I’m linking to this old post from when I used to write on LiveJournal, just because I ran across it and I still like it. It begins:
Joan Didion’s 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That,” about falling in love with New York in her twenties and falling back out by her thirties, has a line about “those of us who came from places… where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions,” and I know exactly what she means because I came to New York in my twenties from a place where all those streets were just ideas, and I’d add Broadway to the list, because it means “Theater” the way those others mean, per Didion, “‘Money’ and ‘High Fashion’ and ‘The Hucksters.’”
It wasn’t just the abstractions, but the bewildering fact that all these fictional settings from movies and books were real. I read The Cricket in Times Square before I had any other idea what Times Square was, and I read about hiding in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and later I saw the United Nations in North by Northwest and Central Park in Annie Hall. And there are so many other pieces of New York that I don’t even remember where I first saw them but it wasn’t in real life, that’s for sure.
And then it continues.
