NEW YORK IN JUNE

	June 16, 1999
	Essayist Roger Rosenblatt reflects on Gotham at the dawn of summer.

MUSIC IN BACKGROUND: I like New York in June, how about you? ROGER ROSENBLATT: I like New York in June. How about you? I don't mean the big events in New York this June, though I like them, too. The Yankees have an interleague series with the Mets, and it brings back the old brutal interfamilial rivalry between the Yanks and the Brooklyn Dodgers. I like that, especially when the Yanks win. The Knicks and the Indiana Pacers butt heads in the NBA Eastern playoffs. I like that, especially when the Knicks win. Knicks versus hicks, although the so-called hicks, like the Knicks, are all urban millionaires. The Abner Louima trial is a serious big event, but even that disgusting episode of police psychotic behavior has an upside: Good cops testify against bad cops, proving that most cops know a crime when they see one. The Belmont Stakes is a sad, if exciting, big event, with charismatic gamely trying for the triple crown, then coming up lame. Other, happier moments, seem to come off without a hitch: The June weddings; the June proms and graduations; the publication of "Juneteenth," the posthumous novel of that great transplanted New Yorker, Ralph Ellison. June busting out all over. But I like New York in June mainly for the fact that one can see the city in this flowery month for the continually regenerative, rejuvenating flower it is. People tend to toss the cliché of ambition at the city, and, like all clichés, it's true. But the most attractive ambition of New York is its impulse for revival, renewal. It's a perennial. Like the sun, it rises over its rock piles of chipped stoops, gray walls, graffiti, garbage, soot, vacant lots, subway grates, rises glowing toward a wholly new day. So resilient is this city's soul that it deliberately recreates winter in the middle of June, as if to show its nerve. At the Brooklyn Museum is an exhibit of the winter paintings of the impressionists. June contains February, yet for those who know the city, February contains June, too, under the cracked and tired surfaces of the city, an unrelenting, optimistic heartbeat. The reason that so many different people manage to get along with one another in New York more than any other place in the world, I would guess, is that they wake up every day eager to start again. Old hatreds and suspicions are shelved for practical purposes. On goes the clean shirt; on goes the smile. I grew up in Downtown Manhattan, which remains adamantly old and new. In my old neighborhood of Gramercy Park, named for a stream that flowed under a farm, young people play make-believe Paris at outdoor restaurants. Babies toddle in the park. Everything renews. Farther downtown, in the West Village, more of the same. A recent novel called "The Hours," by Michael Cuningham, has a nice scene of a character greeting the day on West 10th street, in June, of course: "The vestibule door opened onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed. Clarissa pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool." She brings to mind the breathless anticipation of Irwin Shaw's story, "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses," which brings to mind one of the loveliest renewals of a New York June: Women, shorn of winter coats, showing off their bodies in summer dresses. MUSIC IN BACKGROUND: I like New York in June. How about you? ROGER ROSENBLATT: Ever the brave new world. Ever the place where the brave find a brave new world. Enter the city of romance. Washington has intrigue, San Francisco mystery; but New York has June, to which the actors come from all over to be waiters, and the young lawyers come to work till midnight, and the poor come, and the money comes. As another song has it, "I'll make a brand-new start of it in old New York." Of course you will. The past is closed. The new day opens like the hands of a tulip. I like New York in June. How about you? MUSIC IN BACKGROUND: I like it -- how about you? ROGER ROSENBLATT: I'm Roger Rosenblatt.

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