TAKEAWAY: Time for me to add a new description after my name: New York City resident
The rooftop view from the building where I live in New York City (Photo by Brian Smith)
Ironic to read a piece in The New York Times relating how famous writers’ love affairs with New York City have sometimes ended badly.
The city that never sleeps also can be the city of heartbreak, and the proof is there in a number of “Dear John” letters, including those from such luminaries as Joan Didion and Ann Friedman.
While reading this article, headlined, The Long Goodbye, I find myself doing the opposite. My piece could be titled The Long (Overdue) Hello.
Long overdue because it has been about 45 years gestating in my mind, especially every time I made a visit to old New York.
“Some day I will live here,“ I told myself when I first saw NYC at the age of 21, not at all concerned if anyone nearby was listening, but knowing that somewhere on the desktop of my subconscious was a new folder titled: Hold for NYC.
It is a feeling I have experienced every time I arrive in New York City: amazement, a sense of vitality, mixed with happiness and that which we feel when we open a present, ready for the surprise—-knowing that it will be pleasant, even when it is not much of a surprise.
To be very precise, I get what I refer to as my “New York City Mesmerizing Moment” at that specific moment when one crosses the last tunnel and, suddenly, in a 360 degree change of landscape, the view is the familiar (but never ordinary) one of skyscrapers, glass, metal, hamal street food kiosks, yellow cabs and people who walk looking straight ahead, not at each other.
I have traveled and worked in more than 110 countries to date, but I have never been able to match that feeling anywhere else.
Where it all began
My first venture into NYC was as a senior at the University of South Florida, when, as editor of the student newspaper, The Oracle, I came to represent the USF at a collegiate newspaper conference at Columbia University (which, by the way, included a visit to The New York Times, where, by coincidence, I was photographed with my fellow editors in the newsroom, and the photo appeared on the front page of the Metro section, a keepsake I will always treasure).
Years later, as a professor at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, I would venture into the city from time to time, always on Friday, to teach a class or to attend a conference. For several months, I also came here to meet and to learn from the late Ben Blank, graphics whiz at ABC News. Together we wrote the book Professional Video Graphic Design (1986), all about TV news graphics.
And so, New York City, here I am, embarking in this new adventure right in your midst, walking the streets that are a repository of history, running in Central Park, not just the ultimate place for the ultimate rave run, but also an oasis that you offer to those who wish to escape when you become too much.
I am honored to be the Hearst Digital Media Professional in Residence at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism this Spring semester.
It is that great opportunity that brings me here, but it is also a desire to call myself a New Yorker, to be a part of it, to check out if it is true , as Frank Sinatra sings in his signature song, that New York City is the top of the list, the head of the head, the king of the hill, the number one.
Time—-and me experiencing the daily rituals that are part of New York City life—-will tell how I feel at the end of my semester here.
Will I, like the great Joan Didion, write a Dear John letter to New York City before I leave? Or, as I may suspect, will it be a love letter with a “see you again soon” note attached?
For now, I have arrived here, complete with four big boxes with my winter clothes and some family memorabilia that will make my New York City apartment feel like home. As I settle in the Big Apple, one thought is with me: good things come to those who wait.
Including New York City.
Of related interest:
A return to academia: Teaching multi-platform storytelling at Columbia
