I wanted to be downtown today, this morning, and despite setting out at six with only the vaguest idea of what that would look like, I am now sitting on a park bench, connected to free “downtown alliance” wi-fi, looking out at New York Harbor. In front of me, from left to right: the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, The Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, some flashy new office buildings in Jersey City, Hoboken (so that’s that Hoboken looks like!), enormous yachts. The sky still has a band of pink along he horizon, although I took my time getting here and its after eight already; above the pink is whitish blue, above that, a ceiling of white clouds.
This morning started in the Bronx with the discovery that the train runs fuller in the early, early morning than midday. I can’t tell you exactly what made me so happy, running up the stairs, stepping onto the platform. I’m sure I can’t describe it all and do it justice, the orange bucket seats, the ads for technical colleges, This American Life’s most recent podcast (“The Devil In Me”) on my headphones. I was overjoyed to be sitting among my fellow New Yorkers, my fellow humans, getting to watch them enter and leave the car, studying their footwear, their coffee cups, their thinning hair. Sometimes you are handed a great heaping serving of wonder, of gratitude, of joy, something that lets you access precisely how spectacular the world always is. It’s like the spectacle of a sunset or one of those breathless, spent, blessed moments when you look down at the face of the person you love in awe – it’s just given, occasionally, you just recieve it. The 1 train clacked and screeched down the island, gathering more fellow travelers than it let go, until we reached the 50th street station, where nearly everyone up and left.
I stepped off just after that, at 42nd. I wanted to check the map, decide my next move. I saw an underground connection to the A, C, and E traced from my current location, what must be a long white hallway, and immediately skipped up the stairs to the exit, settling on traveling crosstown on foot, above ground. I emerged under one of the flashiest subway station signs in existence, surrounded by the frenzied and glorious celebration of light and garish glamor that is Times Square. I am happy to report that reports of its uselessness have been greatly exaggerated. There are moments when Times Square just works. When you need a private little moment of civilization jingoism. When you’re celebrating the ballsy energy of New York City, remembering it and falling head over heels in love for the first time. When you’re listening to the rousing finale of The Hold Steady’s latest album, grinning and shaking your head in gleeful disbelief at just how fucking incredible this all is. Us. New York. The glorious noise we make.
Hate to admit it, I really do, but I was turned around, and what was supposed to be a quick trot to the next subway ended up taking me past Bryant Park and Grand Central and I kid you not I was nearly to the United Nations when I started putting together that I was headed East. I spent the next five minutes working hard to teach my new orientation to my brain, picturing myself on the subway map, a briskly moving, blinking dot setting out in my true, new direction. So I passed Grand Central Station again, the New York Public Library again. This is New York’s Fashion Week, and Bryant Park is decked out in white tents. The beautiful and the semi-famous are hovering around midtown, attending parties, passing judgements, buying and selling status. I couldn’t help but be tickled and proud. 42nd street is a trip. If you open your eyes and look, there’s this amost unbearable concentration of human achievement, some of the world’s most charismatic displays of human productivity, frivolity, grace, and grandeur there.
There is a tugboat directly in front of my bench now, flanked by a tiny red coast guard vessel. They’re both flying the American flag; the tug is hanging a truly enormous, and seemingly backwards, flag from its raised crane. The sky has brightened, the air is warmer. The unfortunate blank and boringly utopian architecture of the financial center and Battery Park is done no favors by the light, but New Jersey looks impish and impatient, already aping greatness and hungry for more. They should really throw a subway line or two across the river – it’s a really long island, and Jersey’s got a lot of useful land potential minutes away.
Google Maps, through the magic of wireless internet, tells me I’m sitting next to North Cove, which I found by walking through the World Financial Center. I’ve never been here before, out on the towers’ landfill, which considering how cool the view is seems criminally negligent. It makes sense; its because the West Side Highway lies in the way, and only infrequently do I find myself in this neck of the woods at all. I visited the World Trade Center only once that I remember. We took an elevator, and must have looked out at the region (maybe not from the top?), but I don’t remember the view or the observation deck. Not well enough to say with certainty that I’m not making it up. What I do remember is the ground floor lobby, a multi story thing that showed off the ribs that defined the building. I do remember the bare courtyard space, from which one could see those ribs extending straight up and up and up. I remember being excited by it, and a litle distanced by it’s coldness, it’s size.
There, a second smaller tug has joined the first. Also yellow and black. Also flying a big stars and stripes from a crane.
