Times Square, where Nik Dirga went to work each day, hadn't been quite so gentrified in 1994, and was a buzzing, sleazy place, he says. Photo: Supplied / Nik Dirga
Thirty years ago this summer, I had my New York City adventure. I was a 22-year-old kid from way down in Mississippi who ended up working at a major international magazine.
In my last few months of university, I stumbled into an internship with Billboard magazine, the music industry bible. I'd been signed up for a "trade magazines" internship, and apparently the few awkward music reviews and pieces I had slapped together as clippings was enough for me to get a three-month tour aboard.
Nik Dirga on Staten Island ferry in 1994. Photo: Supplied / Nik Dirga
(Later, I met other people who were part of the same trades internship who ended up at magazines with titles like Tractor Parts Weekly, and who were a bit jealous of my fumbling luck getting a "cool" internship.)
For a college boy from Mississippi, it felt like I had dropped into another world. I had never been to New York City or even America's East Coast, and suddenly I was tossed into a real Manhattan magazine office. It had the warren of cubicles like you would see on TV and movies, the bustle of constant weekly deadlines, but while it was magical, it was also sometimes mundane and, in the end, a place where people just worked.
Times Square, where I went to work each day, hadn't been quite so gentrified then, and was a buzzing, sleazy place with wide-eyed tourists mingling with businessmen, sex workers and panhandlers. Cheap trinket shops mixed with fancy Broadway theatres and bizarre shadowy tombs showing all kinds of porn.
I spent a lot of time in the East Village, where a dirt-poor intern on his days off could just spend the days people-watching in Washington Square. I sat listening to a cassette of Elvis Costello's Get Happy!! on my Walkman and reading a paperback of cheap Chekhov plays and imagining how cool I must be. (Spoiler: I was not cool.)
Manhattan's skyline captured in 1994. Photo: Supplied / Nik Dirga
Each day, I would take the subway from my dorm room at NYU up to Times Square, where I'd grab a New York Daily News and coffee and head up to the Billboard office.
In 1994, the music industry was a very different place than it was in 2024. Sure, you still had hustlers and hopefuls all angling to make it big, but there was no Spotify, there was no social media - there was a gentrified system you had to crack to break through.
There was cold black ink on glossy magazine print worth its weight in gold to any musician. Billboard told the world what the number one song was, what the biggest selling album was. It mattered, in an age before media splintered into a million subsets.
Nik Dirga at the World Trade Center in 1994. Photo: Supplied / Nik Dirga
The CD was king, and it's hard to explain now how these shiny disposable discs were valuable hard currency to music lovers for a while there. We would get dozens of CDs a day from bands hoping for a line or two of print, and each day, dozens of surplus discs would be "dumped" on a small "free" shelf right across from my cubicle. Like a dinner bell ringing, the "dump" would be accompanied by other office workers scurrying to the shelf from all over the building, scooping up the glorious free music, no matter what it was, hoping to find treasures.
Staffers casually mentioned having lunch with pop stars or heading to the muddy fields of Woodstock '94. I was an observer on the edge of it all, but it confirmed for me this weird, pressure-filled life of journalism was where I wanted to be.
I lived the true intern's life of being the office errand boy - helping sort the massive sacks of mail of review CDs and books, answering phones, working in a tiny file room to organise the horrifyingly cheesy band photos sent in by every would-be superstar in the land, and sometimes, getting to write short pieces.
I had maybe 10 bylines in Billboard that summer, each one feeling hard-won.
I did not end up staying and working in Manhattan - I had one semester of college to finish and ended up working in Mississippi a few more years before fleeing back to my native California and continuing my quixotic career.
I have never been back to New York City and now live almost on the opposite side of the world. It's not where I imagined things might go as a hungry young intern all those years ago, but it's also great to be here.
I'd like to go back, someday. But it was enough to be there, one summer in Manhattan, where it felt like the entire world revolved around Times Square.
Part five of RNZ's summer essay series.
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