I woke up at 6 in the little hotel we’re at. It’s the Larchmont, on 11th St. between 5th and 6th avenues, just between the East Village and the Village proper, a neighborhood of quietly luxurious flats and thousands of students who attend the neighborhood colleges: Parsons Design School, The New School for Social Research, NYU, and more.
It’s a European-style hotel, with small simple rooms and a shared bathroom and shower down the hall. It’s cheap (a little over a hundred a night) but clean and charming. Continental breakfast is included in the price of the hotel. It’s served in a small breakfast room that looks very much like the one in the Paris hotel I stayed in last spring when I was there to review an art show. There are other hotels like this in the Village and Chelsea–like the Washington Square Hotel, the Chelsea Lodge–and I much prefer them to the three and four hundred a night posh palaces around Times Square.
They’re also full of interesting people who have all sorts of reasons to be in New York. In this hotel there’s a young very tall couple, also very pregnant, from Marseilles; there’s a Senegalese bellman who likes to chat (also very tall); and there’s Irwin D., an elderly man who was raised in New York but who’s spent his life teaching the history of ideas in Berlin and London.
When I went down to the lobby of the hotel (where the WiFi is) to sit on the couch and type, he was coming down for breakfast. The door stuck (it is a very old building) so I opened it for him. He was complimentary about my smile, and we fell into a conversation. He’d been, the night before, to a free concert by a great organist at the church on the corner of 11th, playing Bach and Buxtehude, and recommended such free chamber concerts in churches as a great opportunity in New York: often very fine music is offered, "especially by the High Church Episcopalians, because they can afford it," he noted with gentle wit.
He told the story of how he ended up at University College in London by way of Berlin–a little too long to retell here–but it involved the politics of the sixties, and was a reminder that the most radical among us often, now, have the whitest hair.
His stories evoked an era, for me, when everything seemed possible, when real change in the world seemed both possible and necessary. What happened? Could it happen again?
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