On arriving at Heathrow airport to a rattling board of cancelled flights, the reasonable man would retreat and carefully plot a new course to New York City. The unreasonable man would book a seat on the next thing smoking to the Eastern seaboard, then finding his connecting flight to a deluged La Guardia cancelled, he would not see the night out in a Toronto airport hotel but would race for the last plane to Philadelphia. There, bolstered by the firm American turf beneath his feet, he would rent the last car on the airport lot and drive for three hours through a pitch black, hurricane-blitzed Garden State, with only an outdated SatNav for company. Were that SatNav to send him hurtling towards a flooded Holland Tunnel, he would not turn back, but would instead rely entirely on guesswork to creep his way along the toll roads and turnpikes of a half-submerged Staten Island to finally reach Brooklyn - that bolshy, sighing, stylish older brother to the flashy kid, Manhattan.
I did not take the path of the reasonable man.
No other city on earth could so stir my blood and send me hurtling recklessly into a storm to visit her. Not even my own. My infatuation with New York is verging on some '-pathy' or '-philia'. I have loved her since childhood and while my reasons have upended and overrun one another, the passion has never ebbed. I will never deny or seek to contain the giddiness that overwhelms me when I emerge from Penn Station to a blast of cold Hudson air and that dazzling canyon of glittering midtown lights; but it's not Christmas and Time Square and yellow cabs that get my heart racing anymore.
It's the cracked and cobbled streets of the LES. The Sartorialist will-be's on every West Village corner. The 'shhhhh' bars and the speakeasies. The droll Billyburg baristas. The plaid-frocked, moustached taco stand owners of Rockaway Beach. The Victorian-era tattoo parlours and wincing scotch enthusiasts. The local microbrews and the esoteric jukebox selections. These are the flavours that my ever-evolving palette longs for now.
Aside from all of this, there are also those constant and abstract values that will never shift from this city. The resilience. The stubbornness. The gruff, beguiling charm. The openness. New Yorkers are New Yorkers not because of where they were born, but because of how invested they are in the narrative of their city. They are wholly caught up in it. They take pride in it.
This was broadcast to the world this week in the form of a muted and careful response to days of flooding, fires, and black outs. When a boardwalk in the Rockaways washed away people lamented it all the way from Queens to the Upper East Side, because it's their city. It chills my blood to picture that hurricane hitting almost any European city right now. It would be chaos and anarchy. There is real hate and nihilism spreading quietly like dry rot across so many of our cities. How much must a metropolis of this size be doing right to bear this sort of catastrophe with such powerful humility? The fraternity of New York - a city of immigrants, lest we forget - is an astonishing and valuable thing. It is addictive, and I am in deep.
And finally there's just the sight of the place, which to this day makes me draw breath. By day the brick and concrete buildings and thick hulking girders stand proud beneath a clear, powder blue sky. It is industrial magnificence writ large in brown and grey across an island as slender and strong as any of her buildings. No other city feels so BIG. The Coliseum, St Marks Cathedral, La Sagrada Familia - all are undone by the minute details that distort the beauty of their sheer size. In New York, such fussiness would be sniggered at. Here, the only interruption to sleek concrete and iron are the nuts and bolts that join them. The closest thing to "decoration" is the Empire State Building with its glaring steel eagle gargoyles - and without a giant ape or a caped crusader hanging from them, they look out of place.
By night the whole city is transformed. Driving along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway Wednesday night and staring across the East River at the gigantic skyscrapers in darkness was the closest I will ever come to a slumbering Leviathan snoring in the shallows. This was the city that wowed Fitzgerald with its, "flashing, dynamic good looks, its tall man's quick-step." From the astounding billboards of Times Square to the dingy neon of Greenwich village. From the mirrored apex of the Chrysler building to the pulsating grid lights of the Marcy Projects. When the sun retreats the whole city sparkles like a pinstriped emerald. A crystal city standing proud where the unfathomable tide dissolves the shore.
I did not take the path of the reasonable man.
No other city on earth could so stir my blood and send me hurtling recklessly into a storm to visit her. Not even my own. My infatuation with New York is verging on some '-pathy' or '-philia'. I have loved her since childhood and while my reasons have upended and overrun one another, the passion has never ebbed. I will never deny or seek to contain the giddiness that overwhelms me when I emerge from Penn Station to a blast of cold Hudson air and that dazzling canyon of glittering midtown lights; but it's not Christmas and Time Square and yellow cabs that get my heart racing anymore.
It's the cracked and cobbled streets of the LES. The Sartorialist will-be's on every West Village corner. The 'shhhhh' bars and the speakeasies. The droll Billyburg baristas. The plaid-frocked, moustached taco stand owners of Rockaway Beach. The Victorian-era tattoo parlours and wincing scotch enthusiasts. The local microbrews and the esoteric jukebox selections. These are the flavours that my ever-evolving palette longs for now.
Aside from all of this, there are also those constant and abstract values that will never shift from this city. The resilience. The stubbornness. The gruff, beguiling charm. The openness. New Yorkers are New Yorkers not because of where they were born, but because of how invested they are in the narrative of their city. They are wholly caught up in it. They take pride in it.
This was broadcast to the world this week in the form of a muted and careful response to days of flooding, fires, and black outs. When a boardwalk in the Rockaways washed away people lamented it all the way from Queens to the Upper East Side, because it's their city. It chills my blood to picture that hurricane hitting almost any European city right now. It would be chaos and anarchy. There is real hate and nihilism spreading quietly like dry rot across so many of our cities. How much must a metropolis of this size be doing right to bear this sort of catastrophe with such powerful humility? The fraternity of New York - a city of immigrants, lest we forget - is an astonishing and valuable thing. It is addictive, and I am in deep.
And finally there's just the sight of the place, which to this day makes me draw breath. By day the brick and concrete buildings and thick hulking girders stand proud beneath a clear, powder blue sky. It is industrial magnificence writ large in brown and grey across an island as slender and strong as any of her buildings. No other city feels so BIG. The Coliseum, St Marks Cathedral, La Sagrada Familia - all are undone by the minute details that distort the beauty of their sheer size. In New York, such fussiness would be sniggered at. Here, the only interruption to sleek concrete and iron are the nuts and bolts that join them. The closest thing to "decoration" is the Empire State Building with its glaring steel eagle gargoyles - and without a giant ape or a caped crusader hanging from them, they look out of place.
By night the whole city is transformed. Driving along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway Wednesday night and staring across the East River at the gigantic skyscrapers in darkness was the closest I will ever come to a slumbering Leviathan snoring in the shallows. This was the city that wowed Fitzgerald with its, "flashing, dynamic good looks, its tall man's quick-step." From the astounding billboards of Times Square to the dingy neon of Greenwich village. From the mirrored apex of the Chrysler building to the pulsating grid lights of the Marcy Projects. When the sun retreats the whole city sparkles like a pinstriped emerald. A crystal city standing proud where the unfathomable tide dissolves the shore.
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