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Downtown: My Manhattan

Name: Downtown: My Manhattan
Author: Pete Hamill
ISBN: 9780759512979

by Pete Hamill

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Overview

In Downtown, Hamill leads us on an unforgettable journey through the city he loves, from the island's southern tip to 42nd Street, combining a moving memoir of his days and nights in New York with a passionate history of its most enduring places and people. From the Battery's traces of the early port to Washington Square's ghosts of executed convicts and well-heeled Knickerbockers; from the Five Points, once the most dangerous and squalid slum in America, to the mansions of the robber barons on "the Fifth Avenue"; from the Bowery of the 1860s, the vibrant heart of the city's theater world, to the Village of the 1960s, with its festival-like street life, this is downtown as we've never seen it before. Hamill weaves his own memories of Manhattan with the liveliest moments from its past, and points out the hints of that past living on in the city of today, fueling the ever-present nostalgia of its inhabitants.Hamill introduces us to the New Yorkers who have left indelible marks: Peter Stuyvesant and John Jacob Astor, Stanford White and George Templeton Strong, Edith Wharton and Henry James, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, W. H. Auden and Allen Ginsberg, Boss Tweed and Fiorello La Guardia, Jimi Hendrix and Thelonious Monk, and scores of others. And he takes us to the eateries, saloons, theaters, movie houses, bookstores, and street corners they, and he, once frequented, whether still standing or existing only in memory.

Through the city's transformations, the pulse of Pete Hamill's brilliant voice melds with the pulse that drives New York, that mixture of daring, greed, anger, rebellion, hope, entrepreneurialism, and longing that never fades. Written by native son who has lived through some of New York City's most historic moments, Downtown is an extraordinary celebration of the magnificent, haunted place that Hamill continues to call home, and that people from all over the country and the world have come to call their own.

Synopsis

In this "beautifully written, sharply observed, and heartfelt" guide to his hometown (New York Times), legendary New York City journalist Pete Hamill leads us on an unforgettable journey through the city he loves. Walking the Manhattan streets he loves, from Times Square to the island’s southern tip, Pete Hamill combines a moving memoir of his own days and nights in new York with a lively and revealing history of the city’s most enduring places and people. “Pete Hamill lovingly captures the vibrant sights, sounds, and smells of Manhattan from Battery Park to midtown, the most important, most exciting stretch of real estate in the world.” --New York Daily News

About the Author, Pete Hamill

Pete Hamill

From his days as a crack reporter (who incredibly rose to the editor-in-chief post of both rival dailies The New York Post and The New York Daily News) to his novels like the sweeping Manhattan epic Forever, Pete Hamill keeps his typing fingers on the pulse of the city he calls home.

Biography

Throughout his colorful career as a writer, New York City has been a constant backdrop and inspiration for Pete Hamill -- from his success at several New York newspapers and magazines to his look back at A Drinking Life to his latest sweeping novel about a man gifted with immortality in the city he calls home: Forever.

Born in Brooklyn in 1935 as the first of seven children to Irish immigrant parents, Hamill attended Catholic schools throughout his childhood. More in tune with the city streets than the schoolroom, he dropped out at 16 to labor in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a sheet metal worker, and from there signed up with the U.S. Navy, where he was able to eventually complete his high school education. The G.I. Bill of Rights helped him gain admission to Mexico City College in 1956-1957, where he was a student of art and design.

While Hamill fell in love with Mexico (and would eventually come to consider it his second home), his interest in design brought him back to New York to study at Pratt Institute. However, in 1960, he made the fateful career move that would change his life: taking a job as a beat reporter for The New York Post. Hamill's pavement-pounding work made him a crafty chronicler of city life -- from the grimy streets of the crime beat to the chaotic uprisings of the 1960s -- and he graduated to columnist. Soon after, he made the slightly scandalous move to the Post's rival paper, The New York Daily News. Perhaps one of Hamill's most intriguing achievements in New York journalism is the fact that he served as editor-in-chief of both papers -- the city's two most notoriously competitive dailies.

Hamill's nonfiction books have resonated with readers craving more than a few column inches. His 1994 memoir, A Drinking Life, was, as Publishers Weekly noted, "not a jeremiad condemning drink... but a thoughtful, funny, street-smart reflection on its consequences." Turning his attention to other lives, Hamill has also written tributes to idols Frank Sinatra (1998's Why Sinatra Matters) and Mexican painter Diego Rivera (1999's Diego Rivera).

Hamill has also enjoyed critical and commercial success as a fiction writer. His 1997 novel, Snow in August, was an instant New York Times bestseller. On the gritty coming-of-age story, the Times observed, "Mr. Hamill has told versions of this story many times, in fiction and journalism. But in his new novel...Mr. Hamill adds magic. Hamill is not a subtle writer, but his gift for sensual description and his tabloid muscularity fit this page turner of a fable."

