Upper West Side, I’m Feeling You!

 By Yvonne Vávra

There once was a tree in Central Park that bloomed every December — not with flowers or lights, but with memory. People tied photos of pets who’d passed to its branches, along with favorite toys, handwritten notes, and other tokens of love and loss. I visited the Pet Memorial Tree every year, and with the pictures fluttering in the wind, it always looked to me like the pets were waving — all of them captured in their happiest moments, in the photos their owners must have loved best. It felt like they were still having a good time out there in the park.

The tree is gone now. The Central Park Conservancy had to cut it down after it died from a mix of environmental stress, damage to its roots and body, and perhaps the weight of our affection. Maybe the ornaments and ashes scattered at its base were simply too much for it to bear.

Even so, that tree wasn’t the only place we tied our memories to. The Upper West Side is soaked in leftover feelings — laughter, grief, anger, goodbyes, reunions — all pressed into a kind of emotional fossil bed. We live among each other’s feelings, layered mostly invisibly onto corners, lampposts, restaurant tables, or that bike rack by the bank at 96th and Columbus. I once passed a couple in a heated argument there on my way to HomeGoods. When I came back, they were still sitting on the rack. Quiet now, exhausted. Something in the way they sat sank into me. And now, whenever I pass that spot, I think of them. How hopeless they looked.

That mood is still hanging there on the rack, now joined by my own added fear: that everything always falls apart and never finds its way back together. Totally fine. Just me and a metal post, spontaneously spiraling. But I pick up the pace because I don’t love crying next to a bank branch.

Things get especially interesting when you walk through places where you know feelings have been left behind. I once stumbled on a story by historian Tom Miller about a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl who, one August night in 1929, marched over to another performer’s apartment to beat her up — probably for having a fling with her husband. Here’s the part that got me: one of the women lived in the building I used to live in. The other? My current one. I live on the Follies revenge route!

Now, whenever I go visit my friend in my old building, I can’t help but picture the showgirl stomping up Columbus in high heels she’d later use to attack the other woman, leaving her, as the New York Times reported, “with a fractured rib, cuts on the face and scalp, and other injuries.”

The rage is still here. You can bring it out if you’re in the mood to brush up against someone else’s story. Fury, heartbreak, clouded judgment — all ready to flare back up. I’m not just walking between my two buildings anymore. I’m on a tour of prime Upper West Side architecture, the emotional kind. There’s a lot to see here on the stomping grounds of a 1920s showgirl grudge, a lot to become part of. Somehow, wandering into someone else’s century-old drama, I feel more at home.

I don’t know exactly how to explain it. But, as with so many things, we Germans have a word for it: Heimat. It translates as “homeland,” but that doesn’t quite capture it. Heimat is less a place and more a feeling. It can be a sight, a smell, a sense of safety — the feeling that everything makes sense, and that you belong exactly and completely here. It’s where your feelings are at home, snug under the covers.

I get a sense of that when I walk the showgirl’s path. Her rage wasn’t mine, but knowing it was here, I recognize it. Knowing all our feelings are here — from the first person who made this once-muddy land their home to all of us today — I feel my world is in good company. The more I uncover and become aware of the stories surrounding me, the more familiar it all seems, and the more I dare to believe that if the showgirl got absorbed into the block, maybe so will I. That’s Heimat.

Of course, with all of us memorialized here, it gets a little crowded. We’re constantly walking all over each other’s feelings. Someone has a first date on the bench where your dog took his last nap. Laughs at your heartbreak table. Orders fries at the scene of your undoing. But, really, that’s the best part. No matter how much personal memory we pin to a place, someone’s bound to push their overloaded stroller right through our emotional footprint—and that’s the way it’s meant to be. The city keeps moving and invites us to do the same.

The Pet Memorial Tree has died, but it’s not gone. It’s just become memory itself, joining the others scattered through the neighborhood. Together, they hold us in place, as part of the story. In a way, we’re like those happy pets on the tree: held by memory, fluttering in the wind. At home for good.

Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

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