On Being a Man On The Street
I feel pockets of controlled chaos. A city that belongs to everyone and is increasingly nobody’s calls for individual expression and constraints wherever it can be managed. The exemplar of this was, to me, the simplicity of spaces between buildings. This ranged from none at all, to the handful of feet, to the blocks I had been expecting. Those gaps are the unaccounted-for or otherwise-owned space that separate brick and steel and time, and add a breath – or none – between styles and moments and singular visions for the sky.
I am struck – as I constantly appear to be – by the scale of it all, by the scale of difference. It is a scale that vanishes with degrees. The second I look up in this city, no matter by how much, I’m treated to monuments of human greatness and achievement, that in reality, only succeed in making me feel as small as I wish I wasn’t.
I walked fast – as one does here - down the great gaps of avenues. Every couple hundred feet, we are treated to a running expanse, to height scale and chrome and glass and rebar and time, stretching for tens of dozens of numbers. The sheer mass of the Chrysler building peaks its head in the distance downtown, from so far a distance looking like a model out of a children's toy box.
Marching as I am down one of the avenues, I weave my way through four or five food delivery drivers huddled outside a building of chrome and glass, separate but somehow united in their collective representation as a whole against the thirty-somethings with well-coiffed hair that retrieved their salads or burgers or burrito bowls. The building in which they work seems to be made of entire buildings of its own, with shiny architectural struts twice as tall as the synagogue just one block north.
It is a beautiful mass of dark pink stone, tessellating in a pattern I could not quite grasp. A woman eats her take-out on its steps listening to whatever he's listening to. An unhoused man puts on a stained tartan shirt on the other side The lines and roundness that make up the building, the angles and circles that communicate a unique history in a city rife with it, familiar to those who ought to be familiar with it.
On another avenue of dizzying length and individual significance, delicately carved and statuesque and marble and tile pillars of a church outside of which bears a sign welcoming those that exist outside of its preachings in thought, seeking an expansion of the faith it, as a building, represents.
Circling back to my origin, I see the 50 stars and however many stripes it is that catch the light as bumper stickers, that show their wrinkles as they lightly flap in the air, that denote language and accessibility in a city where such warnings are needed, where they are baked into its identity.
Everywhere, somebody's old is somebody's new. New York is a city that in its short time frame of existence, has expanded outwards and inwards and upwards. Downwards too, but discovering such requires a venture down the steps of heat and smell and wafting. In a land of excess, tolerable is lucky here.