Mr. Beller's Neighborhood Turns 25

The website's idea of putting writing on a map has become the thing it always hoped to be, an antique world to be explored for its connections and juxtapositions. Also: The Substack Kool-Aid.

I remember when the first digital billboard went up in Times Square in the mid 1990’s. Morgan Stanley erected a three level electronic ticker tape, the numbers racing along at three different speeds, and above it, a nearly cinema quality digital billboard.

I wrote to a friend whose father worked at Morgan Stanley to tell him about it, half mocking, half in congratulations. Times Square had always been filled with Billboards but this one was different. It’s appearance felt like news, an event, a provocation. I think I actually made a point to go there late at night to stare at it. What did I see?

The numbers, the numbers¹, they were intimidating and exciting as they flew along on their trio of zippers, each zipper moving at a slightly different pace. The news zipper that used to go around the 1 Times Square may or may not have been gone by then, but either way, it now seemed as modern as a telegram, partly because it used actual light bulbs, and partly because it used actual words. The Morgan Stanley Zippers lent the neighborhood a sheen of finance and hyper-modernity. The neighborhood had always been about commerce, a surreal melange of lewd movie theater marquees, arcades, music stores, and over the top billboards. A place famously gritty, tactile, gross, tempting. I recall one that blew smoke.

(David W. Dunlap/The City Observed: New York)

In the following years, more and more LED signs popped up, a Baudrillardian house of mirrors made of money. And then came the end of the century, the end of millenium, the Y2K panic. People of sound mind were building bunkers in New Mexico. It was the crescendo of the dotcom boom. The triumphalism of the dotcom people was gross². But they were undeniably rich, on paper at least, and, however goofy their vision, they were obviously right about where things were headed. On New Year’s eve, 1999, the clocks struck midnight, and kept on ticking. AOL bought time Warner. People either “got it” or they didn’t. The stock market went up some more.

I paid very little attention to it. I was absorbed in various personal dramas, including the disorienting feeling that accompanies finishing a book. A tremendous amount of space seemed to open around me. That winter in New York there were epic snow storms, the city was bathed in white. Alternate side of the street parking was suspended. I roamed free, bereft. And then, sometime in February, sitting in the office of Open City Magazine at 225 Lafayette Street on some caffeinated morning with the light streaming in, I became the last man in America to have the following epiphany: The Internet was a big deal.

And then I had a thought: I would start my own website that put essays about places and events in New York on a map. A place for flaneurs to deposit their accumulations.

I would get William Steig, the ancient but still living cartoonist now best known for inventing Shrek, but back then a holdover whose decades of work for the New Yorker embodied the cozy, cranky, old-sweater vibe I thought would be a good juxtaposition to all the sleekness of the internet. How it might make money was a question that could be figured out later. I guess I felt what every artist in New York spelunking through its canyons feels, like a stowaway whispering, “you can take your three stock ticker zippers and shove them up your ass!”³

I went into a frantic mode. In the language of therapy, I guess you could say I was a bit manic. As I said, there were several things in my personal life destabilizing me, but the only one I wish to mention here is that finishing a book and then preparing for it to be released is a state that doesn’t always bring out the best in people.

I got up to three level stock-zipper speed. I went and asked questions of people I knew who had already drank the internet Kool-aid. People who had started sites like Sonicnet, Feedmag, Word. I had lots of meetings. For one insane moment my innovation - stories on a map - was deemed sufficiently valuable that it appeared I might be sued for a stake in its ownership by the company that had helped me build it. Before that could get too out of hand, the stock market crashed. We entered the era of the dot.com bust. Generous souls like Sabin Streeter, a guy named Naomi, Marisa Bowe, Christopher Nicholson, and others helped the site achieve lift off on a pro-bono basis.

2.

Twenty five years later, the site continues to publish—usually one new story a week. There is a party on May 28th to celebrate the occasion.

