Lou Reed died yesterday in Amagansett, N.Y., thus ending his life on the same island, Long Island, where it began more than 71 years ago in Kings County, better known as Brooklyn. For most of the time in between, Reed was all about Manhattan (he was, says this obituary in Spin Magazine, “the embodiment of New York City”)—or, when he and the Velvet Underground first became famous in the late 60s and early 70s, that part of the city circumscribed at its northernmost point by the club Max’s Kansas City on Park Ave. South, at its southernmost by Houston St. (there was no SoHo back then, no Tribeca either), with the Bowery as its eastern frontier and the Hudson river to the West: in other words, Greenwich Village.

I grew up in the Village during that period and imagined I saw Reed everywhere on its streets, and in a sense I did—the drug addicts, drunks, prostitutes, rock and rollers and hustlers who populated his songs were some of the people in my neighborhood. It was years before I recognized that most kids didn’t grow up like my brothers and I did, before I saw that Reed’s subjects were something other than just the people on your block.