I’m writing this in Central Park. I’m right up in the North East corner, sitting on a bench by the Harlem Meer, 100m or so from the apartment where I lived for the second half of my twenties. It’s so familiar. The warm evening air, people laid out with picnic mats, a guy with a big plastic bin of churros. Kids chasing each other, squealing, skylarking, the sound of traffic crawling down Fifth Avenue. Across the road, staring down the length of Central Park is my favourite obscure building in al...
I’m writing this in Central Park. I’m right up in the North East corner, sitting on a bench by the Harlem Meer, 100m or so from the apartment where I lived for the second half of my twenties.
It’s so familiar. The warm evening air, people laid out with picnic mats, a guy with a big plastic bin of churros. Kids chasing each other, squealing, skylarking, the sound of traffic crawling down Fifth Avenue. Across the road, staring down the length of Central Park is my favourite obscure building in all of Manhattan. The views from this thing would cost enough to make an Oligarch’s gulp. But it took until a couple of years ago for the city to finally convert it from its previous use: a low-security prison.
I haven’t been in New York for two years. When I was last here, post-Covid, it felt a bit dark. Back in the day, I used to be so blasé about safety – I felt more threatened in central Christchurch late at night than I did in East Harlem. But Covid changed that. You could sense people were fearful and untrusting.
It’s better now. More like the New York I remember.
When I landed this week, I did my usual thing. I got a coffee and a pastry, I put in my headphones, and I walked. It took me a morning until I had the rhythm of the traffic, j-walking with confidence and checking the right way up the streets as I crossed.
I rode the subway everywhere. I mostly didn’t need the map. Amazing how you can feel nostalgic for the gentle resistance of a turnstile bar, for the lurching, screaming, and shuddering of a metal subway car, staring dead-eyed through the windows into the black.
Even when a city is familiar, taking time away and coming in with fresh eyes gives you a perspective you don’t have when you’re immersed in it, living it. I’m realistic enough to accept it probably means you look at things with rose-tinted glasses. But there’s a reason all of my friends here have moved out to the suburbs. The thing that has surprised me most is that I feel it too. It’s not that I’m tired of the city, it’s just that I’m not sure I have the energy and the patience for the hustle and the horns, the concrete and the studio apartments.
One thing doesn’t change though: New York is the best city in the world.
For two simple reasons. Number one: diversity. There cannot be a city with a greater spread of cultures, ethnicities, languages, and socio-economic extremes. The thing that everyone has in common is that everyone is different. And the result of that diversity is the greatest concentration of interesting food, music, and art on the planet.
And the other reason it’s the great city is public space. Because almost everyone lives in small spaces, everything public is always busy, and every public space is used. There’s a collective experience, whether people are conscious of it or not. It means the tiny little strip of land on the corner of Madison and 110th has been converted into a community garden. It means the benches alongside the triangle of green at Broadway and 72nd are always filled with people, just watching the World go by.
And it means here, tonight, on a random Autumn evening, as Central Park’s leaves turn gold, and the sun drops below the West Side, there are hundreds of people out enjoying the moment, socialising, playing, eating, relaxing. It feels vital, alive. Even a bit magical.
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