musingsonurbanlife

Schooling

2012-01-31T11:51:00.001-05:00

The New York Times reported on Sunday that tuition at New York’s private schools is or soon will be $40,000. As someone who has just spent four years living in England, it strikes me that not being able to afford Spence or Andover is not the same disadvantage in America as not attending South Hampstead or Eton in the United Kingdom. The British character of Lane Pryce on Mad Men once comments that he loves New York because he has been there for six months and no one has asked him where he went to school. (A cynic would tell Lane this is because of Yankee prohibitions on talking about such things, but school simply doesn’t play the same role this side of the Atlantic.)

Still, the remarkable resilience of these institutions in a liberal democracy is somewhat remarkable. In France or Austria, private schools are the haunts of dim-witted aristocrats. But in America, and particularly in New York and Boston, they remain the province of the elite. Boston magazine ran a story a few years ago about the number of parents who are taking their students out of Milton or Commonwealth to attend a public school. The tenor of the story is nothing if not angst.

The role of property taxes is a ghost in the attic here. What seems to matter to parents is where their students go to college, and the feeling remains that the better the school, the better the college, the better the career, etc. A smart student at Stuyvesant or Wellesley High will go to a very good college. But if property prices push out the middle class in Manhattan neighborhoods where there are good schools, students who test into Stuyvesant may be traveling an hour to get to school because the school down the block isn’t good enough. Does a parent pay $31,000 at Saint Ann’s, or saddle their child with two hours of commuting rather than doing homework? And why would someone choose to live in a city that forces such a choice?

Manhattan Visions

2012-01-29T13:46:00.006-05:00

A few years ago, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece detailing the numerous reasons that artists should no longer flock to New York. (I’m not posting it because the article isn’t available to non-subscribers.) Their reason was basically the web. Why would a jewelry maker pay to live in New York when he or she can showcase on Etsy? The article posited Portland, Oregon as a lovely, inexpensive alternative.

The trend away from New York was already in place when the WSJ published the piece. Visit a gallery in Chelsea and the artist on display most likely does not live in New York. If American, their place of residence is often in a place that many New Yorkers consider anathema: Los Angeles. The lower rents, low-key lifestyle and warm weather have drawn numerous artists to the West Coast, in addition to a burgeoning arts scene of its own. An Angelino would bristle at the term ‘burgeoning’ and point to the recent show, “Los Angeles 1955-1985,” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris as proof of New York’s out of date snobbishness.

Still, Brooklyn is full of artists: painters, filmmakers, etc. Manhattan can often feel like a playground for tourists, the über-wealthy and those lucky enough to have been born there or to have arrived before 2000. The 2008 downturn lowered rents across the city, but Brooklyn seems to have emerged as a rival more than a cheap, close alternative. MovieMaker Magazine recently voted Brooklyn--rather than New York--the seventh best place for filmmakers to live in the United States.

It’s all New York, some would say. Yet the peans to Manhattan and Brooklyn have often sounded off against one another. Truman Capote said he, “lived in Brooklyn. By choice.” E.B. White wrote THIS IS NEW YORK when he really meant THIS IS MANHATTAN. These can seem like internecine concerns, but the question seems essentially and profoundly architectural.

When Mies van der Rohe arrived in New York and proclaimed that it was a whole city built in the sky, he wasn’t talking about Brooklyn. Despite the fact that gentrification has cleaned up Manhattan, some native Manhattanites felt the grit and grime was a rite of passage that a true New Yorker had to endure. Has Manhattan’s unique architecture essentially priced it out of the normal function of a city that houses all classes? Does this matter since the other boroughs have picked up the torch? Or it essential that Manhattan remain affordable because it gives birth to unique visions of how life can be lived? Propser Assouline recently commented that New York is a not a real city; it’s just an outpost of JFK airport. Surely it needs to be more than that.

Newness

2007-01-04T16:06:00.000-05:00

The long holiday pause ends, and with it there seems- perhaps it is only my imagination- something new in the air, as if New Yorkers are having a bit more fun; as if another layer of post-9/11 gloom has been shed. Perhaps it is the unusually mild winter that puts an extra bounce in our step; perhaps it is the rejuvenation of a new year, the expectation of novelty. The sky is that wondrous January blue and the air is fresh. Women smile seemingly at nothing, and upon returning from California I remember- in the cacophony of pedestrians and taxi horns, the rush of post-Christmas sales, the rush of the morning commute, the palpable energy of the city- why I love it, why it beckons so many, why it boasts of itself, why it seems always, endlessly new.

