Remembering the Upper West Side

In the most recent Commentary, John Podhoretz has crafted a beautiful piece of writing on the Upper West Side, then and now.

Here's a beautiful piece of writing that is also a vivid and true piece of history: John Podhoretz on the Upper West Side, then and now.

Everybody got mugged. Once, after I was punched, my wallet stolen, my glasses (!) pulled from my face, and my sneakers removed outside the side exit to the Olympia movie theater on 107th between Broadway and Amsterdam, my parents called the police and two mammoth cops showed up and drove me around the neighborhood looking for my two assailants by checking out sneakers. But I had to wear my old prescriptions and couldn’t see very well.

On that very block in 1972 (probably two years before my mugging), a 10-year-old boy named Jimmy Wallace was found in the hallway of his apartment house with stab wounds in his back and neck. Jimmy’s penis had been cut off. Left for dead, he lived, the only surviving victim of a serial killer who prowled the neighborhood for a year. He murdered and castrated four boys. We neighborhood kids came to call him, with the horrible bluntness of adolescent boys, Charlie Chop-off. He struck on 106th between Broadway and Amsterdam, a block from my building. He struck on 104th and 103rd.

Imagine such a thing today. It would dominate news coverage in the country for weeks, if not months. We would remember it now as we remember the Son of Sam, and the Washington snipers, and the Hillside Strangler. But in 1972 and 1973, Charlie Chop-off had so little resonance beyond the blocks near me that when I made mention of it in a short story I read to my eighth-grade class—in a school on the Upper West Side—my classmates hadn’t heard of it.

As Podhoretz aptly concludes: "To hell with nostalgia."