Why Hoffman loves New York

It took a long time for Dustin Hoffman to find his home, said Matthew Garrahan in the Financial Times. Growing up in Los Angeles, Hoffman was constantly on the move with his family. “[My father] was a salesman, always trying to live above his standard of living,” says Hoffman, 74. “He was always moving upward but falling short of the rent, so we’d move back to where we shouldn’t have left.” The actor felt a pull to New York City from an early age, fueled by East Side Kids, a 1940s serial about a gang of boys from the Manhattan tenements. “When I used to see them on the Saturday matinee, that’s all I wanted to be.” At 20, he visited New York for the first time. “I got off the bus and, in front of me across the street, there is a guy pissing on a bus tire, in full view of everyone. My first thought was, ‘I’m home.’ I loved New York from then on.” That affection almost killed him. In 1970, members of the radical left-wing Weather Underground accidentally blew themselves up with dynamite in the house next to his. “There was a large gaping hole where my desk had been.” What would have happened if he’d been sitting there when the bomb went off? “Well,” he says, laughing, “it would have been a shorter career.”

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