---
Rarely do they glance.
I have heard much talk about NYC being an oppressively lonely place. I could see how a person could be quite lonely in NYC, but I didn’t see much of what looked like loneliness in the field – most people we encountered were either with someone or phoning or texting. I didn’t see a lot of people that looked like they were dying to be noticed. I think NYC is better described as a disinterested place. It was creepy and bizarre how rarely any of the hundreds of people we passed each day would shoot us even a quick glance. I’m not asking for prolonged eye contact, but I’d at least like to be occasionally visually acknowledged. It’s not even like being in an elevator where at least the awkwardness of not looking at each other is present. To New Yorkers, other pedestrians seem to be merely moving, peripheral obstacles.
Even the dogs were disinterested. They’d walk inches away from me without showing the slightest inclination to direct a quick sniff toward my smelly legs. It’s the first I’ve felt tempted to yell, “WHY AREN’T YOU SMELLING ME?!”
It was an incredible relief to meet a woman and her german shepherd in a mostly empty Central Park one night because they both gave us a sniff and a tail wag, one only metaphorically. Maybe I’m just narcissistic, but I think having your existence acknowledged by someone whom you are not paying is a pretty important part of life, up there with food and sleep.
Homeless people that don’t beg.
Related to the last point, we were within coin-flipping distance of probably more than a hundred homeless people during the trip, and only a few – literally 3 or 4 – asked us for money or even held up a sign. Like most New Yorkers, it’s rare that they even glance at you.
City that never sleeps, my ass.
Try walking the NYC streets Sunday night at 3am. Less sleepy than Durham-Raleigh streets to be sure, but hardly deserving of being called “awake.” When you have 70,000 residents per square mile, I expected to see a whole contingent of people and businesses that operate throughout the night, just by mere necessity. But other than bars and McDonalds, it’s hard to find any businesses open after midnight. The parks shut down, the public chairs in Times Square are stacked up or put on top of tables, and the homeless people sleep on benches or church steps. There is very little going on at night.
Walking speed.
“New York minute” seems inaccurate. People in New York don’t move that fast. Near the end of the trip, when we had logged nearly 100,000 steps and our lower backs, legs, and butt cheeks were in moderate to severe pain, we were slogging, and yet I estimate that we were still passing people at a two-to-one ratio.
Bigger than I realized, but not intimidatingly big.
Here is a rough sketch of our path on the first day from the bus to the hotel:
That’s a long walk, my friends, especially if you're carrying luggage. That particular path took us three or four hours. In total, we took nearly 40,000 steps that day, and took over 20,000 steps every day we were there. (For perspective, I average 4,400 steps per day.) There is a lot of ground to be covered in Manhattan, but not so much that I felt like the other side of the island was out of reach. It felt large yet consciousable.
Unaccommodation.
Can a cracker get a drinking fountain? Or how about a bench or a public restroom? Even a private restroom? A free Internet connection that does not come in 15 minute increments and have a waiting list? These things are surprisingly hard to come by. I’d hate to live in New York if I had bladder issues. Correction: New Yorkers would hate it if I lived in New York if I had bladder issues. (Related: A friend mentioned that there was a large turd on her subway train the same day I wrote a post praising the subways for their “homey” smells.)
The smells.
Trash bags are piled up about every other block every day of the week, many of them rancid. We did lots of momentary breath-holding. But even when there was no trash to be found and no rancid smells to be expected, you would still sometimes get hit with a random pungent odor, maybe creeping from the sewers. Pretty unpleasant. The subways, though, were not terribly smelly—just warm and ugly.
The
I don’t know how people are able to speak casually into a cell phone in New York. But they do it. Except in the residential areas and in the parks, you are swimming in noise, often to the point that it makes conversation with the person next to you difficult.
It was fascinating listening to the city’s hum from the top of the Empire State Building at 1:30am. [This at best crudely captures it, but here’s a clip.]
Style.
I had this vision of NYC as being this rare place in the Universe where you could not look out of place if you tried, but wow did I feel very Midwestern walking through West Village in a t-shirt, baggy shorts, and athletic shoes. I might have expected to see Manhattanites looking glitzy sporting Gucci logos and what not, but that wasn’t at all the case. There were hardly any logos to be found; that’s out of style, apparently. These people dress well. Not runway-style, but clothes-that-fit-and-look-good-on-them-style. Only good, though, not interesting. They look like professionals and party-goers, not artists and designers.
Mmm, diversity.
When I first got off the bus near Penn Station, I could not stop smiling. The activity, the sounds, the colors – it was like a sensory orgasm. Flower shops and pizza parlors, fake jewelry and porn, young and old, gay and straight, hipster and nerdy, thin and plump, poor and rich, white, black, mocha and latino, all rolled into one concrete pastry. It was delicious. But either the effect wore off or we wandered into boroughs that had less diversity to offer because after the first ten minutes the feeling was lost for good.
Prices.
Yes, it’s expensive, but not prohibitively so. If you’re not careful, you could easily have living expenses exceed $5,000 per month, but with some sleuthing, I estimate that a person could live reasonably in Manhattan for $1,500 a month. There are apartments to be had for under $1,000 a month. There are 1,000 calorie meals to be had for under $5 (see Chinatown). Subways will take you pretty much anywhere for $2.25. And grocery stores are probably no more expensive in NYC than the rest of the U.S.
Pretzel croissants.
That’s right: pretzel croissants. They exist, apparently, and I was determined to put one in my belly, especially after reading that Thomas Gresham called them “one of the most delicious things in existence.” But alas, it wasn’t to be. There were three or four separate missions, countless natives interrogated, but ultimately zero pretzel croissants captured. I left the city humbled and ashamed.