2002's Forever brings Hamill's street smarts and near-encyclopedic knowledge of New York City together with his gift for spinning a story. Perhaps his most ambitious work yet, the novel traces the history of Manhattan through the eyes of a man who has watched it unfold for the better part of two centuries -- thanks to an otherworldly wish he is granted. It's likely Hamill's secret wish as well.

Good To Know

Since the 1950s, Hamill has had a keen interest in Mexico and considers it his home away from home. As a reporter, he covered the events in Tlatelolco in 1968, the Olympic Games that followed, and a major earthquake in 1985. For six months in 1986, he served as editor of The Mexico City News.

He is married to Japanese journalist Fukiko Aoki and has two grown daughters -- one a poet, the other a photographer for the Arizona Republic in Phoenix.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

Other books might provide exhaustive hikes through Manhattan minutiae; Pete Hamill's Downtown offers a leisurely stroll through the world's most bustling borough. Hamill loves Manhattan as only a native Brooklynite can: He approaches its sights and scenes with affection but also with the detached insight and wonder of an outsider whose mother once described it as Oz. Downtown bustles with history, self-made men, and shared tragedies. Nostalgia was never more sweet.

Publishers Weekly

Hamill has spent most of his life in New York City, and he knows its history and its pulse intimately. In this paean to his hometown, he moves from southernmost Manhattan to its center, and from the city's origins to its current state. Each CD focuses on one area, beginning with Battery Park and working through Trinity Church, the Bowery and the Villages before jumping to the city's heart: Times Square. The only sound effects (brief jazzy riffs) can be heard at the beginning and end of each disc, and the stark quiet of Hamill's narration seems odd for a book about such a noisy city. However, his gruff, seen-it-all voice, filled alternately with wonder at the beauty of a building, disdain for modern trends and indignation at how some worthy historical character has been forgotten, is that of a wise older relative revealing the true past of a place he loves. He speaks often of the "human alloy" of new and old immigrants that comprises Manhattan, and intersperses his own experiences growing up in Brooklyn and coming of age in the Lower East Side. Hamill's narration is somewhat monotonous, but his way of traveling seamlessly through neighborhoods and years, relating fascinating anecdotes and little-known facts, keeps the tour lively. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Forecasts, Nov. 15, 2004). (Dec.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Former editor in chief of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News, Hamill spent his adult life in downtown Manhattan. A highly literate and eloquent writer (see also his memoir A Drinking Life), he thoughtfully guides readers through that borough's neighborhoods, which he knew as a young man and still walks. Threaded throughout is the idea of loss and nostalgia: New Yorkers pay an emotional price for the city's constant, irreversible change, he writes. Yet his vision is ultimately uplifting, that of "New York alloy." Hamill masterfully includes many astonishing facts, e.g., Washington Square was built on the graves of a potter's field; the first branch of the New York Public Library, the Ottendorfer Branch, founded in 1884, still stands doing its job, on Second Avenue. The book ends with Hamill generously sharing his sources for readers wanting to continue learning about the city. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/04.]-Elaine Machleder, Bronx, NY Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Manhattan south of 42nd Street (with a handful of excursions north), rendered in all its delirious human evidence by veteran newsman Hamill (Forever, 2002, etc.). "New York," Hamill writes, "is a city of daily irritations, occasional horrors, hourly tests of will and even courage, and huge dollops of pure beauty." For this native son, it is also "infused with a mixture of memory, myth, lore, and history, bound together in an erratic, subjective way" by a man who has lived within the mysterious mixture of those elements. Hamill's delightful, informative, and elegantly shaded account starts with his mother, who took her children on excursions through Brooklyn and one day stopped while viewing the Manhattan skyline to say to her thunderstruck son, "You've seen it before . . . It's Oz." Our very own wizard then proceeds to take readers on a historically rich, memoir-laden walking tour of the area below Times Square, covering not just the architecture and anecdotes that grace each of the city's parishes, but their emotions, from greed to explosive anger. The city's continuous changes prompt what New Yorkers have come to recognize as their own special sense of nostalgia. "In some unplanned way," Hamill finds, "part of the Battery is now a necropolis." The current Trinity Church stands on the site of two previous houses of worship. The Commissioner's Plan of 1811 imposed "rigid order on wildness" with a street grid but could not truly impose technique over topography; Broadway, with its "honking velocity", simply ignores the grid as it angles southeast to northwest. Historian, geographer, and frequenter of emporia, Hamill revels in everything from the Jewish Rialto of Second Avenue to theonce-vibrant newspaper district of Park Row. Most of all, he hails a citizenry that refused to be lectured about sin and knew from the beginning that "the only way human beings could live together here was by practicing tolerance."A finely etched and hand-colored portrait from one of those rare reporters who has lived long and hard in his beat. Agent: Esther Newberg/ICM