Backgrounder: Pete Hamill
Pete Hamill was born in Brooklyn, but he claims the streets of downtown Manhattan as his own. His new book, Downtown, is both a memoir and a story of the streets circumscribed by the Battery and Times Square. In the opening chapter, Hamill recounts the moment he first became entranced: As a child, he stood at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge and peered at the spires of lower Manhattan and believed it was Oz. He has since paid rent at 14 different addresses downtown and now resides in a Tribeca loft.
In Downtown, Hamill describes how he learned the city's streets as a young reporter, investigating murders and domestic disturbances, educating himself both as a newspaperman and as a New Yorker. He has condemned modern journalists' tendency to sit before computers, sifting through endless streams of information and waiting for news to trickle in. Instead, Hamill wants journalists to hit the pavement, to learn the back alleys and to the reach out to the purse-seller on Canal Street, the woman who runs the corner coffee stand, the tired cop. Each one has a New York story. "I have been looking at that New York for decades now," he writes in Downtown. "The place seems as fresh as it did when I was 21. On its streets, I am always a young man."
Hamill began his distinguished journalism career as a reporter for the New York Post in 1960. He was a columnist for the New York Post, the, Daily News, and New York Newsday. Hamill served as editor-in-chief for the New York Post and the New York Daily News and has covered wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland. He has written for many national magazines, including New York, Esquire, New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. Hamill is also a faculty member at New York University.
Hamill is also known for his fiction writing. He has produced eight novels, including Snow In August, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for four months, and two short story collections. In addition, he has published three collections of his journalism, a memoir which appeared on the same bestseller list for 13 weeks and four non-fiction books on subjects as diverse as Diego Rivera and Frank Sinatra.
As the son of immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Hamill has spent his more than 40 years as a New York journalist and best-selling author advocating for working-class people. The eldest of seven children, Hamill went to Catholic schools until age 16, when he left to become a sheet metal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He completed high school after serving in the U.S. Navy and later attended Mexico City College in Mexico and the Pratt Institute in New York.
In Downtown, Hamill calls immigration "that extraordinary process that created the modern city." Hamill's New York is one of gritty waterfronts and hard-boiled immigrants, of Irish and Italians and Jews and blacks who built Gotham and whose tales remain distinct. New York has shown Hamill that "many stories begin somewhere else, for people who become center fielders and for those who start as domestics." And his city is stronger for it.