Pete Hamill and the Narcotic of Lost New York

There’s a natural feeling of loss when a person of certain renown dies. We didn’t know the man, but we remembered the era—or we read about it in books, heard of it from parents, peered backwards with the longing of those who can only imagine. The famous embody their time, their images and memories our own, joined to a collective consciousness. Pete Hamill, who died last Wednesday, was one of those individuals, a newspaperman and novelist and essayist and screenwriter and bon vivant who enjoyed a career that isn’t really possible anymore, swaggering from Greenwich Village barrooms to Saigon to the embrace of the world’s most famous First Lady, all of it with only a high school education. He edited two tabloids, wrote for every publication imaginable, and ambled the side streets of New York, writing lyrical columns that are still quoted by older scribes and readers. He was an admirable generalist, with liberal sensibilities and a belief in the underdog, capturing what it meant, for a lot of people, to be alive during the best and worst times of the late 20th century.

I’m too young to count Hamill as a hero; I knew him mostly through the eyes of others, in tributes and Google searches, and in his generous appearances, seemingly every year, at the Brooklyn Book Festival. But as a fellow Brooklyn kid and baseball fan, I could always feel a kinship with Hamill, whose local sensibilities were quite familiar. Without the Brooklyn Dodgers, I grew up pulling for the Yankees, but if I had the opportunity to take the train or trolley to Ebbets Field like Hamill did as a child, I would have been a Dodger fan too—I have no doubt about that.

Some of his writing holds up quite well. His 1969 New York Magazine feature on the revolt of New York’s white working class against the progressive, race-conscious Lindsay administration presaged, by a half century, the rise of Donald Trump. These were Hamill’s people, after all, and he had a fraught bond with them, dating back to his hard-drinking father knocking down pints in Windsor Terrace pubs when the neighborhood was known for its poor, aggrieved Irish, not today’s genteel wealth.

Hamill possessed none of his old neighborhood’s nativism or nakedly revanchist attitudes, but he was seized, throughout his career, with the persistent nostalgia that can characterize these movements of resentment. If sentimentality is not exactly a sin for a writer and intellectual, it is certainly a trap; the past, divorced eternally from the present, grows as alluring as a drug. Hamill, unfortunately, could be this kind of writer, chasing phantoms through the backstreets of his youth. I am not here to argue against nostalgia because the world can never feel quite as redeemed as when you are young and healthy. It is important, though, for the writer to not allow nostalgia to skew perceptions of a deeply complex, and inevitably flawed present society. To do so is to make a grave error—to fall prey to a mirage.

There are two Hamill essays I have been thinking about since his death. One appeared in New York Magazine at the end of 1987 and the other ran in Esquire at the close of 1994. Though the latter is written with far more fury, they can be seen as companion pieces, with titles that evoke cultural and temporal tragedy: “The New York We’ve Lost” and “End Game.” Both have redeeming qualities. “The New York We’ve Lost” is an ode to the New York City of Hamill’s youth, when trolley cars rang through the streets, the Dodgers hadn’t bolted for Los Angeles, elevated subway lines thundered above Manhattan, and lovers met under the Biltmore Clock.

Hamill, writing in the 1980s, was looking back at a New York that had not yet been besieged by the rising tide of crime that would begin to diminish shortly after the essay ran. It can be argued life for New Yorkers was generally less precarious in the 40s, relative to the tumultuous 80s, when crack cocaine ripped through impoverished neighborhoods. As the essay rolls on, though, you get the sense that this is almost beside the point. People just aren’t like they were in Hamill’s old New York. They aren’t so friendly, so polite, so evocative of that Mayberry spirit. All is not as it was, and this is the greatest tragedy of them all.

Baseball is an instructive lens here. A decade ago, the sportswriter Joe Posnanski took Hamill to task for his moralizing over the steroid scandals and his insistence that the modern game was corrupted, unlike the sport of his youth. At times, Hamill permitted his instinct for sentimentality to overtake his journalistic mind. There is no argument that for kids in New York in the 1950s, baseball occupied its golden age. But the sport itself, as my friend Lincoln Mitchell has persuasively argued, was at a somewhat dire crossroads: attendance, for many teams, was quite anemic, and for many of the other franchises based beyond New York City, the 50s represented a nadir. Baseball was not competitive; there was no amateur draft, no free agency, no revenue sharing of any kind. Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard Around the World,” one of the most famous moments in baseball history, drew a mere 34,320 fans to the Polo Grounds, nothing close to a sellout. The year the Brooklyn Dodgers won it all, finally, in 1955, their average attendance was a meager 13,423, catastrophic by 21st century standards.

Why am I going on about baseball? Because it was Hamill’s lodestar, and it’s a sport that is too often nostalgia-drunk. In Hamill’s obituaries, it was often noted that he and the Brooklyn-reared Jack Newfield considered the three worst people in human history to be Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers owner who ripped the franchise from New York and moved it to Los Angeles in 1958. But journalist Hamill, not nostalgist Hamill, should have seen the move for what it was: a vital business decision to keep baseball alive. Major League Baseball had no franchise west of St. Louis. By the 1950s, this was a suicidal proposition, with so many more people now living in the Western half of the United States. Baseball needed to succeed in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Again and again, throughout his essay on Lost New York, Hamill elides the reality of his own time to make it seem, to modern eyes, like a lost Atlantis. Would an African-American of Hamill’s age, who grew up watching segregated baseball and would have already been twenty-two by the time the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, look back on his youth with such love and tenderness and yearning for what was lost and could never be? I agree with Hamill: it was a travesty New York City ripped up its trolley network and threw its lot in with the automobile. But how could such a perceptive journalist and man of his city not note that when he was eight years old, in 1943, African-Americans in Harlem rioted after a white police officer shot an African-American soldier? That this spate of violence, driven by racist policing practices at home and a large swath of the nation still living under Jim Crow, was the inspiration for the climax of Invisible Man? Then, as now, New York was a city of searing inequality, of occasional degradation and violence. Just because the doctor made house calls and the milkman came with a cold bottle every morning didn’t mean the postwar period of Hamill’s youth was halcyon, a realm of unvarnished amazement and wonder. If you were poor, if you were Black or Puerto Rican, if you were disabled, or if you were a leftist suddenly suspected of an allegiance to Communism, 1950s New York was no bounty.

