Pete Hamill takes readers on tour of 'his' Manhattan

In New York, one often gets the feeling of just missing the last great party, the last great meal, the last great scene.

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As Pete Hamill describes the city's Greenwich Village neighborhood during the 1960s in "Downtown: My Manhattan," it's easy to succumb to that searing feeling of having missed everything, just everything. Hamill listens to John Coltrane and Miles Davis in a jazz club, mixes with Beat luminaries Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and catches a young Jimi Hendrix playing in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village.

But how did this budding bohemian end the most celebrated decade of the 20th century? In a seat on the sidelines, quaffing beers with his pals at the Lion's Head saloon and shaking his head at the younger, more radical, drug-fueled hippies. True to form, the venerable New York journalist won't give in to a romanticized picture of the decade and instead puts the period into perspective as just another cycle in the history of New York, with the new ushering out the old.

This cycle of constant building up and tearing down, and the New Yorker's inevitable lot - living with loss - are Hamill's main preoccupations. But his years as a journalist "walking the pavement" yield a richness of detail that keeps the book from being merely a catalog of historical events in lower Manhattan.

The Brooklyn native got his first taste of New York-style heartache when the baseball Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, just three years after winning their only World Series title.

"But to talk about the Dodgers' departure without cease would be to live as a bore. New York teaches you to get over almost everything," he says.

Hamill argues that irreversible change - the latest, most brutal example being the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks - has helped form a New York character built on nostalgia, but never sentimentality.

This son of Irish immigrants stresses the influence of New York's most enduring strain of nostalgia, born of immigrants who fought for a brighter future while harboring memories of what they left behind.

"That rupture with the immediate past would mark all of them and did not go away as the young immigrants grew old. If anything, the nostalgias were often heightened by the coming of age," Hamill writes. "Some would wake up in the hot summer nights of New York and for a few moments think they were in Sicily or Mayo or Minsk. Some would think their mothers were at the fireplace in the next room, preparing food. The old food. The food of the Old Country."

As he examines his own nostalgia, Hamill alternates between his personal history and the city's, paying tribute to long-gone New Yorkers such as architect Stanford White, who designed the Washington Square arch and was the victim of New York's "murder on the rooftop garden"; and John Jacob Astor, who emigrated from Germany in 1784 and became America's first millionaire.

Hamill's knack for putting readers into his shoes, as he demonstrated in his 1995 memoir "A Drinking Life," helps him walk the reader through several centuries of downtown New York history on a meandering route. Hamill leads a tour through the "lost cities" of Five Points, an area that teemed with immigrants in the 19th century, and the tony world of the Anglo-Dutch socialites who descended from the city's earliest settlers and were known, derisively at first, as Knickerbockers.

He even evokes a forgotten holiday, Evacuation Day, which was celebrated on Nov. 25 for a century to mark a Revolutionary War battle.

Hamill's determination to give "lost" New Yorkers - the unsung heroes who built the city but whose names are lost to history - their due is perhaps the most touching aspect of the book, as when he notes the E.V. Haughwout Building, whose early use of an elevator led to the development of the first skyscraper: "I pass it a few times a week and always think about those men who built it, and whether they understood that they were making one of the first moves toward creating the city we inhabit."

In a plainspoken but always compelling style, "Downtown: My Manhattan" is part history book, architecture book and travelogue - all jam-packed with facts, figures and addresses.