Elsewhere On-Screen

When we reached the Regency Theater on Broadway and Sixty-Eighth Street, I saw that The Apartment was playing. My decision was instantaneous. As for hers, who knows why she consented—because I coaxed her into joining me, or because she had nothing better to do that night. I’ll never know, nor did I ask. I loved the Regency, where old double features were still being played, frequently to a full house, and I loved the shape of the theater itself, which wasn’t rectangular but circular. There was a sense of intimate coziness inside, in good part because one felt in the company of people who shared a love for vintage films, which is perhaps nothing more than a love for things that endure despite their age. Later that night, I walked Maggie home and we said goodbye in her lobby.

But what stayed with me ever since that evening was the echo, the reflux and hazy after-presence of the film. It lingered all night and into the following week.

After leaving Maggie, I did not want to go back home and, even past midnight, continued to wander around the Upper West Side in the mid-Seventies and high Sixties, perhaps looking for the apartment and trying to see if the world inhabited by its characters continued to exist more than two and a half decades later. Without knowing it, I was headed on an improvised pilgrimage, the sort that many people take when they travel to the site of a film or of a novel they’ve loved and whose resonance continues to hover over their lives, almost beckoning them to slip into a world that suddenly feels more real and far more compelling than their own. It’s not just that they want the movie to stay with them indefinitely, they want to borrow the lives of its characters—because they want the story to happen to them, or better yet, the film feels as though it has already happened to them and what they’re asking the site to do for them is to help them relive what they’ve just lived through on-screen.

So here I was walking on the Upper West Side at night feeling not too different from C. C. Baxter on evenings when someone is using his apartment and he is forced to linger out in the cold. All I could find, though, was not the old Upper West Side of 1960, which I was hoping to drift into somehow, but one that was systematically being revamped and modernized. So many small, insignificant landmarks had already vanished or had their impending disappearance written all over their storefronts—groceries, bakeries, butchers, cobblers, fruit and vegetable vendors, drugstores large and small, delicatessens, and hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop stores—to say nothing of the disappearance of so many neighborhood movie theaters. Now, more than thirty years after I took that walk past midnight, I want to list all these vanished theaters because I don’t want them forgotten: the Paramount, Cinema Studios, the Embassy, the Beacon, the New Yorker, the Riviera and the Riverside, the Midtown, the Edison, the Olympia, and of course the Regency. The Thalia and the Symphony still exist today, but gone are the days of continuous film runs. And as for the Midtown, renamed Metro, it was gutted a number of years ago and remains an empty shell still.

That night, as I walked around on Columbus Avenue, which was being heavily gentrified and had once been quite a dicey area, I kept passing boutique stores that hadn’t been there a few weeks before but whose earlier incarnation I no longer could even recall and felt guilty for not remembering. Maybe I’d been noticing changes in the neighborhood for longer than I knew, but only after seeing the film and the way it seemed to coddle its own tranquil, mildly shabby image of an Upper West Side that no longer existed was I made aware of how pervasive and irreversible these changes were.

A new Manhattan was creeping into existence. The very store where I’d bought my first pair of American sneakers had disappeared. Gone as well were the Syrian bodega where cigarettes were cheaper than anywhere else in the city, and the numberless incense Botanica stores on Amsterdam Avenue—vanished, each one.