Nobody calls it Dimes Square without modulating their voice like they’re quoting someone. Nobody calls this place Dimes Square because it’s not called Dimes Square. It’s a test. He’s testing me. He’s trying to see if I catch the reference.
I’m at a bar in Chinatown. I’m alone, but I still don’t want to get into it with this guy. We’ll probably have a lot in common. How awful.
“You live in the neighborhood?” he asks. I know it means Are you the kind of upbeat, motivated person who goes to different neighborhoods for variety’s sake or whatever, or are you actually cool?
Six years, I say. Seven, he replies, lifting his pint glass. Did you catch that? We just played a round of Who’s More Lower East Side. He who has lived here longest wins. This guy has me beat. But since my number was close to his, I still have relative cred.
It’s so stupid. If we really wanted to talk numbers, we’d have to go back—back before the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans were here, before the Chinese bachelors of the late 1800s came, before the Jewish and Eastern European immigration waves, before the Dutch farms and settlements of former slaves, all the way back to the Lenape who were here in Manhattan when da Verrazzano arrived in 1524, and even before then.
If that were the scale, then our six or seven years is laughable. Seven years of what—walking around paved streets? Is that what it means to belong here? We are a long way from what it once meant—to live until death in the place you were born, to have a relationship with the physical land, to depend on one place and one people for survival. We are far from that. Far from the actual canal this street is named after and the orchard that once stood north of it. Far from the dirt earth that, for most of history, had never been bought or sold. We are here, most of us on someone else’s land, and something isn’t quite right, though we have lost the sense to know what.
We could talk about things like this, but we don’t. Not directly anyway. You live in the neighborhood is the closest we’ve got. But when I hear those words, I don’t hear an invitation to converse about place and belonging. I hear Am I better than you? And who has more cred?
After the Lenape, capitalism has reigned here, and, like a slumlord, it’s left everything in disrepair. Including us. I look around this place and see beautiful, horrible people preoccupied with Am I richer, thinner, smarter? Are my politics better than yours? The struggle of life is reduced to I, me, mine. As if we are alone. How awful.
If instead we considered ourselves on a grander scale, the relative differences between us would fall away. We wouldn’t be concerned with outdoing each other. We’d be forced to admit we’re more similar than we realize. We’d be forced to admit we should probably come together, find common ground, help each other, maybe even solve the problems we share.
I thought about saying these things to the guy at the bar. But the words sounded lame, stupidly optimistic. We. The last time I said it out loud, it was in an odd register, as if I were quoting someone.