Closing

2006-12-11T16:39:00.000-05:00

I went to Coliseum Books (link on the right) today to buy a book of haiku for my father, his Christmas present. I had gone to several other bookstores around town in search of a good book of haiku, but had been unsuccessful. I knew that Coliseum would have what I wanted, and as expected I found an excellent book of old and contemporary Japanese verse. Upon checking out, I received 30% off my purchase. I asked the reason and learned that they are closing their doors after 32 years. Sadly, it seems an independent bookstore cannot keep pace in Midtown anymore. I bought my book and told the woman behind the cash register that I was very sorry.

As I opened the doors onto 42nd Street, the street seemed a shade muted, the city slightly less now. Stationary figures seemed paused in salute, even if unaware. They say you are a New Yorker when you begin to say, "that used to be..." and soon we will have another occasion to utter that phrase. As I walked down Fifth Avenue however, I passed the HBSC building, where a Chinese acrobat was standing on her head in the display window for no apparent reason, several people watching her intently. Well, I thought, the face of the city may change, but the spirit, madcap and effervescent, remains the same.

Multiplicities

2006-12-06T16:09:00.000-05:00

(photo by Normko)

How to contain the multiplicities of New York in one day or one mind? How to trace the line that is New York across the verisimilitudes of its numerous urbanities? This challenge seems the endless joy of New York, which is forever giving us a city wholly and remarkably different from the one seen yesterday. New York is a state of mind as much as a place, and with it comes all of the contradictions and whims of the mind; if we begin to feel that we have ascertained it, we are fools. The city’s fluctuating realities are at times a harrowing reality that creeps into us with the residue of fear, while at other times, it is the very fact of the city’s unpredictability that makes a New Yorker feel uniquely alive, in a city without equals, its masses assembling and conspiring to once again forge greatness out of the embattled, brilliant and insistent buildings we call home.

Escape

2006-12-01T12:37:00.000-05:00

The truth is that the city is a device for reducing stress – by giving humans a free choice of escapes from the pressure (along with the weather) of their environment.
-Brigid Brophry

Perhaps what is most perplexing when conceptualizing New York as a city- and in doing so one inevitably must come to grips with its natives’ insistence that it is the greatest city in the world, the center of the world, etc- is the fact that New York is a city that many often seek to escape from, rather than within. It is certainly, like any other major world city, a place where one can lose oneself and consistently discover new aspects, stores, streets, and the like; yet the need ‘to get away from the city’- from the winter or the noise or the population density- is more acutely felt than elsewhere. It is impossible to say that New York reduces stress, or that it gives one an escape from the pressures of one’s environment. If anything, it intensifies stress and pressure. This then seems the paradox of New York: it takes the pleasure and activities and opportunities of a metropolis but fails to deliver a metropolis’ sense of escape. New York is not an escape, but rather a refuge- from economic turmoil for many immigrants to suburban ennui for American youth. A New Yorker may object that escapes are found vertically in New York, and indeed the farther up one is, the better. There is nevertheless a sense of confinement within an apartment, no matter how large. New York (by which I really mean Manhattan because the other boroughs are much closer to other American cities) emerges as an insular entity entirely unto itself, whose reality and influence ends abruptly outside its borders. (This is different than other cities such as London or Paris whose realities have shaped and continue to influence the lives of millions outside its borders due to their central place in colonization.) It is necessary to stay within Manhattan, but also necessary to leave. Thus, to my mind it is more apt to say that rather than being the greatest city in the world, New York is simply the only city of its kind. Whether you find it the best type of city is a matter of taste.

