Nothing is forever. This should be simple enough to remember, but the reminders come quickly in New York. There was a time when I thought Ludlow Street’s Max Fish in the Lower East Side would be a bar I’d be going to for the rest of my life—now I’m four years sober and Max Fish is gone, replaced by a gourmet chicken and waffles spot called Sweet Chick. Ludlow Street as a whole is virtually unrecognizable from the days when I used to hang out there until the break of dawn. Dive bars and tattoo parlors have been replaced by upscale boutiques as well as luxury residences for the type of people who shop at those kinds of places. (At least Katz’s Delicatessen doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.)
This is not a phenomenon that is unique to New York City, of course, but it seems to take place here more often and at a more accelerated pace than anywhere else. Over the course of mere weeks an entire block can be transformed—places that seemed to be a permanent part of the landscape swept away in a fit of rebuilding. This is not always a bad thing. New York is not only the city that never sleeps, it’s the city that never stays the same. Not for long, anyway. Finding a fantastic new restaurant that wasn’t there the week before is amazing. Then again, finding out your favorite restaurant has suddenly become yet another Starbucks or Chase bank is awful. Call that part corporation gentrification.
The overall message this sends is to not get too comfortable. Rising rents means you may have to move more than you’d like, and the transience of restaurants and bars means becoming a regular—unless you frequent someplace like McSorley’s, which has literally been there since the Civil War—isn’t guaranteed. But is this such a bad thing? New York City has never been a city for the passive, and it’s only appropriate that the city itself be as dynamic as its residents. Maybe one feeds off the other.
Again, this happens everywhere. Everyone knows the feeling of going back to their hometown, or their college town, and noticing changes and absences. But only in New York does this happen so often that it’s essentially an urban renewal perpetual motion machine. Forget Paris, which has parts virtually unchanged since the Middle Ages, New York City has changed far more and far more often than Boston, which was actually founded six years after NYC but seems far more aged. There’s no need to go away to experience the change either, although someone returning to NYC after an extended time away with little access to media—from, say, the 1989 of Do The Right Thing—would be appalled to discover CBGB had become a John Varvatos boutique and Times Square a giant candy shop-slash-theme park.
But even with all that’s gone, from Max Fish and Motor City to ‘Inoteca and Sorella, overall it’s worth it. Not being able to get comfortable is in itself comfortable somehow—as the new replaces the old, you’re forced to acknowledge the fact that you too will suffer the same fate. The city is like a human body, the general shape remains more or less the same even as all the individual cells are replaced again and again. It’s a lesson in Zen, a permanent monument to impermanence. Heck, even Madison Square Garden has been rebuilt four times.
So the answer to how to live happily in NYC is the one that perhaps a Zen master would give on how to live happily, period: Live in the now. Accept and appreciate what’s here today, as it may not be tomorrow. Remember the past, but don’t stress yourself by trying to recreate it. And if there’s a bar you’ve been meaning to try forever, maybe go there tonight. Because you just never know.
Russ Bengtson is a Senior Staff Writer who lives on the Lower East Side. Follow him at @russbengtson.
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