Pete Hamill: 1935–2020

The City of New York has lost another of its great storytellers.

Pete Hamill, who passed away this week at the age of 85, was the quintessential tabloid reporter…a chronicler of the everyman and the fabric of the five boroughs. He was the last of a dying breed.

Hamill had a storied career, working in New York journalism for over 50 years at nearly every single tabloid publication across the city. The Daily News, the New York Post, Newsday, and The Village Voice, as well as scores of magazines like The New Yorker, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. He was not the type of reporter that stuck to one beat unless you count how adeptly he wrote about New York. Hamill often wrote eloquently about the rhythm of the city and the allure that a place like New York has on so many people.

He explained this allure in greater detail in his 2005 memoir, Downtown: My Manhattan, a love letter to the city he called home for most of his life:

“The wanderer in Manhattan must go forth with a certain innocence because New York is best seen with innocent eyes. It doesn’t matter if you are younger or old. Reading our rich history makes the experience more layered, but it is not a substitute for walking the streets themselves. For old-timer or newcomer, it is essential to absorb the city as it is now in order to shape your own nostalgias. That’s why I always urge the newcomer to surrender to the city’s magic. Forget the irritations and the occasional rudeness; they bother New Yorkers too. Instead, go down to the North River and the benches that run along the west side of Battery Park City. Watch the tides or the blocks of ice in winter; they have existed since the time when the island was empty of man. Gaze at the boats. Look across the water at the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island, the place to which so many of the New York tribe came in order to truly live. Learn the tale of our tribe, because it’s your tribe too, no matter where you were born. Listen to its music and its legends. Gaze at its ruins and monuments. Walk its sidewalks and run fingers upon the stone and bricks and steel of our right-angled streets. Breathe the air of the river breeze.”

It was with this lens that Hamill looked towards reporting. Whether he wrote about the working class of New York or the ongoings of City Hall. He surrendered to that magic of the city. It provided him the means to craft rich narratives about the people of the Five Boroughs. New York Times columnist Dan Barry said it best when he once wrote of the tabloid poet, “If the pavement of New York City could talk, it would sound like Pete Hamill,” and he was right. Hamill wrote created a soulful narrative each time he reported on the city.

For any tabloid hack that was fortunate enough to work at one of the city’s newspapers, you could feel the influence of reporters like Hamill, or equally great scribe, Jimmy Breslin (It’s hard to talk about one without mentioning the other.)

Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin were fierce competitors as columnists in the New York Tabloids but formed a strong friendship over the decades.

When I started in 2002 as a copy assistant at the New York Post, my ambitions were lofty enough to become the next Hamill or Breslin. I believe that’s what most cub reporters from my and past generations set their sights on when they are beginning their careers. Hamill was the gold standard. I for one felt honored to work in the same newsroom he did, with many people who worked alongside and even for him when he became Editor-in-Chief of the Post in 1993.

What made writers like Hamill and Breslin so captivating for a young scribe was how they came from meager upbringings but never let that get in the way of how gifted of reporters and writers they were. Hamill never forgot where he came from. No matter how much his career brought him across the globe and hob-knobbing with the elite of New York, he never lost the Brooklyn-born sensibilities that gave him the curious mind with which he approached his work for over five decades.

The landscape of journalism is a very different one from which Hamill came up. Many reporters are chasing clicks instead of stories due to metric-hungry management and not given the means to do the style of reportage in which Hamill was so adept.

Hamill may have left this world, but not without providing a voice to the City of New York.

PETE HAMILL’S NEW YORK AND BEYOND:

JUNE 30, 2008
THE NEW YORK WE’VE LOST [NY MAG]

SEPTEMBER 12, 2001
DEATH TAKES HOLD AMONG THE LIVING AFTER 9/11 ATTACK [NY DAILY NEWS]

JUNE 13, 1968
RFK, TWO MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT: THE VERY LAST HURRAH [THE VILLAGE VOICE]

JUNE 5, 1975
JOHN LENNON: LONG NIGHT’S JOURNEY INTO DAY [ROLLING STONE]

JUNE 24, 2019
DAILY NEWS VETERAN SCRIBES PETE HAMILL AND DENIS HAMILL ON THE DO’S AND DONT’S OF WRITING A NEWSPAPER COLUMN [NY DAILY NEWS]

Originally published at https://thirdperson.substack.com.