The New City

2006-11-28T11:33:00.000-05:00

(Image courtesy of The City Review)

The current exhibit on Rem Koolhaas’ Central Chinese Television building in Beijing (CCTV, rendering above) at the Museum of Modern Art is a breathtaking peak into what may be the most iconic building to emerge since the World Trade Center, possibly even the Eiffel Tower. Koolhaas’ bold vision is the centerpiece of the new industrial zone of Beijing that is serving to shift the center of the city away from the historic Forbidden City to the area surrounding the CCTV. The building is so large that twenty-nine 747 jet airliners could fit inside its perimeter. Additionally, the building falls outside of any current building codes or seismic measurements, calling for new seismic codes and a team of seismologists to consult as to the best time of day for the two parts of the CCTV to be joined so as to ensure the most structurally sound building (5:00 AM, apparently). The tower will be ready by the time of the 2008 Olympics.

Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has long sought to shape a new urban topography and lifestyle, creating buildings that unite urban inhabitants rather than divide them. The CCTV is their boldest venture yet, a mammoth building that unites all the aspects of a television studio and company into one edifice. The result is a seamless, astounding building astonishing in scope, scale and bravura. It is the first building in some time that people are likely to travel great distances to behold, and Koolhaas has assured them a privileged view with the inclusion of a visitors’ gallery. The construction of the CCTV leaves little doubt that the twenty-first century will be the Chinese century, and it makes one hungry for such an astounding spectacle to rise in Manhattan. Despite the vaunted talk surrounding the Freedom Tower and the Fulton Street Transit Station, Beijing has emerged along with Koolhaas as a pioneer in new urban iconography, and will serve to shape our conceptions of what the city could be.

The Coming Cold

2006-11-22T12:34:00.000-05:00

In the bleary and ferried cold of late November, it is nearly impossible to keep the city in view as a whole thing perceived and digested. It is instead a random conglomeration put together piecemeal, with the various strands of the city’s inhabitants forming a haphazard striation. The city has an unnatural ebb and flow now, emptying herself of natives and residents, swelling with numerous out-of-towners, many of whom are visiting the pied-a-terre they visit only at Christmas or thereabouts. Friendships slow to a halt with this busy coming and going, and there’s a sense of waiting, of hibernation, knowing that winter is coming and social activity will be met more reticently. It is time to settle in and gather about us that which is precious, that which will keep us warm, inside and out, during the long, cold, bitter winter.

But first some holiday cheer, when New York is at her finest and friends and family are all about. So Happy Thanksgiving!

Here Is New York

2006-11-21T09:37:00.000-05:00

On any person who desires such prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city's walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

-E.B. White, Here Is New York, 1949

Poetry in the City

2006-11-17T09:28:00.000-05:00

A kick-ass response to my last post!

Mad

2006-11-14T15:26:00.000-05:00

The women of New York are driving me mad:
The sly length of the season’s skirt,
The flapper hats that make me believe in F. Scott’s New York
(If only for a moment) -
Every avenue replete with a Helen capable of causing war.
Maybe the autumnal light makes them all more beautiful today.
(And did I imagine the moment that passed between us at the streetlight?)
The struts of a thousand women down Fifth unraveled me today-
Left me breathless.
I’m indebted a thousand times each morning, and evening.
I hope it doesn’t pass with autumn.
All the season begs for now is a bit of conversation.

Constructing the City

2006-11-09T10:52:00.000-05:00

Perhaps it is unfair to bemoan New York architecture over the past decade. Many cities would envy the breathless pace of construction; but to the keen observer there has been a noticeable shortage of profound or startling design. Even Rem Koolhass’ Prada store was more an issue of interior innovation than genuine architecture. Notable New York institutions such as MoMA opted away from intriguing designs by current hothouse designers such as Herzog & de Meuron for the tried and true (and tired) minimalism of Yoshio Taniguchi, which provided a poor rival to London’s Tate Modern. Since the 1980s, other cities have gradually taken the lead in architectural adventures and the center of design has moved away from New York.

There are of course several obstacles in the path of New York’s architecture. Competition is frighteningly fierce; in this city, a 50-year-old architect is considered young. By the time an architect is able to gain a New York commission, she is hard pressed to implement ideas as fresh as her thirtysomething counterparts working elsewhere. Thus, when Renzo Piano arrives in New York with his renovation of the Morgan Library, the result is assured and elegant, but hardly a push against tradition, an advance toward the new. Brooklyn seems an ideal place for such a dialogue to occur, but it is too enmeshed in fears of gentrification to let designers have the free reign with which they might define a new American cityscape.

