When I Loved New York

Will Mamdani bring back the city I remember? Can anyone?

I unpacked a box in the basement and photographed the remains of a life.

A notebook from the New York Daily News, where I earned $40,000 a year in my first job out of college: a job that later became an unpaid internship and now is probably done by AI. A Nokia cell, used for making calls: what else could a phone do? A card for a video store in Astoria, where I paid $900 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.

And the object that shifts Before to After: a keychain adorned with the flag, the Statue of Liberty, and God Bless America. I don’t know where I got it. But I know when: September 12, 2001. I attached it to my purse and wore it without irony, for a time.

At the Daily News, I worked in the “web room” with the other twentysomethings. Our job was to put a replica of the print paper online. This was a monotonous task performed between the hours of 7 pm and 3 am, but I didn’t complain. A job was a job. The nights left my days free to explore New York City, and I did so with abandon.

I rode subways to every borough, getting off at random stops just to see what was there. I experienced everything firsthand because no other experience was possible: Google Streetview was not there to deter or entice. The streets of New York were paved in serendipity.

In 2002, I felt the ground shift: the march of corporate CHUD out of the sewers and into the boardrooms. New York’s criminal underground had risen to the top. The FBI, which had investigated transnational organized crime in the late 1990s and early 2000s, abandoned that pursuit after 9/11 for a narrow focus on Islamic terrorism.

Ordinary New Yorkers paid the price in both freedom and in cash, as prices rose to reflect the white-collar crime economy. The New York I loved was vanishing. It was destroyed not in a day by the 9/11 attacks, but over years by post-9/11 greed: the soaring costs of rent, public services, entertainment, and more.

The city was pricing its diverse residents out when not surveilling them on baseless grounds. The anonymity of the crowd was replaced by the ubiquity of the police. A corrupt mayor, Giuliani, asked for elections to be canceled so he could stay in power. Unsuccessful, he helped install a billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, as his replacement.

That was when I decided to leave. I took a souvenir: my Daily News co-worker, who I married after we quit.

* * *

Everyone who lived in New York City has a variation on the “why I left” tale. But my time there was unusually tumultuous: 2000-2003. I had one “normal” year and two years dominated by the worst attack on US soil in history. I worked at a tabloid that both documented sacrifice and normalized corruption. I captioned photos of firefighter funerals and I uploaded Iraq War propaganda.

I still explored the city. But now subway signs told me to report on strangers, to view New Yorkers not with curiosity but suspicion. I felt plutocrats grasping at my grief, gathering it like clay for the foundation of a new city — a worse city.

It was a far cry from the halcyon days of 2000. One of my main tasks at the Daily News was posting photos. We had three divisions: news, features, and sports. Everyone worked on all three, except for me, after I guilelessly inserted a photo of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill where baseball guy Paul O’Neill was supposed to be. “SARAH IS NOT ALLOWED ON SPORTS!” became the mantra of every night manager.

Despite my well-deserved ban, there was a sports story that caught my interest. Baseball player John Rocker made headlines in 2000 for insulting the 7 train and the people who rode it — and then New York City itself.

“The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners,” he said. “You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there.”

“But that’s the best thing about New York!” I exclaimed to my coworkers, and it remains true. I have never experienced the incredible diversity of languages and cultures and food in such a compact space, especially in Queens, my favorite borough. It’s why I thought I would never leave.

I had to, though. I could not afford to stay on my salary. I moved to one fallen imperial capital — Istanbul — and then another — St. Louis. I wondered if New York would buckle under its corrupt excess and join them as a fellow city of faded grandeur. I wondered if it would allow the dignity of ruins. I wanted proof I had not invented the New York in my mind.

When I returned in the 2010s, New York had transformed into bland rows of luxury stores and banks. When I returned in 2022 to do a book event at The Strand, it was a fledgling technocracy of QR codes and digital currency.

The city’s tangible quality, the literal feeling of New York, had been scrubbed clean, eliminated like newsprint. I hid in The Strand, an old store surrounded by old books, like it was a holy bunker.

I returned one last time in 2023 to see my daughter play violin at Carnegie Hall. Behind me were rows of seats named after the oligarchs I condemned in my books.

Maybe this is why the media doesn’t grasp the depth of corruption, I thought. The bad guys bought the whole town.

