He was here at the beginning, before the beginning, before the lights were turned on, before there were walls and floors and the pinwheel ceiling, before this patch of midtown sprouted high above the train depot and became The Garden.
“I was here with my hard hat on, me and Dollar Bill Bradley, when there was nothing but dust and dreams,” Willis Reed said late Wednesday afternoon. “We had no idea what we were in for inside these walls. And I don’t think either of us would ever trade what happened to us here.”
He smiled, the old captain, and he peered out from a corner of the Garden, and he pointed at the floor.
“Right here,” Willis Reed said.
Slowly, patiently, they are reopening Madison Square Garden again, a three-year plan that has yielded a vast sporting palace that only vaguely recalls the old. But it’s the same building. The same address — Four Penn Plaza. And the same storehouse of memories, memories shared by generations of New Yorkers, generations of tourists, generations of people — sports fans, music fans, political junkies, the whole realm — who learned to fall in love with the city partly because they walked inside these doors and found they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — close their eyes.
“The first time I came here I was playing for Detroit and I skated onto the ice and this is what I remember feeling: like I’d just walked onto a Broadway stage,” Adam Graves said. “It was different than any arena or rink I’d ever been to. The lights were so much brighter. The noise was so much louder. It was all so …”
“Big?” someone said.
“Big,” Graves agreed. “Like New York City.”
That’s the thing. That’s what the short-sighted politicians who would force the Garden to find another address forget: just how many people receive their first taste of New York City here. And it is precisely the location — smack atop Pennsylvania Station — that makes it such a welcoming portal.
It can be the circus. It can be a concert. It can be the Big East Tournament, or the NIT, or the Holiday Festival. It can be the Knicks on a Saturday night or the Rangers on a Sunday afternoon. This is the building that makes the whole sprawling, splintered region — Westchester and Jersey, Connecticut and Long Island, and every one of the outer boroughs — feel like one endless and connected city. New York City.
You could drop your son or your daughter off at a train station and know they would get to Penn, and to the Garden, without the attendant complications of going up to The Bronx, or out to Flushing, or even deep into the swampy hinterlands of the Meadowlands. And you still can. Forgetting the fickle vagaries of sport, that has always been a constant. And should always be one, whether you like whoever happens to own the Garden — whoever serves as its temporary caretaker — or not.
And so that is why this transformation is so important, and so vital. For most of the new millennium, we have torn down our sporting structures around here, buried them under foul concrete graveyards disguised as parking lots. Giants Stadium is a memory, and so is Shea, barely recognizable as people park their Chevys and their Audis and their Hondas where Lawrence Taylor once prowled and Tom Seaver once hurled. Yankee Stadium? There was a group that wanted to keep one of the old gates up, as a reminder of all the glories that once occurred there, on those secular but sacred grounds; the gate came down. All of that collective, communal memory, gone.
The Garden is still here.
It’s ironic: New York still mourns the fiendish way the original Penn Station was reduced to rubble, the way that marvelous old city landmark was cast aside in the name of progress, driven to dust, an architectural felony for which our collective conscience still pays a wicked toll. And now there are some who would cast this arena aside, bump it north, nudge it east, maybe bounce it all the way out of town?
“You come here,” Graves said, “and what you immediately think about are all the things that have happened here. And it’s incredible to think about. Right here.”
The Garden has always been a place where history matters, where archives matter. It has always been a place where you had an immediate sense that you’d seen something that was now but also forever: Graves and the Rangers winning the Cup in 1994, Reed and the Knicks winning titles in 1970 and ’73. The concert for Bangladesh, and Sinatra’s Main Event, and the concert of 12/12/12. Michael Jordan visiting here, and Bobby Orr, and Patrick Ewing as an enemy collegian and an iconic local pro. Ali-Frazier.
On. And on. And on.
Everywhere you turn in this new incarnation is another taste of what was, what used to be here. You’ll never see everything here, not in one visit, not in 20, which is perfect because its history has never been easily contained between four walls. It has sacrificed some elements in the name of new; the tunnel Reed made famous, Game 7, 1970, is gone, for instance.
“I noticed that when I was back for the 40th reunion of the ’73 champs,” Reed said. “But that’s OK. Long as I look up there” — he pointed toward the rafters — “and see my number, that’s what matters most. They won’t forget me then.”
Graves number hangs here, too, on the opposite side, and every time Graves looks at it you see a reaction: a smile, a nod, sometimes a cough.
“I see that, I see the other names,” he said, “and I ask myself, ‘What are YOU doing up there?’ ”
Most of us don’t have our numbers up there. But we all have our place here. This is where I saw the Rolling Stones. This is where I saw the Pope. This is where I watched Chris Mullin. On. And on. And on. They have taken a wrecking ball to so many warehouses of our memories the last few years. Not here. Not yet.