slavin: Frank Horvath image via retronewyork. Earlier today,...

slavin:

Frank Horvath image via retronewyork.

Earlier today, caro:

“Have you ever lived in the suburbs? It’s sterile. It’s nothing. It’s wasting your life.” - Ed Koch

I was a little kid when Koch was the mayor. He was the mayor for longer than I was a kid. His was the New York I grew up in.



I remember his city as bankrupt, dark for days in ‘77, garbage strikes — garbage strikes — I remember seeing buildings on fire with firemen who avoided them because they might get shot, discovering my dad carried a tactical knife in his architect’s suit, and how shaken he was when a suicide diving out of a midtown window missed him by inches. I remember, at 10 years old, walking with him in Times Square when a prostitute offered services to both of us. I had no idea that there were other ways to live.



It’s not like I grew up hard, but Ed Koch’s New York was hard, make no mistake, and I remember that even in the middle-class half-suburbs of the Bronx, not everything was pretty, and not everything was healthy, but it was life, it was breathing, and you had everything to remind you that animals devour whatever stops moving. Everything to remind you that humans could build this fucking thing, and humans could wreck it, and there was romance in all of that, in both those impulses.



I’m departing New York in a substantive way this weekend, on my way to MIT’s Media Lab, living primarily in Boston or Cambridge or I don’t know what. I don’t know where I’ll live there, or what it will be like. But it won’t be like Ed Koch’s New York. Hell, New York isn’t like Ed Koch’s New York.



But what he said is true now like it was true then, and I’m saying goodbye to Ed Koch today, and New York this weekend, and I’ll miss him and his city with my whole heart. Rest In Peace, Mister Mayor, and the city you kept running. It’s running still.

via Tumblr http://thenelsontwins.tumblr.com/post/42038928616