Travelogue: New York

What do you say about the Big Apple?

Ten million people piled on top of one another. It still never ceases to amaze me how may cars this most-walkable-of-all-cities seems to produce. NYC is best understood neighborhood by neighborhood and district by district. But, is it really? Gotham is the internal subconscious made tangible: Each aspect and facet gets a manifestation; sometimes I feel like the dissonance of Gansevoort, sometimes like the harmony of the Upper East. Sometimes the ambition of Midtown, sometimes the realism of Astoria. All cities are like organisms in some way – but this one seems at times to read like a psychic road map.

The lesson is that each district cannot be severed. Plans to isolate Jane Jacobs’ West Village or Westchester’s Tuxedo Park should be seen as just that; plans to take a piece out of a larger organic whole without the original context that made them make sense. Where New York breaks down as a model (other than sheer scale) is that each of its pieces depends on each of the others in some way. Sure, we’d all like to have Brooklyn Heights without Long Island City, and the Upper East Side without Elizabeth and Newark, but the economic reality seems to be that we can’t.

The question may become, “for whom should we build?” If the goal is to build more Seasides and Celebrations, then there need to be an accompanying realization that they are small communities for the privileged, and not the truly functioning towns they’ll purported to recreate. The great lesson of the City of Cities is that economic reality drives both beauty and ugliness, sometimes in stark contrast.

If the goal is to accommodate the average or near-average citizen of the here and now in the best possible way, what form would that take? Would it involve a car? Would it involve fee-simple ownership? Is walkability an artifact of more limited economic choice? How much inconvenience due to living next to ten million of your closest friends is worth having one of everything a subway ride away? Does it matter which stage of your life you’re in?

Perhaps the best question is this: New York is a singular place, never reproduced on Earth. Why?


Compare: New Urbanism, The sticky wicket of urban economics, What people want, and The World According to Aunt Jane