Where’s the creativity?
True, there are pretzel croissants (we’ve heard), but I expected NYC to be a place where trial and error are always and everywhere on display. With the density of “creatives” that live in the city, I thought these little shops could hardly afford not to try new things. This was probably what disappointed me the most. Pizza, bagels, corner delis, halal carts – it’s really all the same. As a business owner, you keep doing what’s profitable and/or what’s been OKed by the city ‘crats. Sadness. (Side note: I thought they'd at least be up on technology, but unlike Miami I saw none of the small businesses using Square.)
Lack of cookyness.
There was an old, shirtless gentleman in khaki shorts playing tennis with himself against an Arc de Triomphe-like monument in Washington Park, but that was about it as far as cookyness sightings. I was expecting to see weirdos on nearly every city block. Instead, stylish people predominate.
Chinatown.
This was the most pleasant surprise for us. It is a bit grittier than the rest of downtown, and that is a compliment. Here is Morgan Friedman, founder of Overheard in New York among many other things (and reader of this blog!), writing in a random thought journal about a city's need for grittiness:
Raw areas have 99-cent shops, liquor stores, thrift shops, adult bookstores, pawn shops, psychic readers, corner bars and strip clubs, tattoo parlors, check-cashing and money transfer shops, Off the Track Betting, men on the street selling food (tacos, in LA), local bars on block after block (often unmarked), and everything is cheap. This is the sort of environment that creates the vibrancy that is the hallmark of a true city: the unpretentious, middle-class but almost sleazy atmosphere of all sorts of stores and lifestyles and desires clashing and co-existing on top of one another. This is what the fabled Manhattan was supposed to be like back in the day of "if you can make it here you can make it anywhere" and "the city that never sleeps"; this rawness survives in pockets far uptown, in the Lower East Side, and in the outer boroughs -- and it is the defining characteristic of every Latino city. I was shocked - in a very positive way - to discover that Los Angeles is not fine-tuned so as to have removed every extra mole on its face, like the models and movies and magazines and pictures that come from it have done; New York is the one that threw the adult stores out of its center, not Los Angeles.
Chinatown was definitely the most active part of the city. The park was crawling with activity, even at 2pm on a weekday. We sat and creepily watched a couple of hotties dressed in their snug-fitting designer jeans kick ass on the handball court. ...Could have watched that for days.
Maybe what sold us the most on Chinatown was a phenomenal little (and by little I mean tiny) place called Prosperity Dumplings, where we filled our bellies with unbelievably tasty fried dumplings and sesame pancackes for about $3.50 / person.
Unpredictable subways.
The subways are not, it seems, like Durham-Raleigh’s I-40, where you know exactly when to avoid them. At least I wasn’t able to figure out the subway traffic patterns from our five day sample. You’d think that we’d be safe riding downtown at 11am on a weekday, or uptown at 3pm, but sometimes it would be no-choice-but-to-grope packed, other times not.
Celebrity sightings.
I saw (but did not stop) Charlie Todd and Matt Haughey (here's a 2 minute video of his trip) – celebrities in geekdom, at least.
(Speaking of geekdom, I have been spending an embarrassing amount of time on the site “You Are Listening to New York” wherein a live feed of the NYPD dispatcher is set to a background of ambient music. Somehow they go together beautifully. [By the way, the crime rate in NYC, I learned, has gone down dramatically [75%!] since the 80’s or 90’s. There are theories, but it’s hard to believe any of them could explain an almost unfathomable 75% drop.])
Declining awesomeness?
I’ve heard comments from various people saying, to paraphrase, that NYC has been declining in awesomeness. I pretty much dismissed it as typical nostalgic chatter, but then I saw these stats. NYC seems to be experiencing a not insignificant exodus. (P.S. – W00t Raleigh.)
It’s easy to not notice stuff.
There were more than a few times during the trip where Pavs and I compared notes and had a “how did I not notice that?!” reaction. For example, I made what I thought was a good observation that there were no public swimming pools in NYC, until Pavs pointed out that we passed two along our walk.
I certainly felt like the lesser of the two observers, but Pavs missed some stuff, too, like when we passed a girl with albinism. I think it’s probably generally true that we fail to notice a lot of what is going on around us at any given time, but New York gave us the opportunity to really see how much we were missing (or else hallucinating).
Mental poverty.
I felt a kind of mental poverty being away from my nerd coffee of Google Reader and books. I was exposed to so many people and so much behavior, but being back on Google Reader for 2 hours, I felt I learned more and was inspired more than I was during the entirety of the people-watching adventure.
Things in NYC I liked / would do again / would recommend doing:
Prosperity Dumplings (Chinatown)
Sal and Carmines pizza (Upper West Side)
Shake Shack (various)
High Line Park (Chelsea)
Absolute Bagels (Upper West Side)
Madison Square Park, while the giant head lasts (Flatiron)
Central Park late at night
Empire State Building late at night
Walk the Brooklyn Bridge
People (tourist) watching in the Guggenheim lobby
Here is a handy map of these and other recommendations from people I trust.
As for transportation, neither of us had a good or even mostly OK experience with Megabus, but we’d do it again just because it was so cheap: $26 round trip (but prices vary widely).
***
Postscript
Was NYC everything I hoped and imagined it would be? Of course not. But I’m glad I went. I’m glad I dragged Pavs along, I’m glad we got to see Cave of Forgotten Dreams (I loved it; Pavs: meh), I was thrilled to be able to take a ride in Gene’s taxi, I’m glad I got to see my high school sweetheart, and I’m glad Chinatown exists.
Also, I’m glad to be home.
###
Postscript 2
That hiatus I mentioned? It's back on.
