Hey, New York!

New York is a giant city.  Unbelievably gigantic.  It’s such a large city that when you’re in it, it’s difficult to imagine that there’s much else outside, or much reason to leave.  You want it, the city’s got it: grocery stores on every corner, 24-hour subways, pizza parlors, churches, cathedrals, synagogues and mosques (but, for the love of Christian God, watch where you put those things!).  In the mood for expensive clothes?  I give you Fifth Avenue.  Cheap clothes?  Here’s a Target.  Don’t mind if last season's perfectly good clothes have been shredded?  Here’s the dumpster behind H&M.  Or maybe you need a break, a walk through the woods.  Central Park has you covered.  Horses?  Prospect Park has those.  Water?  There’s the Hudson River (of course, I’m using the term “water” very loosely here).  Museums?  Yeah, we’ve got 86 of them.

In short, it’s no wonder why people gravitate to New York.  It’s a city’s city, the kind of city every other city wants to be.  When cities hang out, I imagine Seattle probably sits off in the corner of the room, a cigarette in hand, pontificating to any city that will listen (and none of them do) about the limits of Dadaism; San Francisco is sitting at another table playing with itself.  Detroit is beating the ever-loving shit out of Philadelphia, Memphis is perusing the buffet, filling its plate with whatever it can fit, while Washington, D.C. is surreptitiously dumping whole plates of hors d’oeuvres into its bag.  But New York is sitting in the middle, at the cool kids table reading the newspaper (Le Monde), while all the other cities try to figure out how they can sit there, too.

When I first decided to move to New York City, I don’t think I fully understood the idea of New York.  I had one of those “streets paved with gold” conceptions of it, as though magical elves came in at night to power-wash the whole city clean each day, and M&Ms fell from the sky instead of rain.  I wanted to genuinely believe that there was some street, somewhere in New York that was, at one time, paved in gold, even if it had long ago been paved over in concrete and broken dreams.  Turns out the closest they come is Christopher Street, which, as you may know, was paved with semen.  Naturally, they had a gay old time with that.

Of course, very few cities can live up to one’s expectations, especially a city with the cultural cachet of New York City.  I’d like to say my idea of New York came from Woody Allen movies, or The French Connection, Network, Wall Street, or the litany of other movies taking place there, or literary classics like The Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby, or even television shows like Seinfeld or 30 Rock.  But if I’m being honest, and I rarely am, I would have to say that Hey Arnold! probably contributed the most to my image of New York, even if, as I just recently discovered, it doesn’t technically take place in New York.  I suppose I should have known that a real city couldn’t possibly match it’s fictionalized cartoon counterpart, but then I was also someone who, until I visited a castle from the Middle Ages in Germany while I was in high school, had a fleeting belief that dragons truly did exist there.  It was a traumatic day when I discovered otherwise.

First Pluto, then Brontosaurus, and now this isn't New York?
Yet another blow to everything I held dear in my childhood.

No, sadly, New York is not much like the fictional place of Arnold’s adventures.  It’s very much what you would expect for a city that, I’m told, never sleeps.  It’s busy, dirty and full of far too many people.  It’s the kind of place where, if I happen to find myself on an empty street, with no one else in sight, I immediately assume something is wrong.  Have I inadvertently crossed a police line somewhere?  Is there a gas leak nearby?  Did I stumble onto the site of a biohazard?  Have the decades of background radiation finally caused the cockroaches in the subway to evolve into our new, giant insect overlords (because I, for one, would welcome them)?  Or, worse, did I forget to put on deodorant this morning again?

It’s a city that, unlike, say, Beverly Hills, feels lived in.  Door handles are well worn, as though they haven’t been polished since the Great Depression, sidewalks are covered in flattened, black gobs of bubble gum (even though there are garbage cans on every corner), and scaffolding sits above most sidewalks to prevent a wayward girder or unlucky window washer, busy at work on the building above, from crashing down and drenching the sidewalks in blood.  After all, you can power wash the bubble gum away, but with blood, well, sometimes that never comes out.

It’s also a city that, oddly, feels alive, ever changing. Where Paris feels like a grand museum, and Tokyo feels like a high tech, city-sized Apple Store, New York is an amalgamation of the old and the new, the classic and the cutting edge.  For every majestic 1910s era Grand Central Terminal, there’s a claustrophobic, 1960s era Penn Station.  For every elegantly spired Chrysler Building, there’s an open pedimented, post-modernist AT&T Building on Madison Avenue.  There’s the art-deco of Rockefeller Center, and there’s the modernist International style of the Lincoln Center.  Newly constructed, glass facaded buildings seem to rise, willy nilly, next to their older masonic predecessors.

My favorite example is the Hearst Building, on 8^th Avenue.  A 46-story glass tower, built with intricate triangular lattice work that, if you squint hard enough (no, squint harder), resembles a giant crystal you might find hidden in some cave in Mexico.  Where most modern buildings might sit near an older building, Hearst Tower just sort of rises out of one.  The base of the skyscraper is a six story, tan colored art-deco building from the 1930s.  Its like the architectural equivalent of someone at a cafe who, finding no open chairs, thinks, fuck it, and just plants themselves on the lap of a wheelchair-bound senior citizen.  That is to say, it’s a rather odd looking juxtaposition.

And it’s odd to fathom a city that, when presented with its history, thinks, “Aww, that’s quaint,” before demolishing it and replacing it with a newer, taller, better successor.  That’s not to say that New York doesn’t appreciate its history -- in fact, I believe its landmark protections are actually quite vigorously enforced, but that’s a rather recent development, a result of the untold havoc that the late city planner Robert Moses wreaked upon the city before he finally demolished the magnificent original Penn Station and New Yorkers finally put their collective feet down (of course, they stepped in gum).  Still, it’s difficult to imagine what Fifth Avenue once looked like when it was populated by the mansions of the New York elite.

I’m sure it’s been said before and I’ll say it again (mostly because I have nothing original to add): New York is a microcosm of America.  People from all over the country move here to call it home.  New York is historic, but it’s also a city with an unabashed eye to the future (though, for whatever reason, no one takes seriously my suggestion that, in the future, New York City should be crossed by mag-levs.  Why?  Because they’re fucking mag-levs).  It’s beautiful in places, and it’s disgusting in others (I’m looking at you, Bushwick).  It’s city where individuality is the highest virtue, but it’s also a metropolis that fosters a sense of community and unity like no other.  New Yorkers take a reticent pride in their city, like the denizens of few other cities do.  New Yorkers regard it as a mark of survival, of temerity, to live in a city precisely because it’s such a difficult city to live in.  It’s a most peculiar paradox.

And it’s exactly why, for better or worse, I want to be here.