New York City – as seen through three sets of eyes

 

 

New York City has always had a mythical presence in my life. Growing up, it was where my grandmother lived. As an adult, it was the center of commerce that my wife and I commuted into for work. Now, it is home to our son and his girlfriend and, as retirees, it gleams as a tourist attraction. I have experienced the city across several decades; indeed, I have seen it through many different sets of eyes.

Looking out from my childhood home in Maine, Boston was the nearest major city, but the towering buildings of NYC loomed over it in my psyche. One of my earliest toys was a set of Lego-like building blocks which, when assembled, made a model of the Empire State Building. The bounty of Thanksgiving and the magic of Christmas were combined in one powerful symbol, the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Christmas morning meant a small, but special, present in my stocking, not from Santa and the North Pole, rather it bore the logo A & F as it was a gift from my grandmother in NYC in a repurposed Abercrombie & Fitch box.

When I was 10, I saw NYC for the first time, albeit through the eyes of a child. My brothers were old enough to fend for themselves, so it was my father, my mother and I who had made the 350-mile car trip into the city where my grandmother was a Christian Science practitioner tending to an elderly woman. My first views of the city were not of skyscrapers, but rather the brownstones on a residential side street off Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. Through the vagaries of memory, my strongest recollection of staying with my grandmother is that the horsehair mattress on my bed was the most uncomfortable thing ever. We didn’t take in any of the sights though my father did take me for a ride on the subway intending that experience to be a highlight of the trip. For me, the highlight was getting a soda from a genuine soda fountain. Each afternoon, my grandmother would give me a quarter and I would walk the block to Coney Island Avenue. As I stood there, more cars would pass in a minute than would pass our house in a month. I wasn’t allowed to cross; I would turn right, walk two blocks along the avenue then turn right again. Halfway down this block sat an old-time drug store featuring a long lunch counter behind which rose the chrome and black levers of the soda fountain. I would sit at the counter, finish my soda, then retrace my steps. As I walked, caffeine would mix with adrenaline induced by the bustle of the world rushing by me and, on a sugar high, I felt on top of the world.

Much later, when I was in my 50’s, I worked in the city, commuting in from Connecticut. New York City was such an iconic part of life in the Northeast that it was always simply ‘the’ city. My now mature eyes would be closed, catching a last few minutes of sleep on the train, then emerge from the gloom of the platforms into one of the most beautiful train stations in the world, Grand Central Station. From there, I would walk diagonally crosstown to my office. When I made my model of the Empire State Building, it never occurred to me that one day it would be a milestone on my way to work, signaling two more blocks to go. Thanksgiving mornings, sitting in front of our B&W TV, as I watched the performers singing and dancing on the huge star painted on the street in front of Macy’s flagship store, little did I know that my feet would regularly traipse across that very same star.

To me, New York City had gone from being an Oz-like place to an obstacle course needing to be overcome on each commute. When headed home, the train schedule dictated that the course had to be completed in under twenty-six minutes – twenty-seven and you stood for the 90-minute ride, twenty-eight and you missed the train! Tourists were like slow-moving slalom poles to weave between; on side streets, jaywalking between the throbs of traffic shaved off valuable seconds.

Weather was another obstacle. Rain would require changing the route to maximize the scant protection provided by construction scaffolding. Heat and humidity required carrying a clean shirt to change into. Snow in Connecticut meant ankle-deep puddles of icy wet slush in the city. Then there was the ever-present wind. Concrete canyons funneled the wind into slipstreams that could literally knock you over on a bad day and made umbrellas useless on any day. The Empire State Building milestone meant two blocks of walking into the teeth of the cold, damp wind coming off the Hudson. One day, the wind blew my favorite hat off my head sending it dancing into the two-way traffic on 34^th St. There, the wind and I played a game of chase for the next twenty minutes. As the wind quieted, my hat lay in the middle of the second lane over, having miraculously been missed by the wheels of the dozen cars that had passed over it. Timing a break in the traffic, I ran into the street and, just as my outstretched fingers were about to grab it, the wind swirled in a different direction sending the grey tweed kite that once was my hat fifty feet away and another lane over. I scampered back to the safety of the curb just as the onrushing cars from a now green traffic light roared by. There, I plotted a path and timing to the hat’s new location, the wind teasing me by nudging it this way and that as I schemed. Another gap in traffic, another frantic dash into the street, another gust lifting the wayward hat out of reach. Eventually I got my hat, scrunched it firmly on my head, and went on to the office.

That struggle to rescue my hat was a microcosm of how I came to view New York City. It is a constant flux of struggle and reward, of Yin and Yang, of life and, if not death, then near death experiences, the best and the worst in close proximity.

Now, turned 70, I have just returned from a week spent in New York City, a week of seeing both new and familiar sights through eyes both older and wiser. Our son had given my wife and I tickets to see To Kill A Mockingbird for her birthday in February of 2020; now, 20 months later, we were going to see the show.  We stayed at our son’s apartment in the theater district and experienced a wide swarth of the best of New York City. Besides the play (one of the best ever BTW), we caught the musical based on Bob Dylan’s songs. People were so glad to be back in Broadway theaters that the person telling them to turn off their cell phones got a round of applause. We went to two museums, one an old favorite, the Met, and one new to us, the Morgan Library. We met old friends and new (including my NYC-based OLLI instructor and her wonderful family.) We walked everywhere including our first time traversing the High Line, going up from the West Village to Hudson Yards with a stop at the Chelsea Market for NYC pizza. We visited some old haunts, including Grand Central Terminal, walked past old workplaces, and got lunch from places old and new.

We were reminded how much of a Yin and Yang experience NYC is on our last day. We walked up to Central Park West to catch a musician friend who, by happenstance, was providing the music for a Sunday Service at the Society for Ethical Culture. After, we strolled through the park, coming out into the swirling mass of humanity at Columbus Circle. As we crossed Broadway, caught up in the moving throng, a man pushing a City Bike was aggressively trying to make his way across the mass of pedestrians leaving the street for the safety of the curb. My wife, just a step ahead and to the left of me, was in his path. The man with the bike muttered something then deliberately used the bike as a battering ram to knock my wife to the ground. The next few moments are a bit of a blur; but, as best I can recall, I shouted at the man then reached out to turn him so I could tell him that he can’t just knock people over like that, especially not my wife. At least, that was my intent. In actuality, I punched him, a body punch rendered ineffective by his leather coat. An instant later, there was an explosion of white light inside my head and the sound of metal hitting bone coming from my forehand. Before I could process that event, there was the pain of something hard hitting my jaw. The guy who had knocked my wife over had just assaulted me with two quick punches to my face. For the next few seconds, I just stood there reflecting on the rashness of my act and the negative consequences it had brought; I had been knocked senseful, not senseless. The man with the bicycle had disappeared into the crowd, and I hurried to help my wife up. To their credit, multiple people stopped to offer assistance. My wife was shaken but not injured and, despite the presence of a mobile police unit at the intersection, it seemed best to just move on. As we started to walk, my wife looked up and realized that there was blood coming from a small gash over my eyebrow. The metal sound I had heard was likely a large ring hitting my skull. When we got back to the apartment, my son thought that it was funny that his retired, retiring father had gotten into a street fight. New York City is like that – Yin and Yang, life and near death, the best and the worst.