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Vital City | Jimmy Breslin and the Lost Rhythm of New York
What newspaper columnists gave the city is painfully missing today.
The death of the city columnist has gone unreported even by the handful of us still writing imitations of the thing, including me over the past decade at the Daily News.
Jimmy Breslin, champion of the common man, famously found the gravedigger after JFK’s murder. Now, amid waves of nostalgia for the deadline artists of the last century, there’s no memorial for Breslin’s own lost tribe.
What I mean is, as Michael Daly, one of the last masters of the form, put it when I told him I was badly, unforgivably behind deadline to write this piece pegged off the new Library of America collection of Breslin’s “Essential Writings”: “There’s a difference between running a column and being a columnist.”
The difference being that “you got to have that rhythm,” said Daly, who did the thing for decades over two stints at The News before taking a national perch at The Daily Beast, where I was rather ridiculously his editor for a year or so, and also Wayne Barrett’s.
“You got to have that presence if you want to talk about city columnists.”
Breslin had it in spades and it comes off in nearly every page of “Essential Writings,” even if that is a funny name for a tradesman allergic to preciousness who knew he was playing a numbers game and whose work mostly appeared inside of the following day’s fish wrap.
Many of the earlier, longer columns and articles collected here by Dan Barry of the New York Times aren’t anywhere online. Those share space with about 75 of his later, shorter tabloid pieces — it says a lot about the diminished state of print journalism that the collection doesn’t list the outlets where each piece ran — and two non-fiction books.
There’s “How the Good Guys Finally Won,” Breslin’s Watergate account, and “The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez,” a compact gut-punch of a read about how 21-year-old Tomás Eduardo Daniel Gutiérrez traveled through Mexico the hard way to make it Brooklyn and off-the-books construction work before a needless accident on the job killed him. It’s a book that feels remarkably timely two decades later amid the city’s ongoing “migrant crisis.”
Breslin wrote the account of Gutiérrez’s life when he was in his 70s and still at it, digging around and reporting and showing up and banging away at books and columns and treating himself and everyone around him as grist for his mill even as he largely kept his moral compass aligned, with the underdogs at true north.
Still, the appeal here is the columns, and that voice, those characters, those sentences.
It’s hard to express now what a big figure J.B. was, big enough for decades to compete for those esteemed initials. He wrote for the Daily News when it had a circulation inside of New York bigger than the viewership MSNBC or CNN draws nationwide today.
There used to be someone like him in every city, a person who made his own name — and it was mostly him — by giving voice to the place’s characters and making some sense of its plot. No more.
He was beaten up by a mobster, appeared on “The Tonight Show,” got letters sent to him “from the sewers of New York” by David Berkowitz (the “Son of Sam” serial killer whom Breslin later wrote a book about), effectively embedded with the Democrats who worked to bring down Richard Nixon, and starred in a national series of commercials for “a good drinking beer” including one somehow lost to the internet with “Pogo” cartoonist Walt Kelly.
All that’s just the 1970s, after he capped his fully formed emergence in the 60s with a brilliant political run to make New York the 51st State on a citywide ticket with Village Voice founder Norman Mailer (tagline: “the other guys are the joke”). He remained in prime form through the 80s, 90s and the aughts, and was still going in the 10s, writing books and living large but always, finally, writing columns.
Breslin belonged to the world of newspapers. The term “columnist” was born from and will die with the printed page and the daily paper.
I don’t mean to poke at myself or my peers by saying that no one writing for a living in New York City has anything like his rhythm or presence now. There used to be someone like him in every city, a person who made his own name — and it was mostly him — by giving voice to the place’s characters and making some sense of its plot. No more.
The economics of the news business have been swallowed up by tech goliaths and that has meant the loss of all those stories that people like Breslin told about people who make cities work.
More talented and ambitious people than me are instead writing scripts for Marvel Comics’ intellectual property, before AI gets to those too and maybe all the rest of us.
Right now, there’s me at The News on Sundays while Ginia Bellafante writes the Big City column for the half-orphaned Sunday Metropolitan section of the Times, which Daly recalls was referred to by one rewrite man at New York’s hometown paper as “a small English-language daily headquartered on Manhattan’s West Side.”
Errol Louis writes weekly, behind a paywall at New York magazine, and Nicole Gelinas appears regularly in The Post. All of us except Bellafante have full-time jobs elsewhere — I’m an editor for the non-profit newsroom THE CITY, Errol is an anchor at NY1 and Nicole is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and — make of this what you will — all three of us also contribute to Vital City.
Depending on how you count, you could throw in Ross Barkan, who writes seemingly everywhere and about everything, Mara Gay, who focuses on New York for the Times editorial board, the opinionated crew at the scrappy new website Hell Gate and maybe a few others.
Add us all up, and it’s less reported commentary that you used to get in a single issue of the Village Voice, back when it was free, or in The News or The Post or the late and still sometimes lamented New York Newsday — and Breslin wrote at different points for all three — on any given day.
Neither of the city’s tabloids have a city columnist, and neither does The Times since it quietly folded its long-running “About New York” column, most recently helmed by the late Jim Dwyer, who kept reporting on the city after that slot was unceremoniously removed.
New York didn’t get boring, but its newspapers got thinner and there’s really nothing online or on the air that’s filled that space.
It’s not that New Yorkers became less colorful or less interested in the city’s characters, or that the columnist was some Runyonesque schtick that took a powder along with the dese-dem-and-dose denizens of the County of Kings who were already aging into the afterlife when Breslin published his Damon Runyon biography in 1992.
A columnist is — or was — out endlessly, talking to people all over the city and writing every other day or even more frequently, climbing tenement stairs while giving a platform to people who’d otherwise be lost in the crowd.
There’s another column early on in “Essential Writings” where Breslin covers the death of the now largely forgotten New York Mirror, a tragedy for those involved even when the paper industry as a whole seemed invincible:
“He was finishing out a career as so many newspaper men do, sitting at a horseshoe-shaped copy desk and writing headlines of stories that younger men collect and write."
Breslin wrote that with respect, not malice, but that didn’t happen to him. A half-century later, he was still out and about, banging away.
A columnist is — or was — out endlessly, talking to people all over the city and writing every other day or even more frequently, climbing tenement stairs while giving a platform to people who’d otherwise be lost in the crowd.
Human nature has changed as the technology and the economy have, and the crucial function in civic life that Breslin and others filled is, simply, not being filled now. It’s a damn shame.
“Working at a newspaper can get to be a way of life more than a job,” Breslin wrote at the end of that column, titled “The Wake for a Newspaper.”
It’s still true, more or less, after so many of those wakes because the world is full of stubborn people finding the tide and the time and doing the work of chronicling the daily life of the city.
Bosses today aren’t so different from what they’ve always been: There have always been plenty of risk-averse company men and women out there. But there doesn’t seem to be a boss left who really understands the value for a publication in having the connection to the city that only comes from a columnist who’s there day in and day out, with the talent and the drive to see and hear as much as they can of this vast, sad, funny, weird place, write it up, and then do it the next day and the day after that, amen.
Harry Siegel is a senior editor at THE CITY, a columnist at the Daily News and a Vital City contributing writer.
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