewer poets have died on the streets of midtown, fewer generations crowded into its rooms.)

Yesterday a speaking engagement at Razorfish took me to Soho, with its 19th century cast iron skyline, its European streets, its artists, models, tourists, and entrepreneurs. Noon, sunlight baking the old streets, an hour to kill before my appointment. I walked up and down the cobblestone avenues, from Chinatown to the perimeter of the Village, living and remembering, seeing what was there and what was long gone.

Among many things, in Soho I worked for the most demanding creative director I ever met. Sal didn't lecture or give pep talks. He awaited the work, considered it, and generally handed it back to you with a small smile. That smile meant you could do better. You would leave his office hating him, then look at his work and hate yourself. You would do better.

In the eighteen months I worked for Sal, I think he may have nodded approval once or twice. He might even have said something positive once after I killed myself to come up with a worthy idea. I was not very good, but he liked me, and that in itself inspired me to work hard and believe in the possibility that I might one day create something that wasn't completely worthless. I learned more from his silence than from any teacher's lecture. I loved him, and what is more profound, I respected his judgement as absolute. I always think of him when I am in Soho, and I thought of him yesterday as I walked along streets where industrial warehouses have become art galleries and fancy shops.

On Canal, at the northern border of Chinatown, I passed grimy shops specializing in obsolete industrial detritus. I used to go into these places, buying 25 cent windup gizmos and plastic scraps, with the idea that I would turn them into art projects. Yet somehow I would always end up in the Lower East Side bars instead.

Walking, remembering.

The hour passed. I entered Razorfish. I was handed a laptop, a projector, and a microphone. An hour later I left.

Afterwards, a friend and I sat on the metal steps of an industrial building, talking of design and the economy and people we'd worked for. I first met Jackie in Miami, after speaking at a design conference there. When the conference wrapped, we sat at the hotel cabana, the sea framing her face, the sound of the sea pillowing her voice. Since then we've communicated from time to time, and whenever Jackie writes to me I've seen her face framed by the sea. Now when we write, I will see Soho. And in nineteenth century Soho, I will always see my own past.

12 May 2001