Growing up in the early 1970s, New York City had a particular smell that hung in the air in a hazy soup of smoky white. It was the residue from decades past, neglect and apathy. Graffiti-stained subway trains emerged from River Avenue and Yankee Stadium roaring atop faded green girders pockmarked with rust.
Crime, corruption, and unemployment were at all-time highs. The city was so broke even the federal government didn’t want to help out. New Yorkers must have felt like the rest of the country gave up on them. As if the whole city had become incorrigible and unredeemable.
But as a kid, I saw a different place.
I saw mysterious streets with sneakers hanging from overhead power lines. Who put them up there? And why? A piece of flare for a non-descript neighborhood block.
Every summer afternoon there were sun-seared streets sprayed down by a nearby fire hydrant. People with wild hair and crazy clothes doing very normal things like walking down the sidewalk.
And the Subways were underground kingdoms all bathed in hot stagnant light. 
Each station was a gateway in and out of another mythical place. Pelham. Parkchester. Castle Hill. Kingsbridge. People waiting on platforms carrying tiny radios that sputtered melodic static from the O’Jays and The Spinners.
Every night held a sparkling confetti of neon light from my 9th floor living room window. Car horns, below, drowned out by cheers from every Yankee night game. Streetlamps sprinkled white powdered light onto the sideways and tree covered paths across the street in Joyce Kilmer Park.
It’s hard to explain, but when the city’s alabaster night glow switched to orange-bronze, this was a line of demarcation in my past. As the city’s maintenance workers swapped out the light bulbs in every streetlamp, I felt the city changing, gentrifying itself over time. So many abandoned lots, burned-out buildings, and rusty bridges were becoming construction sites with high fencing and tarp. POST NO BILLS was very popular signage.
In 1978, my father had been approved for a home mortgage to move us from the Bronx to the Long Island suburbs. There were no bodegas in the village of Holbrook. No subways. No bridges or rivers. No honking yellow cabs. The tallest building for miles around had three floors. And every sidewalk was clean white. The only empty lots in our new neighborhood had the foundations of new homes being built.
By the time the moving truck had arrived downstairs, my youthful wonder for New York had gone away. It was slowly replaced with the knowledge that the things that bedazzled me as a child were all bad things and unworthy of fascination.
But now I’m almost 50 and part of me longs to see a neighborhood wino with a brown paper bag of malt liquor telling kids to stop fooling around on the corner and get home before it gets dark.
NYC 6th Borough 