That said, there have recently appeared several signs of new life in the city. Sir Norman Foster’s new design of the Hearst Building (above) has provided a refreshing and bold strike to the Midtown skyline, articulating with its zigzagging lines the frenetic nature of today’s metropolis and helping to usher in a much-needed breath of contemporary relevance in a city dominated by modernist ideals (even if it never really had the treasure trove of Chicago). In Chelsea, Frank Gehry’s IAC Tower is something of a revelation for New York. Gehry’s buildings can seem suffocatingly similar, but his new building is so different to what we are used to seeing in New York that it comes as a wave of excitement and relief. Elsewhere, Winka Dubbeldam’s Greenwich Street project is another vibrant project refreshingly out of step with the rigid lines and squares that for too long have made New York look tired and out of date. These buildings are hopefully moving to bring the city in line with other architectural hothouses of the past ten years such as Amsterdam or Barcelona. If New York wants to keep its finger on the world’s pulse, more moves in this direction will help it a great deal.

Sleepless

2006-11-03T13:58:00.000-05:00

Last night I could not sleep because I love New York so much. After dinner with a friend in the East Village, I wandered through the Lower East Side past the terribly hip bars and arrogant fashionistas as winter’s impending fury rippled through my bones and my hands felt cold for the first time. I stood at First Avenue and watched the taxis zip uptown and felt the pulse of the city and the thrill of its call course through my veins. As I wound my way down to Chinatown I marveled at the children playing football in shorts and t-shirts, knowing full well that the chill 40-degree temperatures would feel balmy by January, when the city would unite in one brave front against the discontent of winter.

As I lay in bed later listening to music I found my eyes wide open with the expectancy and urgency of the city. I wondered who that night had found a long-lost friend while leaving dinner; who had met the love of their life by chance; what next great actor had gone to the theater and decided that their destiny lay in the hushed yet frenzied lights of Broadway. And in the darker corners of the city I wondered what man had cheated on his wife; what woman had abandoned a child just hours ago, never to return; and what private agony was endured by those who fell asleep with sorrow in their hearts and no one to whom to relate it. I wondered what my neighbors across the alley were doing, their light still dimly lit. The moon was bright through my skylight, which looked like a James Turrell skyspace. I felt for the first time that my life might stretch long over New York like the avenues that we go up and down each day, and that my friends too would criss-cross the city and form a grid with my own life. I remembered the taxis streaming up First Avenue and thought that the sense of life being pursued and chased and bandied about is so palpable in New York that it takes my sleep away and I was happy for it and then I slept.

To set oneself apart

2006-10-31T09:13:00.000-05:00

It is obvious and goes without saying for many a New Yorker that to live here is to set oneself apart from the rest of America. This difference can at times manifest itself politically, as when in the wake of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that followed 9/11, bumper stickers emerged that read ‘NYC out of USA.’ Historically, New York was always set apart as the ‘Dutch’ settlement, separate from the Puritan enclaves of the other colonies. Perhaps what is most striking though is the sense of how life works here as opposed to other cities or towns in America, and how apparent this is in speaking to friends from elsewhere.

In New York there is a battle for space, a quest for peace, a scraping against limited funds (especially as a youth) and a general sense of being assaulted. The genius of New Yorkers is the way in which they are able to mount this assault and ride its waves to heights of financial, artistic and personal success. For this reason, life in New York is always to one extent or another a mystery. Not only do we pause to wonder how a thing such as Manhattan came to be; we also wonder how its life has been so vibrant, so alive and so audacious in light of the many factors against it: weather, overpopulation, poverty, ethnic tensions. The quest for the sublime in a city as gritty as New York is bound to come with its fair share of frustration and disappointment, making triumphs that much sweeter. The American Dream in New York is different because it is far harder to achieve; it makes us dig far more deeply into ourselves than elsewhere. This is the secret of its victory and continued relevance to American life.