There are some echoes between the spring of 2025 and the Spring of 2000. It’s not a tidy parallel, but something about the feelings evoked by Substack reminds me of that earlier moment: lots of people high on their own supply, giddy with the glorious feeling of taking fate in their own hands, which is another way of saying they are writing. But it’s not just the writing that is so giddy making—it’s the feeling of having commanded an audience⁴. Substack even puts some dollars into the equation; the gambit seems to be that a few dollars in hand goes further that hypothetical windfalls of the future. At any rate, I am benefitting from Substack in the same way I had hoped to benefit from “the internet” when I started Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, namely, the freedom to write combined with a sense of obligation to write. The burnout will arrive at some point. I am here for the ride.

More than the freedom to write, it the freedom to publish , and to exercise the power of owning a printing press, that is the thrill. I wrote things for the new site, but mostly I edited it, throwing myself into soliciting pieces from friends and strangers and then editing the work as though I were running a business in the 19th century. Robert Mankoff of the New Yorker and I had yelled at each other enjoyably and, I think, amicably, over the Steig commission.

“This is why I don’t like dealing with writers!” he yelled.

“I am going to pay you the cash!” I yelled back, indignant at his indignation that I had asked for a break on the fee to retain William Steig, which was three thousand dollars⁵.

Steig didn’t draw a logo for the site so much as select something from his archive, and then draw the site name above it. I paused over the drawing of a man with a trenchcoat, bushy mustache, hat, tie, and shaggy, slightly baffled dog, sensing that I had been subjected to some Litchfield County Voodoo and would one day resemble this man. After 25 years I can estimate that the process is about two thirds complete.

I don’t want to make this into a big victory lap; in some ways I am almost embarrassed by the site because it has my name on it but I have not had a direct hand in its contents for over twenty years. It is a kind of practical joke that fate has played on me in return for the hubris of the name. I had wanted a side project away from Open City Magazine and Books, (A few months earlier we published our first title) which I had put a lot into. Like a band member who needs a solo project, except that while I put way too much energy into it for a year, it is the opposite of a solo project. I am the founder but only one member of a very large and growing choir.

I was well into editing a book of pieces derived from the site’s first year when the surreal event of 9/11/2001 place. The site’s greatest utility, and popularity, was in the months in the immediate aftermath. It became a place for testimonies both raw and strikingly literary and often both. There were pieces of beautiful writing by people who had not previously thought of themselves as writers. There had been an editorial team in the first months of the site; after 9/11 it grew.

Some time after that book was published, I stepped aside from the day to day operations. A writer of one of the lengthier and intense accounts from that day, Bryan Charles, had volunteered to take over editing duties. He turned out to be the first of many. Starting in 2018, Jacob Margolies - a mellow dude who grew up on Avenue A who grew up with Rickey Powell and played basketball with him at the 14th Street Y - has given the site a distinct flavor of the outer boroughs, which seems right, it’s where the energy is. And now we are at year 25. The things with my name on it is a place I sometimes explore, like a visitor. Sometime I return to old favorites, usually I find something interesting in the new work.

The site has given a boost to a large number of young writers, which is to say writers of many different ages who had begun to write and decided to send in a piece to a website devoted to the city and the many forms of the casual essay. There are almost as many permutations of this form as their are people on the subway. The old satellite images that were stitched together with such difficulty in 2000 gave way to Google maps in 2005, and a decade after that, novelty was gone and now there are no maps. The mood of those old maps remains, though.

1. I am quoting a Bingham cadence with the word “numbers” here standing in for his word, “money.” I didn’t do it on purpose but as soon as I wrote it I knew where I had heard it. His version appears in an anthology of original essays called “Personals.” I think this book’s value - as literature and as collectible commodity - are both going to appreciate for reasons both good - it’s good! - and not good: a fair number of the contributors died way too young. They are: Rachel Wetzsteon, Tom Cushman (appearing under the pseudonym Tom Allerton), Robert Bingham, Jennifer Farber.

