‘The Phantom of Ninth Street’: A Bon Vivant’s Lonely Decline

‘The Phantom of Ninth Street’: A Bon Vivant’s Lonely Decline
He lived every New Yorker’s dream life. And then it all slipped away.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/nyregion/paul-pannkuk-phantom.html

When the police arrived at his apartment in Greenwich Village, Paul Pannkuk didn’t know what they were talking about.

Someone had entered the apartment next door, taken a random armload of the tenant’s belongings — photo albums, a doormat, a shoe holder — and dumped it all with the garbage in the basement. The burglar was captured on security camera, and he looked an awful lot like Mr. Pannkuk.

He told the officers he had no memory of the incident. He would never steal, he said.

He stood in his once-grand one-bedroom home, with marble floors and windows onto tree-lined West Ninth Street. The home’s former elegance was now hard to imagine.

The living room was dark, most of its lights missing. There was little furniture, and what remained was old and worn, with stuffing sprouting from holes. Newspaper clippings were stacked in tidy piles on the floor beside black-and-white family photographs.

On a side table was a sheet of paper with what looked like random doodles and reminders. In fact, it was a map of sorts for a man hopelessly lost, guideposts to his old life: “Morgan Stanley,” “Drake University,” the name of the composer of “The Music Man” (Meredith Willson). There was a verse from a child’s prayer: “If I should die before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

Mr. Pannkuk had once lived in comfort approaching extravagance, split between the Village and the Hamptons, his future secured by a career in finance many dreamed to have in 1990s New York. He traveled the world, returning to the city to share his stories with his friends.

Most of those friends were gone now. He had driven them away. At the age of 68, he was on a path many single New Yorkers dread. He was alone, with no one to take care of him, the mysterious occupant of Apartment 1A. But he was too far gone to realize what was happening. His brain no longer worked the way it once did.

His story is one steeped in kindness and frustration and hope misplaced, framed by addiction and a shattering accident on the eve of a new start.It is the tale of a recluse in plain sight, a man left to compulsively wander the place he called home. A friend gave him a dubious title: The Phantom of Ninth Street.