Tuesday
On Tuesday morning I felt particularly happy. I had spent a lovely evening with a few of my friends the night before, and I was feeling resplendant with a fresh satisfaction. The weather was clear and bright, northeastern.
Life was laid before me, the city was at my feet. I was headed out on errands. Walkabout, my dad calls it. Over to the bank on Broadway, down to Canal Street to visit Industrial Plastics, up on First to Ace Hardware. I got coffee at the Corner on St. Marks and third, found a pushcart lady selling rice-noodle crepes on Lafayette. I bought one and it was delicious, with dried shrimp cooked in, splashed with soy and chili sauces. (and one dollar!)
I was feeling too good, staring at the sun on Canal street, getting lost, wandering. Am I there? Isn't this the city I have been looking for?
Everything was strange and new, there was so much new construction. People were crawling all over the buildings, busy on scaffoldings. It was beautiful, joyous. Isn't this what I wanted? Why does it feel so strange to me, so bittersweet?
Madeleine Isom's "Reflection #2 (How buildings see each other)" (via dublog)
Is this the economic recovery? I didn't know it could come, but it is here. Whatever happenend, it is over, and something new is beginning. Wherever it came from, who ever planned it, whatever Halliburton lard Wall Street filter-down -- they are building. Two massive housing blocks on Houston, a mixed-use high-rise at Astor, and a dozen smaller projects. The two mid-rise replacements have opened on St. Marks. The police precinct building on 5th has been torn down -- what will be built in its place?
We came to the city when the last re-invention was well underway. Downtown, Tompkins had been closed and re-opened, the riots were a story about a past time. Guiliani's tactics were well established. The first year we were here, he rolled a god-damned tank into the neighborhood to evict a squat. The late nineties, the protests, the retrenchments, the new technologies, and now this fucking war. War on drugs, the war on the neighborhoods, war on terror, war on the world. Is the empty building on the south side of Union Square going to be a Wal-Mart?
So here I am, downtown, the sun in my eyes, overjoyed. And yet I see a horde coming -- not poor not rich, working in low office or high retail. Busy, impenetrable. A flood of commuters -- impossible to make out the threads of the melody. Unresponsive eyes.
How can the city hold them? It is like a rain in the desert, the hard ground so split and scarred it is unable to hold the moisture. It just flows away, sweeps down in flash floods, rushes to the lowest point.
This city is not closed. It is open, torn, riven, scarred. It draws people in and out every day, most of them going to a single point. If you know where you want to go, your path is laid out for you. But what of us who don't want to go somewhere that already exists? Who want to go somewhere together that can give us a better togetherness than there is in the world today.
Is that place being built? When I look around, this is not what I see. They won't say out loud what these buildings are, what their plans are, but the traces are there. They want to build a stadium on one of Jimmylegs' favorite bars, for chrissake! So what type of city do we want?
Posted by Sam at December 18, 2003 11:30 PM