2. Thomas Frank and gang put out at issue of the Baffler in 2001 called The God That Sucked in which he railed against the way all sorts of illiberal and plutocratic political ideas were becoming acceptable under the guise of the gospel of the internet. An opinion that has aged well.

3. To paraphrase the joyous end of Bad News Bears. Said by the tragic booger eating Lupus, so I don’t know why I am so pleased to be identifying with him. But I sort of do, as I identify a little with almost every single member of the Bad News Bears. I think my elleven year old self even identified with tatum O’Neal a little, when she says, “I want jeans, expsive jeans. The French kind.” As Saul Bellow put it in a much different context, “I want. I want.”

4. This feeling is one every writer is susceptible to, but it is also a kind of false god, and with no malice intended, I will relay the anecdote that I return to now and then to remind me of this fact: I heard it from a guy I had know as kid, who I remet in adulthood. Bumped into him in the park. He followed up with an email. This was sometime in around 2010. He was a finance guy going through some difficulties, and had taken up blogging. We had some contact for a while, and then fell out of touch. I read his blog a few times and one entry stood out: he spoke of his despair in general, and his disappointment in the blog itself, how he was considering giving it up. He was, in essence, making a rookie mistake, and one I am making, to some degree, right now, which is to allow the excitement that someone might read what you write to enter into the writing, and even become the subject of the writing. These are totally normal feelings but are best excised from published work. It’s similar to the self-editing one does when you are in the presence of someone you really like, or really love, or are extremely attracted to. One understands that you ought not to express the thought that flows continuously inside you like a river, never the same and always the same: I love you do you love me? I want you do you want me?

At any rate, the thing that sticks in my mind is a long, soliloquy in which he declared that he had more or less given up on the blog, but then consulted the blogs stats, as he sometimes did. The stats were meagre. He had something like thirty site visits that week, or month, I don’t recall the details. But then he looked at the chart that indicated where these readers were in the world, and saw that one was from China. And he wrote something to the effect of (I repeat this with compassion, I do I do I do!): “And I thought to myself, if I have one reader in China, one soul who is reading the words I am writing about my life in New York, that makes it worth it to keep going.”

God, that killed me. Part of it was the stentorian tone, self eulogizing tone, which reminded me of the album played in Roth’s novella, “Goodbye, Columbus,” in which a 1950’s era graduate of Ohio State plays the album that is distributed to the graduates, a kind of audio yearbook like announcement summing up their time at the Alma Mater, which ends with the words, “Goodbye. Columbus. Goodbye.” Even now I find the tone of that voice - the low, male, sentimental tone - to be ridiculous and also kind of moving. And even now I can’t fully get a read on how ridiculous it was to Roth. Was he mocking the record or the brother? Did he find it moving, or at least the memory of it moving, or the fact that this very young guy who had just graduated was feeling so nostalgic for the recent past moving? I think he did. Or rather, that’s what I think. Even as it was absurdly self-aggrandizing and silly.

I recognized my blogging friend’s sentiments of despair, of wanting to give up, and how he was bouyed by the fact that one Chinese soul somewhere in that far away land was connecting with his thoughts and feelings. There is nothing wrong in wanting that, or being excited should such a moment occur. What made the whole thing seem like such a cautionary tale was the fact that by 2010 I had enough of an understanding of these metrics - I had done my share of checking on them - to know that the soul was a “spider” sent to “crawl” the whole internet. In that sense my friend’s confusing a robot for a soul anticipates the freaky AI conundrums moving towards us today. What I took from it was to just ignore the audience as much as possible. And expressions of despair or self-pity, in their first, rough draft form, all fine for a diary, for a journal, but they are not for public consumption. At least that is my attitude. Maybe they can be used in some way in another form, with some further consideration.

5. As my own anecdote illustrates, every writer that pays for rights to a photograph gets loudly proud of having done so. I don’t know why, but they do.