New York in the Rear-view Mirror

There is something poetic about a leaf falling in New York City. If I had a dollar for every time I see this image in a movie, I'd be filthy rich! There is a timeless quality about it, an identity all its own in a city that erases every identity there is. In the whirlwind of the New York life there is this one living “creature” dying and your eyes are watching it.

I think about this identity crisis every time I visit New York. I am not a big city girl and going to New York cements that once and for all. I cannot even hear myself think there. But for a short period of time, a couple of days, even hours, I let myself be swallowed by this big city, the noise, the crowds, the dirt, the honking horns, the fire engines, the ambulances, the lights, the moving ads … For a few days I forget I have a life, and a name and I become one with the great unknown around me.

Every time I visit I wonder the same things: how can someone live here, with no ego, no identity, no physical proof that they exist?! How can they live knowing that they do not matter, for this is how I feel in New York: alive or dead, rich or poor, who cares?!

But New York is bigger, larger, deeper than this humdrum mix of nothingness and everythingness. New York is richer than this still. History oozes from every wall, filling up the filthy gutters. Pop culture and the present are leaving their marks seemingly with every second, as we breathe …

The stories, as told by our many guides on our hop-on-and-hop-off buses, abound: “this is where Cary Bradshaw lived, and this is where she got married; this is the first Trump tower and the only one without his name on it; this is where John Lennon got shot; and this is where Sully landed that plane on The Hudson...”

There is never a boring second in New York. If you're not visiting a museum or a sight to learn about history or art, you're listening to some story about something that you have seen in a movie, a series, or a documentary; if you're not doing that, you're probably eating something memorable, even if it is a hot-dog on the streets of Manhattan, or dim sum at an obscure neighborhood eatery . If you're not doing that, you're just wandering the streets of Little Italy and hearing century-old echoes of Italian voices disputing rent and ownership … You're riding the boat on the way to Ellis Island and crying because you can relate to every immigrant story you're about to listen to! You're seeing Manhattan and beyond from some high-rise building and seemingly seeing all the way to Florida on a clear day! I am convinced that you can be born and raised in just one of these boroughs and live to be 100 and not exhaust seeing, hearing, learning everything there is to see, hear, and learn about it. Every day is a visual and auditory explosion of life and death, everywhere you turn.

Like I said, I don't like big cities much, but I enjoy once in a while knowing and feeling, with every pore of my body, that there is something undeniably bigger than myself. New York ensures that.

I have seen it three times so far, and every time it is the same and every time it is a little bit different. This month, it was (if you can believe that!) quieter than I remembered it. The traffic was not as bad as I once thought, but that may be because I have driven in Utah now! Cars were not double and triple parked anymore and two lanes meant two cars in one direction, unlike what I remembered.

9-11 still hovers over the city like a dark cloud, an open wound, still oozing with pain. People talk about it and remember the city “during those days” – probably the most recent historic moment they got to watch with their own eyes. The infinity pools that replaced the towers, flowing deep into the ground, are a profound symbol of what was there before, in absentia: once shooting towards the skies, they are now buried inside the underground of the city, just as deep as they were once tall. Touching the names of those gone sends chills up my spine. I remember the first time I was in New York (1999), the second thing to Ellis Island to impress me was the Twin Towers. Their massive stature, their impressive views. The amount of people they housed. If you have ever seen them or any other high-rise that compares to them, all that would consume you when you see them collapsing would be “those thousands of people have no chance!”. The sadness is all-encompassing and lasting for many years …

And that's the thing about New York: beyond the multitude of buildings and streets and public transport vehicles, there are always the people. 8+ million of them – and you wonder in mute awe: where would they all fit? How can they all fit?! And somehow, you are seeing it: they do …

There is a strange familiarity about New York. Maybe it is the fact that we do see so much of it in pop culture?! Maybe it is simply the fact that we're all human and we relate to all these millions around us?! But there is a certain reassuredness that you're going to be OK, in the end, no matter how overwhelmed you might feel. Walking the streets has always felt friendly and familiar to me, and I never thought I would ever get lost in New York. It's pretty simple: grid system all the way, except, we learned this time, in Greenwich Village.

What was unusual this last time I was there was that my first thought after I got back home from New York was: “I wanna go back.” I am not sure if that was because this time I was there with my sister, the true big-city girl, the true cosmopolitan, the true art monger who really knows how to do a big city justice. Might be all that or I am not sure why, but I wanted to turn right back around and see, hear, taste, live … some more.

We never finished seeing The MET, nor did we really walk Central Park. If I were to go back those would be the only two things I truly would want to see and then just turn around and come back home. If I am lucky, it would be a gentle fall day, so I can watch all the leaves leaving the trees in Central Park and listen, for once, at the silence in the big grinder. With every leaf, one second of silence, one single identity of life making its brief existence known. What puts the world in motion, life, and its swan song right in front our eyes … There is good to know that there is room for poetry even in the dirty, noisy streets of Manhattan … So much room …

With such a dense forest of buildings, where are the streets?!  Manhattan seen from The Empire State Building, looking South towards the unified One World Trade Center in the misty sunset. Click to view the album of our adventures ...