The East Vil­lage seemed dead Tues­day. 2nd Ave strikes me as New York’s answer to South Street in cer­tain respects. One the one hand you’ve got places like Lit, on the oth­er you’ve got strip mall reg­u­lars like Cold Stone Cream­ery. I had­n’t been up for a vis­it since last sum­mer, but since then so much has changed: Cedar Tav­ern closed last Decem­ber, TLA closed in Jan­u­ary, yet some­how Maryan­ne’s returned? New York is an ever-chang­ing city, but right now some­thing’s just not right.

I remem­bered more tourists. Peo­ple vis­it New York when they can afford to and you find vis­i­tors every­where. Down­town had nev­er been as big an attrac­tion as uptown, where you find muse­ums and the park, but since 9/11 all of the finan­cial dis­trict was crawl­ing with peo­ple look­ing to find “the hole.” I’m still try­ing to see the mor­bid humor in how “tourists” in pre-Giu­liani NYC used to wan­der around Times Square try­ing to find “the hole” too.

So maybe I’ve been gone for too long and the city I knew left me behind. The sub­way sta­tions I could once nav­i­gate blind­fold­ed feel strange to me now. Once a remark­able place for its abil­i­ty to mesh the old and the new, how­ev­er unsuit­ably, in Bloomberg’s New York, famil­iar­i­ty recedes, like the hair­line of a forty-some­thing bridge and tun­nel type, leav­ing in its place a use­less anonymity.

It seems that in the thir­ty or so years since the Dolls’ record­ed “Per­son­al­i­ty Cri­sis,” New York City resolved it with the rest of mid­dle Amer­i­ca. Obvi­ous­ly, atti­tude abides in the place, but no longer with the in-your-faced­ness that once typ­i­fied east coast cities, each in their own spe­cial way.