Want to See Change You Can Believe In? Try New York!

President-Elect Barack Obama Thursday spoke to the nation's deep economic woes with a plan involving tax cuts and stimuli to the tune of $775 billion dollars. Already, some of his allies in the Senate are picking it apart, and some commentators say it's not enough. Hey, Rome wasn't built in a day!

Obama is trying to create the change he talked about so often in his campaign, that is, a change in the nation's sense of itself. Yet, as I found out quite by accident last night, there's change, and then there's the change you feel when you walk through a New York City neighborhood that used to be your stomping grounds.

I had a meeting with a friend at a spot on Manhattan's Upper West Side.



As I came out of the subway, I realized I was early, way too early to expect my friend to be at our meeting place. So I decided to walk around a little. I headed up Broadway, past buildings that were so familiar, but their ground floor storefronts had changed, and changed profoundly.

The diner that used to sit in the middle of one block was long gone. It became famous as the source of a recurring skit on Saturday Night Live. Also gone was the movie house that was one block up. The Shopwell supermarket, the Ideal restaurant, the hot dog joint on the corner of 110th St. all a part of my distant past. When I started walking, my steps had no real destination in mind.

Yet as I kept on, I knew where I'd end up up. It was the block, 109th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave. Once upon a time, it was my second home.



Suddenly, names I hadn't thought about in years came flooding back. So too did the incredible diversity that neighborhood came to represent, and still does, despite the obvious changes. Gus, and his brother Victor lived in the building on the corner. Ricky, the only Venezuelan on the block, lived a couple of doors down. I passed a small playground, and remembered that my boys Clean Gene and Sailor 109 got busted there, for what I can't even remember.

And then, even though at first I couldn't remember the exact building, I saw number 215. That was where Juan and his mother Carmen lived, along with the Castro brothers. There was a time we considered it our building, even though we didn't live there. Carmen always opened her apartment to us, and it was there that I learned to love Latin music in all its forms. On Saturday nights we would set out from that apartment on the second floor, sometimes three or four of us, sometimes a dozen.

There was Johnny the Gambler, Shorty, Spongy, Monkey, Candy, Jamie,and of course, my closest friend Wilfred. We'd set out for parties uptown, in the Bronx or Washington Heights. And always, we'd end up at four or five o'clock in the morning back at 215. Now, in real time, I stood looking at my past.

I continued on to the end of the block, then headed back down Amsterdam Ave. Where once the street was dotted with bodegas and small Dominican businesses, change had come as well. Some of the same stores where I used to buy my favorite soda (Good-O Cola Champagne. 39 cents a quart) were still there, but now they co-exist with bistros featuring exposed brick and flat screen televisions, most tuned to either CNBC or ESPN (sports or bad economic news, take your choice). I'd resolved to head back toward my meeting, but again my mind turned my feet toward one more place.

I headed east, across 108th St., where the schoolyard behind the Booker T. Washington Jr. High School (or just plain Booker T) stretched almost half the block. Across the street from that yard was a small vest pocket playground we used to call "The Little Park". For some reason, I had to see it again. And there it was, now called "The Anibal Aviles Playground". A large Parks Dept. sign proclaimed "This Park Closes at Dusk".

The benches were still in the back, but it was wishful thinking to believe they were the same ones we used to sit on and solve
the problems of the world. The place was empty, as it should have been since it was well after dark, but still, I drifted back to nights we'd be there, even in the cold, talking, cracking on girls passing by, sharing various libations (don't ask), and trying to figure out what to do with our young lives.

It was getting close to the time of my meeting. I turned, crossed the street, and walked back toward Broadway. The neighborhood had changed, as does just about everything in New York.



The people I spent those times with many years ago are long gone, just like the Olympia Diner. But the mist of memory remains, time stamped in a corner of your brain.

As the nation seeks change, it's good to remember, even on a cold New York City night.

Leave a comment - what are your memories of the area you grew up and how it's changed?