Lost in transit

Memory Loss

I was talking to someone tonight about the Film Forum, one of New York’s great arthouse cinemas. He’d lived in New York for a couple of years, so I mentioned that it was on Houston Street.

“Oh, yeah, but I thought it was called the Angelika.”

“No, no, that one’s further east, near Broadway. Film Forum’s on West Houston, over by... um... what Seventh Avenue South turns into. What's that street called? Shit.”

I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of the street – a street that as the main approach to the Holland Tunnel I’d had to drive down (and get stuck in traffic on) more times than I could count.

How could I forget a street name in New York? These are the streets that I grew up driving on, that I knew better than the back of my hand. I can still close my eyes and picture entire blocks in my head, mapping them out storefront by storefront. Head over to the west side of Second Ave. between 19th and 20th Streets: you’ll find an animal hospital, a liquor store, a dry cleaners, the Bloominghouse Deli and a pizzeria. The streets of the city were always facts for me, things I knew as sure as basic arithmetic or the elements of water. First Avenue turns into Allen, Third Avenue into the Bowery, Seventh Avenue into...what?

Of course, I’ve spent less than two of the past seven years actually living in New York, so naturally my memory must fade with lack of use. I understand this, rationally. I can’t remember many street names from Chicago or Prague, which makes sense given the time I spent in each place, but hell’s teeth – somehow, New York should be different. I grew up there, spent almost three decades of my life there. Had maps of the city blu-tacked to my walls. Debated the finer points of local navigation with my father (“Forget 23rd, it’ll be packed – we can get on the FDR at 20th Street”).

Besides, I’m a native New Yorker, the child of a native New Yorker – the city should be part of my genetic code, the strands of my DNA forming not a double helix but the winding thread of Broadway, that old native hunting trail, sliding through the warp and weft of the math-rigid city grid, or perhaps the shape of a hundred small triangles, a biological echo of the Chrysler Building’s white neon teeth. Forgetting the name of a street I never had to try to remember feels like forgetting the name of a relative, like the first onset of some kind of geographic dementia, and suddenly everything seems cast in a different light.

Who am I, if not a New Yorker? How much of who you are depends on where you live, or where you have lived? I'm certainly not a Chicagoan or a Praguer, and I wouldn't call myself anything more than an honorary Melburnian. Could I be some weird hybrid of them all? Or am I evolving into something new altogether?

If I’m enough of an émigré to have forgotten that Seventh Avenue turns into Varick Street, I’m certainly still enough of a New Yorker to get upset about it.

And most of all, to feel absolutely mortified at having had to look it up.

Posted by wildsoda at February 27, 2007 03:20 PM