Perhaps I liked best the sunflowers along the railroad tracks, and the little purple asters that rose between the ties, out of the cinders. Or the cattails in the ditches and the rank nameless weeds that flourished by the iron wheels of rotting boxcars—Erie-Lackawanna—The Great White Way—Route of Phoebe Snow—forgotten on sidings. Or the feral hollyhocks tall as corn along the walls of the gate tender’s shack at the railway crossing, transpiring through July. There was a bitter, forlorn yet stubborn beauty everywhere you looked in Hoboken. Even the smog of heavy summer evenings played a helpful part, enhancing the quality of light and shadow on old brick walls, lending to things only a block away the semblance of magic and mystery.

When I was there I thought New York was dying. Maybe it really is. I know I was dying to get out. But if it’s dying then it’s going to be a prolonged, strange, infinitely complex process, a death of terror and grandeur. Imagine a carcinoma three hundred miles long, a mile thick, embracing 50 million souls. Whatever else (I tell myself) you may think about New York now, looking back at it from this desert perspective, you’ve got to admit that Wolf Hole, Arizona, can never have so rich a death.

There are three ways to get from Hoboken to Manhattan. There were four. You can take the Number 6 bus, dive into the Lincoln Tunnel (holding your breath), roar through that tube of tile and light, where the tunnel cops pace forever up and down their cement walkways or stand in glass boxes built into the walls (we used to discuss the question, which is the world’s worst job: subway motorman? city bus driver? slaughterhouse worker? switchboard operator? or tunnel cop?), to emerge suddenly into the blue air of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Or you can take the Hudson Tubes under the river, ride the trains through the sweating tunnels, where little green lights blink dimly beside the rails, and come out in the Village or stay on the train and ride it uptown as far as Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Herald Square. The third way, if you have a car, is to drive it yourself through either the Lincoln Tunnel or the Holland Tunnel and drive it back through the other way when you realize finally that there is almost no place on all of God’s Manhattan where you can park your machine.

The fourth way was to take the Lackawanna Ferry and although the slowest this was by far the best. (A fifth way will be to walk on the water when the Hudson finally coagulates.) Getting to the ferry slips at the railway terminal was part of the pleasure: For whether you went by Washington Street, Hudson Street or River Street, you passed not only such places as the hippie communes and the Christian Seamen’s Home but also the most shabby dingy rundown smelly half-lighted dangerous and downright picturesque little Mom-and-Pop bars in North America.