New York City – As Seen Through Three Sets of Eyes - Take 2

 

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 El Dorado, a place of endless excitement with the trappings of unimaginable wealth. My otherwise dour grandmother was imbued with its aura simply by living there. Later, it was the center of commerce I commuted into. I saw the rats in its subway stations and stepped over the homeless on its sidewalks. Now that I am retired, NYC is both a beckoning tourist attraction and home to our son and his fiancé; luster thus restored, it again gleams. Across the decades, I have experienced the city, seen it through three different sets of eyes, observed its mystery, misery, and majesty.

As I looked south from my childhood home in Maine, the towering skyscrapers of New York City loomed in my psyche. One of my earliest toys was a set of Lego-like building blocks which, when assembled, made a two-foot-tall model of the Empire State Building. The bounty of Thanksgiving was symbolized by the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Christmas morning meant a small, yet special, present in my stocking. Not from the North Pole, rather it bore the gold logo, “A & F”. I didn’t know what an “A & F” was, I didn’t know that my grandmother had repurposed the Abercrombie & Fitch gift box, all I knew was that it came from the mecca of NYC and was therefore magical.

At age nine, I saw New York City for the first time, seeing it through the eyes of a child. My father was driving our white Ford station wagon with Mother beside him as we set out on the Maine Turnpike. A seemingly endless car ride took us to Brooklyn where my father’s mother, a Christian Science practitioner, was a live-in companion. Glimpses of skyscrapers were soon replaced by the dizzying view of concrete canyons lined with more neon signs per block than in my entire town. Eventually, my father parked the car in front of a row of brownstones on a residential side street off Coney Island Avenue. Though I ended up sleeping on a cot with a horsehair mattress set up in the corner of utility room in my grandmother’s second floor apartment, there was still the thrill of being in new places and seeing new things.

Too poor to take in the glitzy tourist sights, my father instead took me for a ride on the subway. One highlight of the visit was my daily outing to get a soda from a genuine soda fountain. Each afternoon, my grandmother would give me a quarter and I would set off on my adventure. I would walk up to the bustling street corner where more cars would pass in a minute than would pass our house in a month. I would turn right, walk two blocks along the Avenue then turn right again. An old-time drug store sat halfway down this block. To my young eyes, it was awesome featuring a long, burnished wood lunch counter behind which rose the shiny brass and white porcelain levers of the soda fountain. I would drink my soda on one of the red leather stools, then retrace my steps. As I walked, caffeine and sugar would mix with NYC-induced adrenaline until I felt on top of the world.

In my 50’s, I again walked New York City streets, commuting in from Connecticut. My adult eyes, emerging from the gloom of the train platforms, would behold one of the most beautiful stations in the world, Grand Central Station. Its main concourse is vast, serving more platforms than any other terminal. The vaulted ceiling of the atrium is so high, the architects felt compelled to decorate it with a mural of the constellations. The four-sided brass clock with its large opal glass faces rises above bustling throngs of travelers headed in a hundred directions at once.

From Grand Central Station, I would walk 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. Nor that my feet would regularly traipse across the star, painted on the street in front of Macy’s flagship store, where performers had sung and danced back on the Thanksgiving mornings of my childhood.

However, New York City had gone from being an Oz-like place to an obstacle course to be overcome on each commute. Mornings, late trains meant hustling to arrive on time. Evenings, mere minutes were the difference between sitting, standing or missing the train! Tourists were slow-moving slalom poles to weave between; jaywalking across the throbs of traffic shaved off valuable seconds.

Weather was another obstacle. Concrete canyons funneled the wind into slipstreams that could literally knock you over on a bad day and made umbrellas useless on any day. From the Empire State Building, I had to walk two blocks into the teeth of the cold, damp winds coming off the Hudson. One day, a gust blew my favorite hat off, sending it dancing into heavy traffic on 34^th St. There, the wind and I played a game of chase for the next twenty minutes. Timing breaks in the traffic, I would run into the street where, just as my outstretched fingers were about to grab it, the grey tweed kite that once was my hat would be whisked under the wheels of onrushing taxis. That struggle to rescue my hat represents a microcosm of how I saw NYC - a constant flux of struggle and reward, of Yin and Yang.

Now, turned 70, I recently returned from a week spent in New York City, a week of seeing both new and familiar sights through older and wiser eyes. We stayed at our son’s apartment in the theater district and partook of a broad sampling of the city’s best offerings. We went to Broadway shows and museums. We lunched with old friends, met new acquaintances.

On the last day, I was reminded of the city’s dark underside. Returning from a delightful morning, my wife and I crossed Broadway at Columbus Circle, caught up in the swirling mass of humanity. There, an impatient man saw my wife as an obstacle and deliberately used the City Bike he was pushing as a battering ram, knocking her to the ground. The next few moments are a blur. As best I can recall, I shouted at the man then reached out to turn him so I could tell him that he couldn’t just run my wife over. That was my intent. Instead, I punched him, my grab becoming an ineffectual body blow. An instant later, there was an explosion of white light inside my head and the sound of metal hitting bone. Before I could respond, there was the pain of something hard hitting my jaw. The man with the bicycle had attacked me, landing two quick punches. He immediately disappeared into the crowd as I stood there stunned, reflecting on the rashness of my action. Recovering my senses, I hurried to help my wife. She was shaken, not injured, so, inured to the city and its craziness, we moved on. As we started to walk, my wife realized there was blood seeping from a gash over my eyebrow. The metallic sound had been the guy’s ring hitting my skull. When we got back to the apartment, my son thought it was funny that his retired, retiring father had gotten into a street fight.

Thus, I have seen New York City through three sets of eyes; I have viewed its many facets through lenses that matured with the passage of time. I have observed the myth, the mire, and the mecca. I have seen the city, its best and worst mingling on its crowded streets, its Ying and Yang ebbing and flowing as the balance between dark and light shifts. When I was a child, it was all light as I projected my glowing vision of the city onto its reality. As a working adult, there was balance as it fed my family, yet each day, it presented me with a new challenge. Now, as a mature adult, the gleam of Yang has once again tipped the scale, but the dark underbelly of Ying is always there.