Pete Hamill Recalls His Storied Downtown

By Jean Passanante
POSTED FEBRUARY 1, 2008

As Pete Hamill stood before an adoring audience packed into the magnificently restored Broad Street Ballroom one rainy evening last month, the painted images of two towering commercial ships from early last century rose behind him like the ghosts of New York’s past. It was a fitting backdrop to the enlightening, funny, sometimes elegiac history of Downtown that the 71-year-old novelist, essayist, and seasoned journalist was there to tell about his native city.

To Hamill, who makes him home on Walker Street in Tribeca, Downtown is Manhattan’s heart and its origin. And his talk, this season’s first offering of the Downtown Alliance’s “Downtown Third Thursdays” lecture series, was like a stroll through its streets with a genial host, pleased to share his observations and memories.

“Looking at this mural reminds me of…the period when the harbor ruled,” Hamill said, speaking in the measured cadence of a born storyteller. “When we fed off the energy of the harbor and of the people who came in and out of it—some of them bone poor, and some of them immensely rich—coming into the piers of our city, and building it into the place we have now.”

Commerce, made possible by the harbor, was New York’s reason for being, said Hamill, as well as the source of its particular character. “We had the good fortune that the city was started by a company—not a religious sect, not a king. And the men who ran that company [the Dutch West India Company] were practical men. They knew they would have trouble getting people to come to this forlorn little settlement on the tip of Manhattan Island, so they took everybody.”

Tolerance was necessary to supply the workforce, and tolerance brought diversity. Thirty years after the Dutch first built the wall on Wall Street, there were 18 languages spoken in New York. “The Dutch cut the template,” Mr. Hamill said, for this multicultural city, leading [after the American Revolution] to the founding of St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, the first Catholic parish in New York, as well as to the city’s first synagogue.

“The Dutch were setting up a system that allowed you to live in a city with people that were not like you. But it was not utopia.” Especially not for the African slaves. The old slave market stood at the east end of Wall Street, and slavery was not abolished in New York until the 1820s.

The wave of Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigration that crested in the late 19th and early 20th centuries changed New York—and America—forever, asserted Hamill, himself the son of Irish immigrants from Belfast. Raised in Brooklyn, the oldest of seven children, he cited the origins of his lifelong love affair with the city. Reading from his 2004 homage to the city, “Downtown: My Manhattan,” he recalled a fateful walk with his mother to the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. From there he caught his first thrilling glimpse of the towering spires of downtown Manhattan, and he believed (as his mother told him) that it was Oz. The deeply etched laugh lines around his sharp blue eyes crinkled as he described how the young reporter who would later become the editor in chief of both the New York Post and New York Daily News, learned his way around.

 “I got to know the city because there were dead bodies in certain alleys that had to be written about.”

Despite his knowledge of the city’s grittier side, New York for Mr. Hamill is still Oz. “It’s a place of infinite magic,” he said.

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