Most well-adjusted New Yorkers will tell you that living in the city requires courage. It can be a promising place for jobs and opportunities, yes — but it can also be as unfair and unsafe as the movies make it out to be.
This is the New York my father, a born and raised Brooklynite, knows all too well. The New York he speaks about is unknown to me but still very real to him: a New York where you could buy a buttered roll and a cup of cocoa for fifty cents, and then play stick-ball in the street with the Irish kids. He talks about eating hot dogs on Coney Island while watching nuns stroll along Surf Avenue, and how later, the nuns at his own school would whack him for being naughty.
His neighborhood, Sunset Park, was once a well-populated area for Irish immigrants and their children. Today’s Sunset Park is unrecognizable to this description — with Google’s overview simplifying it as a “booming Chinatown” known for excellent dim-sum spots. The people who live there today wouldn’t know about the pubs my grandfather would frequent. They would not be able to visit the corner stores where my father bought his smokes and candy. And they couldn’t know the dozens of Irish-Americans that my father used to know. All of my dad’s family and friends have moved away to New Jersey, Staten Island, or Long Island.
He warns me of a Brooklyn that is long gone; a version of Brooklyn that is only in his head, now. The late writer, Vivian Gornick, claims that this phenomenon is when you become a true New Yorker: the knowledge of what was once occupying a space in this city. Like how New Yorkers of a certain generation may recall that midtown’s Met Lite building was once known as the Pan Am building. Stubbornly, people might continue to refer to it as the Pan Am building, too — also the mark of a true New Yorker.
But my dad would argue a more unromantic outlook: that being a New Yorker means living a lesser quality of life. It means danger, poverty, tragedy.
When I was a child, my dad would drive me past his local haunts (or whatever was now occupying that space) and he’d recount for me the tales about his youth. One moment, he’d be laughing about the time Tommy Mulligan “got his ass beat” for stealing cigarettes from the older kids. He’d point out a stoop where they all used to gather and eat Snoballs (the Hostess snack), which I found endearing and ridiculous: my dad eating some pink, coconut, confection in his worn-down sweater. He’d mention the holes in its fabric and its annual appearance in the yearbook — how he and his brothers were called dirtbags since they couldn’t always afford new clothes.
He’d share painful stories that were hard for me to imagine; stories you don’t fathom happening to your own father. There was one about him turning 5 or 6 and no one showing up to his birthday party. There was another about him and his brother being excluded from the neighborhood pool. My mom is particularly troubled by a story where my dad recounts being five and having a tremendous eye operation. My grandmother, out of pity, told him he could have anything he wanted afterward. She splurged on his one request : Oreos, which was pricey for his family at the time. Apparently, my dad got really sick from the Oreos and the medication … and he doesn’t eat Oreos to this day. Just another woe to add to the ongoing woes, I suppose.
His stories were so mesmerizing that their sudden slip into horror could be easily missed. He spoke about kidnappings and death as casually as one might say they ran into Sue at the grocery store. My dad would drive and point out an innocent stoop where they played cards — yet the next stoop would be the stoop that Catherine O’Connor was abducted from, and then the police found her body in the river. And then he’d just move on from it, not really touching it other than to say “You should never live here. I hate this city.”
I’m not a native New Yorker; my dad worked hard to get his family out of Brooklyn (and thrilled to set roots in Connecticut, where my mom is from). So you can imagine his anger and frustration when I chose a Manhattan college — and his ongoing anger and frustration that I have chosen to stay here, post-college.
For the last eight years, my father reminds me often that the city is a terrible place. “Horrible. I don’t know why you’d want to live there when you could live in Connecticut with the sheeps and dogs.”
“The sheep?”
“You know, all the critters here. Like how I see that big heron fly over our yard? You can’t get that in New York. I just don’t know why you guys want to live there. It’s so dangerous.” And then he reminds me of the dangers, some real and some inventive, all the while stressing that he doesn’t want his little girl in the city anymore.
I remind him of my work, and my friends, and the fact that I met my husband here. That Aleksa is also a city kid in his own regard: born and raised in Belgrade. Also, that I’m not a little girl anymore.
“Well you should be here, anyway,” he says. And then there’s a pause, which I know is because he is taking a long drag of a cigarette. My father seems to be the only person I know in 2024 who still smokes cigarettes in cars and indoors and all day long. “I’m gonna quit,” he says, and then moves on to some equally insane story that he drops on me so casually that when he hangs up, I don’t know what to do with myself. (Usually, I begin pacing around until I’m no longer unsettled.)
Now that Aleksa and I are visiting suburban, rural Connecticut for the holidays, the question of “So when will you guys leave New York?” happens quite a bit. The truth is, we don’t know if we will stay in New York forever or just for a few more years. We don’t know where we want to live or who we want to be.
One thing, I think, is certain — no sheep.
Yours cumulatively,
That American Girl
That American Girl 
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