In his conclusion, Hamill seems nearly self-aware of what he’s doing, predicting the nostalgia wave for the 80s before it hits, though he does so somewhat begrudgingly. “I suppose that 30 years from now (as close to us as we are to 1958), when I’ve been safely tucked into the turf at the Green-Wood, someone will write in these pages about a Lost New York that includes Area and the Mudd Club and Nell’s, David’s Cookies and Aca Joe and Steve’s ice cream.” Indeed! Hamill’s wish, however, is that we remember his New York: the spaldeens, the trolleys, and young Mays camping beneath a fly ball. As an amateur New York historian, I want to remember all of this. But each generation has their version of the city they feel is unfairly erased, its legacies disregarded. Now, Twitter lights up every time a beloved restaurant, bar, or department store closes down, even those that aren’t old enough to trace their origins to Hamill’s Lost New York.

Hamill’s Esquire essay treads darker ground. It might be one he would want back, like his written remarks about the Central Park Five. Let me say up front that I understand his argument and have sympathy for elements of it. In language that is reactionary and crude, he makes a case for American pluralism. His concern, funnily enough, is quite current: the continuing struggle over identity politics and so-called successor ideology, how America squares the sins of slavery, racism, and xenophobia with its rhetoric of inclusion—how we, as a people, actually inch forward. Hamill is deeply concerned about political polarization, with a politics filled with hate and devoid of logic. He is frustrated that too many ideologues are more committed to obliterating their rivals than engaging in the effort of building a stronger, fairer nation. But Hamill, at 59, has a bone to pick with American popular culture. Here is the fulminating middle-aged scribe on the music he really hates:

Rap music is a problem for Hamill, emblematic of a nihilistic nation rapidly spiraling into the gutter. This was a common, typically white, lament of the era, a hatred of a new kind of art quickly gaining dominance. The music is alien to him, too violent and strange, and therefore a cheap symbol of decline. Hamill is angry, too, that athletes aren’t as demure as their predecessors, too willing to thump their chests; it’s a trite observation, one that has, thankfully, been disregarded with time. Even the staid MLB now encourages the kids to just play.

Hamill rages that too much of news is entertainment, which was true then and remains true today. We have been a country “that has never made a movie about Leonardo da Vinci and has produced three about Joey Buttafuoco.” Guilty as charged. Celebrity, gossip, and stupidity can and do trump substance; pun intended. Hamill spends time excoriating identity politics and doesn’t always miss the mark. There is a glaring simplicity to the new ideology, the reduction of thorny individuality to unalterable categories, a demand for rigidity that attempts, too frequently, to erase doubt and debate. Hamill, had he lived, would have undoubtedly written something good and cutting about Robin DiAngelo’s corporate grift. But of course it’s easier for the white Irishman to assimilate into the great American melting pot than the descendant of a slave, who cannot ever hide skin color. Hamill decries “ethnic chauvinism,” but why can’t a Black or Latino person take pride in their own culture, especially when white supremacist institutions have tried to suppress it for so long?

Hamill’s essay is soft on Bill Clinton, who was a Democrat in the Kennedy mode, a triangulator with a pretty face and a knife clenched behind his back. The Republicans are too mean to him, Hamill laments, especially when he’s done so much. The End Gamers, as Hamill called them, tried to derail Clinton, but the Good Ol’ Boy rammed a free trade agreement through Congress, paving the way for the evisceration of the American working class that Hamill rhapsodized in so many tabloid columns. Clinton gutted the social safety net and he got the crime bill done, ushering in a new era of mass incarceration. Contemporary critics loudly opposed all of these efforts. Hamill, though, despairs that the art of compromise is dead, that middle-of-the-roaders like Clinton can’t succeed like they used to. Clinton is another shallow symbol for Hamill’s thesis, recast as a victim in this new aggrievement matrix.

Hamill’s nostalgia, for a better politics and a better city, is limiting. It would be difficult to find an era that meets his ideal of comity and good cheer. When he was 10, after all, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians. None of this means we should devolve into nihilism and reject the American project altogether. We should, with our sin in mind, carry onward, striving for a better, fairer nation, one committed to the goal of a functioning multiracial democracy. We can do this without sentimentality.

My own sense is, as an aging millennial, that our generation and subsequent ones will be less prone to nostalgia than Hamill and his cohort. There was no postwar boom for us. There was September 11th, a disastrous Iraq War, an economic crash, a Trump presidency, and a once-in-a-century pandemic with no end in sight. I, too, will happily tell those not yet born about my own wonders of Brooklyn—the since shuttered batting cages and indoor laser parks, the cement courts teeming with handball players—but I will do it knowing that my people, like those who came before and those yet to be, lived like all really do: day-to-day, moment-to-moment, proud and fearful and anxious and heedless and grateful for the years they had with those that they loved. There is no Lost City, no lost Country. There are the places we inhabit, and those we hope to do the best with while we’re here.

Originally Appeared on GQ