In a way, it was due to Kevin (although I hadn't met him at that point) that I strengthened my resolve to move to New York from L.A. Kevin is the sort of person I never would have met in L.A. He has a strong identification with his home, the metro New York City area, having lived for his first 20-odd years in Bay Ridge and then in Flushing. He also possesses a vast store of amazingly detailed knowledge about New York's history, a little of which he shares on his Forgotten New York website (forgotten-ny.com). When I was still living in L.A. I stumbled onto his website and gradually found myself becoming more and more fascinated with its contents. "The past is all around us in New York," he writes, and the Forgotten New York site proceeds to show, in image and in historical fact, how the outline of that past is visible as a palimpsest on the larger canvas of the modern metropolis. Kevin is the opposite of an armchair historian...he views everything from street level, walking around the city with his digital camera, capturing the near-present before it fades into a final twilight and illuminating his visions with definitive descriptions of how things fit together temporally and historically.
Kevin Walsh is not the sort of guy who would stand out in a crowd. Compactly built, usually dressed in a short sleeved shirt and neutral colored jeans, his ever-present camera slung in a canvas pouch across his chest, he tends to be direct in speech, unpretentious in his tastes, and seemingly not comfortable with blowing his own horn, an almost metaphoric New York Everyman. Yet his site has received well over a million 'hits' since its inception, and he has done numerous interviews in the four years the site has been in existence. Periodically he will announce on his site that he'll be hosting a Forgotten tour, and the faithful will turn out for a few fascinating hours' worth of urban exploration.
A few weeks ago Eric and I met Kevin in the city. I wanted to have a couple of drinks in the bar of the Algonquin Hotel to celebrate my birthday. Kevin was just getting off work (he works at the World's Biggest Department Store in the advertising department), so we hooked up with him at the employees' entrance and walked to the Algonquin. Since childhood I'd been immersed in the mythology of the wits of the Algonquin Round Table...my mother had a lifetime subscription to The New Yorker, and I'd learned to read by puzzling over James Thurber and Robert Benchley. It seemed somehow fitting to celebrate where they had cerebrated.
As Kevin, Eric, and I walked through Times Square and the theatre district, Kevin would stop periodically and show us a building from the mid-19th century, with its interesting architectural detail intact; a dim advertising sign which had miraculously managed to survive from the 19th century; a 1920s streelight that was "the only one remaining in lower Manhattan". Block by block, manhole cover by water main, Kevin revealed to us the skeleton of the past that shores up the metal-skinned flesh of the present. To me it seemed like a magic trick: historical X-ray goggles.
I am glad there's a Kevin Walsh whose passion is the history of New York City, macro and micro. I wish there were someone like him in Los Angeles...if there had been, maybe I would have stayed there longer. But that's the difference between L.A. and New York. L.A. is condemned to repeating its historical mistakes over and over again, because no one seems to understand or appreciate the big picture there. New York, of course, has its problems, but as long as it has Kevin Walsh, and others like him, it has a fighting chance...something Kevin well understands.
Happy birthday, Kevin! And thanks for the great introduction to New York.
