Office workers will pick a neighborhood clean. Like rain-forest villagers, they explore the surrounding jungle and ply the gathering grounds. Sometimes the local establishments go out of business, but mostly they enter the rotation and stay there. A routine settles in—coffee here, burger there, Citibank, Duane Reade, the salty snacks at Jimmy’s Corner, the pork bellies at Szechuan Gourmet. If you’re the type to count the steps you take each morning on the trek from apartment to subway platform (third I-beam in, rear car), and then on to lobby and desk, you find that the number hardly varies. After a while, you stop looking around.
Looming absence makes the eye grow keener. Last week, the staff of The New Yorker made its final preparations to leave 4 Times Square, its headquarters for the past fifteen years, to join the rest of Condé Nast, the parent company, down at 1 World Trade Center, the new megatower in lower Manhattan. The move took place over the weekend. Suddenly, in the days leading up to it, you savored some of the things that you’d taken for granted. A lunchtime walk west for a mandoo bowl led past the Lyric and the big blown-up posters of the dance numbers from “On the Town”: all this time, Broadway, right under our noses. The International Center of Photography gift shop, the surfing videos outside Quiksilver*, the elevators at the Marriott. O Bank of America security guard, in thy geriatric shades!
Your fondness for the neighborhood the magazine is leaving behind might depend on when you got here or what version of it sticks in the mind. The New Yorker has been in the area for all ninety of its years, but many, if not most, of us have known only the 4 Times Square chapter. Some, as teen-agers in the nineteen-eighties, oblivious of the existence of a Mr. Shawn, might have seen Times Square as a place to buy nunchuks, get mugged, or sneak into a movie house to see Vanessa del Rio. Or else, younger still, we know only the millennial theme-park edition, purified of porn by Rudolph Giuliani and of cars (on some blocks) by Michael Bloomberg, but a gantlet still, if you object to the molestations of sooty Elmos and lumpy Spider-Men, or find sad the forbearing expressions of tourists who can’t remember why they felt it necessary to come here. Then, there are the islands of safety—the Red Flame diner, say, still sincere in spite of a series of face-lifts, or the Kinokuniya Japanese bookstore, across from Bryant Park, a place to browse books without feeling any guilt about not reading them. And Bryant Park itself, with its pétanque courts and the crazy haphazard arrangements of bistro chairs. It smarts a bit to think of such spots out of our lives, like kids off at college.
As for the older stomping grounds, the lore hangs around. Before 4 Times Square and the decade or so at 20 West Forty-third Street, the magazine spent more than fifty years at 25 West Forty-third Street. That’s the building with the “Literary Landmark” plaque out front, which, backward-runningly, depicts the place as having been a Luddites’ den: “Characteristic of the magazine was a suspicion of advanced technology.” Brendan Gill, describing the office’s “bureaucratic squalor,” called it “penitentiary-like,” but more beguiling is what went on outside the prison walls, in the old Theatre District haunts: the Algonquin, the Century, the Teheran; Joe Mitchell and A. J. Liebling at the Red Devil, dining on baby squid; all the editors dressed up and out every night for dinner and a show, under the watchful eyes of policemen on horseback. It was acceptable in those days to pass a woman on the street and say, “Great hat.” The whole publishing industry was basically within a one-mile radius, to the printed word what Wall Street was to capital formation or Hollywood to motion pictures. (It’s funny that there was never really a commensurate term for it, unless you count “New York.”) There was squalor, to be sure, but what passes down is a sense of glamour and exaltation of a kind that you won’t find in the Times Square of Red Lobster and the Naked Cowboy. In the end, it’s not that hard to leave.
Frankly, it was harder to get ready to leave. As a prelude to the move, the staff, told that it would have to travel light, spent weeks purging offices of the detritus of the decades. Some of it was easy to bid goodbye to: here and there a shrine of exotic booze (flask of Ugandan banana gin, anyone?) or a Cornell-box assemblage of promotional doodads. The things we keep around! But mostly it was paper, whole forests’ worth. Thousands upon thousands of orphaned books, some hoarded for novelty appeal, or a nascent interest, or a bygone assignment, or out of allegiance to (or guilt about) writer friends—an “accretion of intention,” as one acquaintance put it—were trucked off to Housing Works and the like. Many more perfectly good books were sent to their doom, like so many unclaimed stray dogs. (An uncommercial thought: a secondhand bookshop called Perfectly Good Books.)
Meanwhile, bins arrived empty and left bulging with the chaff from cabinets and drawers full of interview transcripts, Nexis printouts, page proofs, fan mail, hate mail, expense receipts, collegial gags, and photocopies of the faces of now grown toddlers smushed on the photocopier glass. The process felt a little like going through the belongings of a dead loved one, except that the dead loved one was you. What was worth saving? Not as much as you’d anticipated, once you got into the spirit of paperlessness. Pile up those mine carts with fool’s gold. The thing that’s worth keeping is the thing you do next.
This week, our first downtown, we’re exiting unfamiliar subway stations via the wrong stairwells and blinking in a strange abundance of daylight and saltier air. Our new offices are tidy, now that we’ve got through the purge. Our step may be a little springier, since we’ve lightened the weight (blessed or not) of our history. The disorientation that attends the first night in a new apartment may stay with us for weeks, especially when we’re thirty-eight floors up, but we’ll make the place our own before long. We’ll hoard new stuff. Not far off are Chinatown, Governors Island, and Wall Street’s narrow shadowy tributaries, with oddball shops in the eddies, glimpses of old New York. It will be cool to watch the summer storms roll in. ♦
*An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of the surf shop.
