Thoughts About New York City

Subway Portraits, New York, 1930s, Walker Evans

You don't need to like people to live in New York, but you have to be somewhat open with your humanity, somewhat okay in your own skin. Conversations and interactions are everywhere, chances to study faces, listen to arguments. At Momofuku, the couple next to us was having a breakup discussion. She was leaving him. On the other side, a group of investment bankers ordered a round of drinks, attempted to flirt with us. In New York, the awareness of experiences unfolding simultaneously is heightened, the way a cacophony of sounds in heavy metal eventually gives way to some sort of harmony. Or not.

In Los Angeles, it is easier to be present in your your own life, even in public, but in New York, there is a constant awareness of the shared space between people, shared air, a sense that you are a small part of a larger whole, and the edges of your singularity are constantly being blurred or eroded.

Lives intersect, for a moment, tourists ask for directions. People stop to listen to drummers in the subway or rush to catch the 6:20 local. You catch glimpses of people you might know, you might have known, you might know someday. The city buzzes with a kind of aggressive possibility, possibility on steroids.

I once made Alessandro walk 52 blocks from the Time Warner Center to the upper West Side. This was the summer I was sad and walked over fifty blocks a day, till I was whittled down to a slip of air and couldn't recognize myself in the mirror. This was a merely a byproduct of walking-while-thinking. Alessandro complained the whole time, suggested the subway every ten blocks. But we walked the entire distance to Columbia. We had plans to meet Jo later that night, but we serendipitously ran into her around Broadway and 86th. This happens a lot in New York.

The subway, even at rush hour, even in the middle of summer with no air conditioning is a boon. I'll say it. Again and again if I have to. I live in a city with limited public transportation, and I miss being able to zip across town with ease.

Jo told me a story about messing up her contact lenses and having to toss them out on the subway and then listening for the stop and walking home in a city that looked like a Monet painting with it's blurred lights and soft shapes. I could understand what she was saying because I am blind too without my glasses, and intrigued at a New york with softer edges. But I wouldn't want to try this.

New York is a fantastic receptacle of memories, even if it is constantly changing. See that boutique? It used to be the only Urban Outfitters in New York City and I would go there, on weekends in high school, to buy vintage orange-tag Levis. The Chinese restaurant in midtown where my dad and I always have lunch when I visit him at his office is gone too. Once, on the 6, Jo and Al and I rode home with a friend who peed into the tracks in between carriages while the train was in motion. We watched, sort of horrified and fascinated at once.

Women walking on the street in New York are beautiful. You only catch their faces for a minute, for a glimpse, because mostly people are in a rush. I think it comes down to the sense of openness in the city, the fact that everyone is constantly afoot. This is my face. This is who I am. There is a beauty just in that.

There are regular stops on every trip. I didn't make it to Grimaldi's this time, or to the Pickle Guys, but I met up with the nice Hare Krishna man at the Doughnut Plant and the boy with the newsie cap at the Chocolate Bar. He wrapped my chocolates with a kind of care that might seem incongruous with the city, if you didn't know it well enough. Brown boxes, with the swoosh of silken brown bows. "They're beautiful," I told him, and he beamed with an endearing sort of pride.

After lunch on Tuesday, I still had a few errands, but then it got gray and I decided to head back home to Greenwich. Also, my heels were hurting from all that walking. I kissed my New York goodbye and told her I would be back for more possibilities in a couple of months.