Lychee Nuts

2006-10-24T10:09:00.000-04:00

In the pale light of October the lychee nuts scatter across the sidewalk as if autumn hates them. The clinking they make as they hit the cold cement is soon eclipsed by the cries of the Chinese woman who now bends over them and attempts to bring them to order and retrieve from them what she might. I imagine that in them she sees a new pair of shoes disappear from view, and I wonder how she might account for her loss. There is time now for me to help. I have arisen only an hour ago, well after she began her labor for the day, and I have nowhere in particular to be. I stand on the other side of Bayard Street and feel that the twenty feet of asphalt might as well be the stretch of America and the Pacific that separate her parents from mine, now narrowed into a small artery traversing Chinatown. I notice teeth missing from her mouth and think myself shallow for caring or feeling pity.

By the time I decide to help she has finished the job, her back curved over the basket into which she dumps the fruit. There is nothing for me to say and yet I want to communicate- to have her know that someone has noticed, even if I did nothing. In fact, I stood there and stared blankly at her strain. It probably was foolish; I probably appeared dumbfounded. A stream of tourists gathers force and flows between us. I do not move. When the crowd thins, I step across the thoroughfare and purchase a bag of lychee. She holds out her fingers and motions that it is two dollars. No English. I think it too little and hand her a five-dollar bill and turn to leave, but she puts her hand on my shoulder and when I turn back she places the change in my hand and closes it. I shake my hand and give her the money back. She gives me another bag. I laugh and she does, too. I want to take all of the nuts and give her enough for all of them and then she can buy shoes or whatever it is for which she toils.

I wonder if she is married and is she loved and does anyone cook for her and is it possible to see in the long creases in her face the care of a father; and how did she come here and did she come alone and was it treacherous and if this is what her life amounts to, surely there is dignity in that. The lychee nuts fell to the ground and it is all in a day’s work, isn’t it? This is her corner of the world, and she feels no shame. I feel shame, now on the other side of the street again, where it is safe to look and admire and eat and buy and then to return to wherever it is we call home. Is a transaction of money what I can offer her? And why should I offer her anything? There is joy in the creases of her face.

In the frigid October wind I withdraw a few steps and admire this woman for whom life seems destitute; but she does not feel that. She knows that she will awaken each morning and sell her wares and then retire to whatever cramped quarter houses her bed, alone or with another I do not know. My morning, drawing to its close, now seems full, like the moon reflecting something far brighter. I glance up at the sun and head my way and chew a delicious lychee.

The Beginning

2006-10-17T12:43:00.000-04:00

“…the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece- millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work….” –Ian McEwan, Saturday

How bizarrely it seems to us now that the city would not work, that it might fail. In light of tragedy, upheavals and disasters, the city still stands as the dominant social system of the early twenty-first century. While nations are eclipsed by corporations, cities are enmeshed in the convulsions of globalization and a tug of war as to which identity to adopt- native or immigrant. In a city that has always been a hallmark for immigrants, I find myself at a loss, as a relatively recently minted New Yorker, to describe the cacophonous sounds of Chinatown (where I live) as they glide into the easy and quiet sophistication of Tribeca, then back out again into the noise and tumult of the West Side Highway. The city seems to be a nation unto itself, where we might lose ourselves in a grid of mire and bliss that is so much larger than ourselves that we are willing to suspend briefly (and for some over a lifetime) the belief that we might somehow as a single entity matter more than the great, hurling masses that stream down Fifth Avenue. If each of us is but a wave, then together we are a great sea whose hidden depths are forever unexplored, waiting to reveal secrets we have never dared to imagine possible. The city becomes the repository of all our dreams, hidden desires, nightmares and private affairs- each dissembled in the crafty and trendy appearance of the apartments for which we so desperately hunt. From our windows, whether looking directly into the next building, out across a park, or into the deep and unknowable web of high-rises, we imagine that across from us are the lives we never lived, enacted and humbly executed by those who made the choices we did not. We take comfort in the fact that each choice, however small, has led to this city, where all roads seem to cross. Wait here long enough, and everyone you know (and to a New Yorker, anyone who matters) will come through. It is the thoroughfare of the world, and as we leave our own imprints on these haggard, lonely, exhilarating streets, we take pleasure in the outlines of those who have gone before, those who walk beside, and those who will walk over us after we have passed. This blog then is one imprint among many, destined to be forgotten and copied and salvaged and withdrawn, as all New York lives. May it tread lightly but perceptively until it is erased, burn brightly until it is extinguished.