Photo © Corinna Hawkes Andy Merrifield is the author of ten books including works on urbanism and social theory such as The New Urban Question and Magical Marxism, biographies of Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and John Berger, a popular travelogue, The Wisdom of Donkeys, and a manifesto for liberated living, The Amateur. His journalism has appeared in the Nation, Harper's, Adbusters, New Left Review, Dissent, the Brooklyn Rail, and Radical Philosophy.

In the early 1990s, Marshall [Berman] told me he was working on a book called "Living for the city"-"after the Stevie Wonder song". He'd been thinking about this book for a long while, ever since finishing All That is Solid Melts into Air. The problem was he hadn’t written much of it-hadn't been able to, was paralysed somehow, blocked. He'd continued to talk and teach, in Harlem, at the City College of New York (CCNY), and at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, and plenty poured out of him-essays and reviews in publications like the Nation, the Village Voice and Dissent. But all that looked like a pile of fragments, he said.

Living for the city had been rough during the 1980s, rougher than talking about it. Marshall's town, New York, was blighted by fiscal crisis, deindustrialization, decline and hard drugs, even while banks and Wall Street piled up spectacular profits. It was a bonfire of the vanities that Mayor Ed Koch ran with aggressive bluster and meanness. "It felt as if he poisoned the air every time he opened his mouth", Marshall said. The decade started off personally very badly, too. In 1980, Marshall's five year old son, Marc, died. Then Marshall got sick himself, nearly died of a brain abscess.

I remember we were sitting across from one another in a booth at one of Marshall's favorite eateries, the Metro Diner, on Broadway at West 100th Street, on the Upper West Side. The Metro had been around since 1989. But the site itself is one of the neighbourhood's oldest structures, dating back to 1871, when it was a grocery store. Its owner today is a Greek-immigrant businessman, Fanis Tsiamtsiouris, known as "Frank". Seven hundred cups of coffee get poured there each day, a hundred and fifty-odd hamburgers grilled, and twelve hundred eggs cracked open by staff hailing from all over the world.

I sat overlooking 100th Street, looking westward, on the lookout for Marshall. But he came from the other direction, from the subway. When he arrived he said I should shift around to face the other way, to look eastward. He was keen for me to watch the action along Upper Broadway, the neighbourhood's central artery. Upper Broadway was very special to him and he wanted to share the pleasure. He wanted me to see it for myself. It was such a sweet thing to do. I’ll always remember it. The Metro Diner had been one of my first New York ports of call with Marshall. Unbeknownst to me then, two decades later, it would be his last. He’d keel over in the morning on that awful New York day, September 11th, in 2013, his heart giving out, breakfasting with his old Bronx pal, the photographer Mel Rosenthal. Marshall was seventy two.

Photo © Corinna Hawkes Andy Merrifield is the author of ten books including works on urbanism and social theory such as The New Urban Question and Magical Marxism, biographies of Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and John Berger, a popular travelogue, The Wisdom of Donkeys, and a manifesto for liberated living, The Amateur. His journalism has appeared in the Nation, Harper's, Adbusters, New Left Review, Dissent, the Brooklyn Rail, and Radical Philosophy.

In the early 1990s, Marshall [Berman] told me he was working on a book called "Living for the city"-"after the Stevie Wonder song". He'd been thinking about this book for a long while, ever since finishing All That is Solid Melts into Air. The problem was he hadn’t written much of it-hadn't been able to, was paralysed somehow, blocked. He'd continued to talk and teach, in Harlem, at the City College of New York (CCNY), and at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, and plenty poured out of him-essays and reviews in publications like the Nation, the Village Voice and Dissent. But all that looked like a pile of fragments, he said.

Living for the city had been rough during the 1980s, rougher than talking about it. Marshall's town, New York, was blighted by fiscal crisis, deindustrialization, decline and hard drugs, even while banks and Wall Street piled up spectacular profits. It was a bonfire of the vanities that Mayor Ed Koch ran with aggressive bluster and meanness. "It felt as if he poisoned the air every time he opened his mouth", Marshall said. The decade started off personally very badly, too. In 1980, Marshall's five year old son, Marc, died. Then Marshall got sick himself, nearly died of a brain abscess.

I remember we were sitting across from one another in a booth at one of Marshall's favorite eateries, the Metro Diner, on Broadway at West 100th Street, on the Upper West Side. The Metro had been around since 1989. But the site itself is one of the neighbourhood's oldest structures, dating back to 1871, when it was a grocery store. Its owner today is a Greek-immigrant businessman, Fanis Tsiamtsiouris, known as "Frank". Seven hundred cups of coffee get poured there each day, a hundred and fifty-odd hamburgers grilled, and twelve hundred eggs cracked open by staff hailing from all over the world.

I sat overlooking 100th Street, looking westward, on the lookout for Marshall. But he came from the other direction, from the subway. When he arrived he said I should shift around to face the other way, to look eastward. He was keen for me to watch the action along Upper Broadway, the neighbourhood's central artery. Upper Broadway was very special to him and he wanted to share the pleasure. He wanted me to see it for myself. It was such a sweet thing to do. I’ll always remember it. The Metro Diner had been one of my first New York ports of call with Marshall. Unbeknownst to me then, two decades later, it would be his last. He’d keel over in the morning on that awful New York day, September 11th, in 2013, his heart giving out, breakfasting with his old Bronx pal, the photographer Mel Rosenthal. Marshall was seventy two.