Pete Hamill died today. He was 85.
For readers like me, Pete Hamill was a capital-J Journalist. Along with his contemporary and sometime rival Jimmy Breslin, the guy epitomized the New York newsman: close to the action, talking truth to power, filled with swagger and intensity. (It was no surprise that both came from the outer boroughs — Breslin from Queens and Hamill from Brooklyn. Their origins gave them an extra chip on their shoulders, determined to show those Manhattanites that there were another several million people in the Big City.)
Stylistically, the two couldn’t have been more different. Breslin was clipped, matter-of-fact, Hemingwayesque; physically, he looked like he’d been plucked out of the clothes dryer before he was done. Hamill, despite his working-class roots, was nattier, smoother and wrote more rapturously, an Irishman spinning a tale. He also dated the rich and famous — Jackie Onassis, Shirley Maclaine — and wrote liner notes for a Bob Dylan album. (One of the best of them: “Blood on the Tracks.”)
It made a perverse sense, as Hamill began as an artist and cartoonist before finding his niche as a reporter and columnist. In his wonderful memoir, “A Drinking Life,” he talks about his days in the Greenwich Village of the 1950s, where he dated an artist’s model, and later took off for Mexico for a couple years, just because the opportunity seemed good. He drank a lot, too, he confessed, but it didn’t seem to affect his memories.
I had a chance to interview Hamill, once, when his book “Downtown” came out. He was as loquacious and thoughtful as hoped. At one point he described Manhattan as Oz to his younger self; for me, who will never have a fraction of the life experience that Hamill had, listening to him talk was equally glorious. In some sense, I felt like I had made it.
You can read all the details of Hamill’s life in this obituary, or this one, but the best way to read about Pete Hamill is to read his own work. You’ll see New York at its best (and worst): sprawling but personal, brutal but humane, a city like none other. One of a kind — like the late, legendary Pete Hamill.
Rest in power, sir.
Ephemereality 
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