Over the years I have written something like eighty-five books, novels, short stories, and even a few picture books. Though I have lived for significant periods in many large cities: Chicago, Providence, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Denver, London, and Venice, my childhood was spent in New York City. But when I visit — rarely now — I’m very comfortable there. What I most enjoy is walking about and just looking, taking it all in. As my grandfather used to say, “They will never finish building the city.”
I loved (still do) to ride the Subways. I was about seven years old when I began to ride them alone, often working my way to the first car, so I could watch the endless fascinating tunnels with their ever-changing safety lights and passing trains roaring by. When in high school I rode them every day.
Although I have not lived there for something like fifty years I confess, I still consider myself a New Yorker. So it’s no surprise that ten of my books have meaningful New York City settings.
My forthcoming book — Lost in the Empire City — is set in 1911 New York. It treats of the love of family, immigration, the Lower East Side, the West Side, crime, and corruption — often common New York themes. [“Empire City” is but one of the city’s nicknames said to have been first coined by, of all people, George Washington.]
The novel takes place in the first decade of the twentieth century when there were still more horse-drawn vehicles than motor cars. It also references the subway system, which first began running in 1904, and was still relatively new. That first decade was also a time of massive immigration. Indeed, the Lower East Side was perhaps the most densely crowded city area in the world, with a gigantic and packed tenement population. There was also great wealth, extreme poverty, and bad health. Corruption and crime were rampant.
The Lower East Side was the area in which my immigrant forefathers came and lived. After I finished my mid-west college years I returned to New York and eked out a living, of sorts, in that same Lower East Side, along one of those alphabet avenues, A, B, C — I know longer know which. As I tried to be a professional writer — I was writing plays in those days — I lived in a fifth-floor walk-up, tiny two-room apartment, which might well have been there in the early twentieth century. The bathtub was in the small kitchen, and when I put a board over the tub, I had my table. Why was I living there?
As I recall the rent was thirty-two dollars a month. At some point, one of my college friends moved in. I would later move uptown, where the rent was sixty-five dollars.
So, all-in-all, the writing of Lost in the Empire City was like a return to my old home, not without its stresses, but considerable comfort and joy all the same. It has always been an adventure for me. It still is. Hardly a surprise this new book is an adventure, stretching from rural Italy to the sidewalks and fire escapes of New York City.
Here’s hoping you’ll visit.