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A walk around Leonard Cohen’s New York
Leonard Cohen’s life is marked by clear and important milestones. There’s his childhood in Canada and his academic and literary beginnings at McGill University in Montreal. There’s Hydra, the Greek island where he lived as a Beatnik and fell hopelessly in love with Marianne. There’s Mount Baldy and the Zen monastery, where he was ordained as a monk. And then there’s New York – the heart of the 1960s scene that first embraced him, the city he longed to belong to, and the backdrop for the romantic trysts that inspired so many of his songs.
When Leonard Cohen left behind Hydra and set off to the Big Apple on a bid to finally make it as a musician, he found the place incredibly lonely. In a New York Times piece written about the artist back in the day, it was reported that he “rarely mixes with the local litterateurs, and sometimes spends whole days in front of the mirror trying to figure out where the lines in his face came from”. He’d heard about the folk scene booming there and had come to try and get involved, but after years of existing in the small Beatnik community and the welcoming familial air of an island, the city was overwhelming.
Over time, though, New York opened up to Cohen in the way it does to anyone who dares stay long enough to get to know it. Through a series of key locations, the artist made a home for himself and found a spiritual one as he mixed with the kinds of characters that would inspire his work in both form and subject. He had love affairs that would turn into timeless lyrics, and met other writers who would encourage him to push those lyrics further, developing his voice in the depths of the city’s vibrant scene.
Through his life, music, and writing, New York became a character with its moody atmosphere and music floating through the streets. It’s an aspirational quality that Cohen always wanted to live up to or belong to. While the energy of the city in the 1960s might have been lost to time, there is certainly still some of that spirit lingering around.