* * *

On Tuesday, I woke at 3 am to discover that Zohran Mamdani was mayor. His win was attributed to blue-collar, young, and immigrant voters. People who will be here for the future regardless of whether overlords have deemed them worthy of one. People who have no choice but to fight for that future with all they’ve got.

I turned on his victory speech. Mamdani immediately mentioned Eugene Debs, the socialist politician, and I laughed, thinking, Oh, he’s gonna get shit for that!

By chance, I had spent the afternoon eating Halloween candy and binge-watching Family Ties, because I’ve apparently decided to live up to the ideal of adulthood I had when I was six. The Family Ties episode was about how Alex P. Keaton, young Republican, learned to appreciate and defend the speeches of Eugene Debs, even though Debs was a socialist. I wondered if a show with this plot could air now. I wondered if Bari Weiss was burning Family Ties reels on the Paramount lot.

I closed my eyes, hoping the relief of a Cuomo-less political world would lull me to sleep, but was jolted by Mamdani’s shout-out to “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.” I had never heard an American politician mention Uzbeks outside the confines of terrorism. It was a welcome change.

You may think I’m focusing on trivialities. Of course I am: he’s been the mayor-elect for twelve hours. I learned the hard way, through Obama and “The Squad” and every other charismatic sell-out, that actions matter more than words. Election Day is but a day. The structural stranglehold of the mafia state can undo the will of the people. When Mamdani is in office, I will judge him by his deeds.

What right do you have to judge, Missouri yokel? the political cult may scoff. For one, New York is an international city. I would like to see if Mamdani makes good on his promise to, for example, arrest war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit.

But mostly I want New Yorkers to get what’s theirs: affordable housing, accessible food, free transportation, and respect.

Respect for ordinary people is the main quality stripped away from New York in the decades I was gone. In those decades, New York uplifted a large number of extremely corrupt characters: Trump, Giuliani, Cuomo, Bloomberg, Bernard Kerik, Eric Adams, and Jeffrey Epstein, to name a few. They were given glory that they did not deserve.

They made headlines — or with teams of PR professionals replacing media, the headlines made them. But the regular people who have long made New York a dynamic place were denied opportunity. They were overwhelmed with the struggle for survival and sneered at by the politicians who are supposed to serve them.

Throughout his campaign, Mamdani treated New Yorkers with respect. His behavior was greeted with shock, and then appreciation. Whether it translates into policy remains to be seen, but it translated into votes — and, hopefully, into a cultural shift that goes far beyond one politician.

* * *

Dick Cheney, whose shadow loomed over the New York I inhabited, died the morning Mamdani was elected. It felt like an omen of transformation, as did the annihilation of the Cuomo dynasty. A new chapter to end the dark prologue of the 21st century.

But I cannot let myself believe it. It’s too early. I’m packing my longing away with my Nokia and my notebook and my 9/11 keychain and my extinct video store card from the now expensive Astoria, home to wealthy professionals like Mamdani.

Much as my old job turned into unpaid labor, my $900 Astoria apartment now rents for around $3000. To my shock, this is considered cheap in some New York circles. Mamdani was criticized for living in a $2300 a month Astoria apartment allegedly meant for poor people. I cannot fathom how any poor person could afford a $2300 apartment. In this way, I am content to be an outsider to New York.

But I am not an outsider to the corruption crisis: no American is. I know what it’s like to dream and what it’s like to be betrayed.

Look into the crowd at the Mamdani rallies and you see glimmers of the old New York, a skyline of light shining in their eyes. You see that gleam and don’t know if it will turn to triumph or tears, and that’s the trick.

I want Mamdani to be the man they believe he is. I want New Yorkers to be the people they dream of being. I can picture a better world even if I am uncertain. I pack that vision away with my mementos too — not because I don’t believe in its promise, but because I want to keep it safe.

What is New York’s past, if not possibility?

* * *

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I took this photo in 2020 when I was cleaning out my basement during the “shelter in place” era of the pandemic. I found other items from my New York years, like a deck of cards autographed by the guy who played “Big Pussy” on The Sopranos. I have no idea how I got it or when I met Vincent Pastore. That is the magic of New York I want restored!

Signing books at The Strand in 2022.