What a Difference 18 Years Makes

Recently I was back in NY for a few days, there to see friends and just reconnect with the one city I truly consider home.

Venturing out of the Upper Westside enclave that I lived in for so long, I spent a day wandering around Greenwich Village. Though I've lived in LA for a good portion of my life, the fact that I grew up in the Village has always bolster the fact that consider myself a New Yorker. I spent the first 11 years of my life on the corner of E. 10th Street and University Place, a few blocks away from Washington Square Park in one direction and Union Square Park in the other. Of course in those days both of those parks were havens for druggies and other assorted unsavory characters. But that was where I played, amongst the rejected drug paraphenalia and occasional spots of grass.

Now that entire area is different. I left right when the Yuppies had started to take hold on the East Village, and apparently though there might not be as many of them left now, the gentrification is still evident. NYU seems to have taken a stronger grip on its environs and places that had been publicly owned are now under the University auspices. New dorms have sprouted where there used to be run down apartment buildings and most glaringly, the local movie theater is now part and parcel of the NYU Film and Theater program. But the changes go even deeper than that. The corner Greek coffee shop where I always had my happy birthday grilled cheese and chocolate milk is now a trendy Thai restaurant. The paper and stationery store is now a bodedga. The fish store, whose owner sadly died of a heart attack in the airport just a few weeks after he won the Lottery, is now Le Petite Coquette, an insanely expensive lingerie boutique. And these are just the changes on my block! The entire neighborhood has a new aura, shiny and slick but I can still see the lovely grime that was there in the early 80's.

I'm constantly told you can't go back again, and while in theory this holds true, I was still able to envision the Village of my youth. The Duane Reade on Broadway and 9th is still the Woolworth's and to me, Forbidden Planet was still on the corner of 10th and Broadway. I remembered learning to ride my bike on University Place and can see myself almost running over every pedestrian in my way. I walked by my old apartment building and though the doormen I knew were no longer working there, I saw Victor and Benny opening the dark wooden doors so I could enter after school. Though I'm now 28, I saw my old neighborhood through the eyes of the child I had been, savoring the occasional visual dissonance with what is actually there. I saw the buildings as tall as they were when I was 10 and even though all of these sights were just in my head, I felt as though I had come home and it felt just right.