I went on a trip to New York City in July 2009. There are a bunch of pictures of it here.
New York, for me, still doesn't exist as a coherent image for me. I have fragments of a picture:
- Eisenberg's, with traditional soda-fountain drinks, the long counter with tiny two-person tables crushed alongside, the images of the proprietor with famous people I didn't recognize.
- The Statue of Liberty, with its throngs of tourists, and the enormous security process to enter, double-layered.
- The squalor of Harlem, briefly glimpsed out the windows of a bus bound for better parts.
- The Guggenheim and the Met, stuffed with people, nestled along Fifth Avenue, the most expensive real estate in America.
- The miles of subway track, where the well-off and the down-trodden intermingle interchangeably, and where two drummers passing a hat can put three dozen people in a good mood.
- Wall Street, empty over the weekend, the shadows of the buildings creating a quiet, hushed atmosphere, as if we were standing at a wake.
Even among all this, there were the constants: the crush of people, the noise, the cars, the constant realization that there are nine million people in very close proximity, and they all get along like this, each and every day.
I managed to seriously annoy two individuals on my trip. The first was in the subways, where I inadvisedly stopped to take a picture of an interesting piece of statuary on the subway stairwell. A gentleman behind me growled "That asshole'd better not make me miss the train." We all missed it, and the man looked like he wanted to haul off and punch me in the face but, thankfully, restrained himself. (We would have missed it, anyway.) The second time, I rather bluntly told someone to move out of the way of the take-out ticket dispenser at the bakery. She and her date shot me the evil eye, and he called me an asshole as well.
That aside, I found New York to be most agreeable. The couch I slept on was plenty comfortable, but I could have slept just fine on the floor after all the walking I did all weekend. Kristine and Ethan were wonderful hosts, putting up with my petulance, as well as the very long list of things to see and do that I had all worked out.
There's no way to synthesize the entirety of New York City into a pithy sentence, some abstract fable about life. Each block has its own narrative history, its own unique signature. The dozens of nationalist enclaves around the city speak to the unwillingness of the individual New Yorker to allow themselves to be caught up in some larger story; instead, there is the holding on to of traditions, the refusal to be subsumed by the City's pull.