If America were one big park, New York City would be the oversized masonic statue at the gated front entrance. Like a General eternally perched atop a bucking horse, ready to gallop into battle, New York City is the physical embodiment of what America thinks of itself at its finest, climactic hour. New York is beautiful and chic and inspiring, and smelly and crowded and infuriating. I’ve never been as close to hitting someone as when riding the MTA subways. Imagine the DMV on wheels, rolling through an oil spill. In fact, commuting constitutes such a large part of life in this largest of American cities that E.B. White famously concluded that there are three types of New Yorkers: the elitist natives who take it all utterly for granted, the transplants who give it passion and steroidal ambition, and the commuters who give it a tidal-like swell of restlessness, what celebrities often refer to as a vibe. To that I would add a fourth – 300 million Americans. NYC is the aerial backdrop for the opening credits of every Disney movie we remember growing up, people laboring off to forgettable meetings in the foreground, their blinding new designer tote bags hoisted conspicuously over their shoulders. It is the urban carrot of a million test-takers, paper writers and understudies, harboring their precious fantasies to be appreciated. It is the destination for a billion skittish dreamers and schemers, the SuperDome of IPOs and short sales. It is assuredly a place where sex never had to be brought back; sex can’t leave a city with its own line of condoms, aptly branded with the cartoonish insignias of subway stops. It is a place where people buy tickets in droves to ride on top of wretchedly emasculating double-decker buses to see rusted bridges from the Roaring Twenties, endless brownstone walk-ups and sidewalks gushing with people from below ground like a slit artery, no one looking or talking to anyone else. It is the life we envision for ourselves every single day in that hazy mid distant future, when we’ve accomplished just a little more, made just a little more, become a little better looking. NYC is a 300 block long corpus just about to wake up, perennially at the climax of the American dream – creating the new and changing it just because it’s old. And I literally cannot imagine anything else.