After flipping the map of Manhattan in my head, after the embarrassing realization of exactly how close Times Square is to the A, C, and E if you travel in the correct direction, I descended again and waited for the E. You can tell from the subway map that anything headed south will take you close enough to the World Trade Center site to walk there in a minute or two, but I wanted to be on the train that actually terminated at a station labeled “World Trade Center,” a train with those words lit up in blue in the cars. It was on this subway ride that I saw a beautiful woman who inspired the thought, simple and happy: what a privilege to share a planet with you.
My makeshift ipod programming also reached a crescendo with the utilitarian trio of Daft Punk songs I keep with me at all times: “One More Time,” “Digital Love,” “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” I turned to Daft Punk for the lyric “we’re gonna celebrate,” which I wanted to make my dedication for the day, but ended up most won over by “work it harder, makes us better, do it faster, makes us stronger, more than ever, hour after hour, work is never over.” Which, if you know the song, also becomes “our work is never over.” A fitting eulogy, I think. My dad long ago framed September 11th for me in terms of work. This is a city that each and every minute of the working day generates more value, more wealth, more useful, productive, creative, positive effort than the jealous jihadists have in the totality of their efforts. The work of this city, every minute of every day, shows the attack to have been a failure. I love being here, getting to bear witness to it. There is nothing like midtown at rush hour when you’re not rushing to work; nothing like the morning crowd of downtown brokers when you’ve got the time to just walk and watch; nothing like the adoration of tourists, and the sound of all the languages its expressed in, when you live here.
Speeding downtown, after 14th street, I leaned into the wall size subway map and resumed searching it. I’ll admit that I’m intoxicated by it, and study it every chance I get. I want to fasten each of the neighborhood names onto the map in my head and begin to remember the spatial relationships beween them. I want to discover, like hidden treasure, the nonobvious (underground) connections between the city’s many parts, the nearness of Long Island City to Midtown, the epic journey of the 2 train from Brooklyn College to the edge of Westchester, the L’s neat joining of the East Village and Williamsburg. I want to learn to place Bay Ridge (bulge on the southwest corner of Brooklyn / Verrazano-Narrows / Saurday Night Fever) on the map, detangle lower Manhattan’s ball of string subway lines and their respective far flung destinations, somehow discern what Rockaway people are talking about when they say “Rockaway” (I see a street, a neighborhood, and a few train stations with the name, none of which are in the same place). Nothing in my life is settled, as of today, but I just may be lucky and crazy enough to live in Marble Hill, work on the Upper East Side, intern in Fort Greene, go to school in Northern Manhattan, and try my hardest to meet people to talk and party with all over the city. There are not enough hours in a day to love my city, to learn it the way it should be learned. There are not enough years in a life. To travel these streets, to meet these people, to celebrate all the living that is done, here, is a task I cannot do justice to. I also can’t help but try.
10:28 and all the boats loitering before me on the river (I count 18 or 19) are blowing their horns. Exactly seven years since the North Tower collapsed. Loud as all hell. And now they’re all motoring away.
Ok, now six parachutists are falling out of the sky, towards Jersey. Four of them are dangling American flags. The flags look enormous.
10:34: Who knew he NYC police department had so many boats?
10:38: After lingering, the first, big tugboat finally sets off down river.
The sun is out in force now, beating down on my neck. It is September 11, I am siting downtown on a park bench, and I want to report that I witnessed men collecting garbage this morning, one block from the big empty lot where two towers used to be, executing an absurd many-point turn on one of those tiny, ancient streets. I wish to report that the goings on of the city’s baseball teams is being discussed on the streets of lower Manhattan. Construction workers are working, and buildings are being built. I saw families walking towards gathering sites, holding pictures of their lost loved ones, and television crews milling about, outnumbering everyone, incessantly shuffling the cameras and microphones around, searching for a shot, an interview, and a story. The police and fire departments were out in force, mostly looking bored and making everyday chatter, but every so often an older officer would be looking especially sharp, ceremonial, sad. Many, many Starbucks were open, serving coffee and pastries and sporting brand new signage displaying (to the dismay and annoyance of many customers, I can assure you) the calorie count of each product. Stopped by traffic cops on the side of the West Side Highway, I overheard an incredulous discussion between two police officers about he price of a cup of coffee and the difference between a Starbucks and a licensed Starbucks. “You mean it looked like a Starbucks?” “Yeah, it had the sign all in front, it looks like a Starbucks.” They had apparently charged him twenty-three cents more.
11:37: Germans seem to be overrepresented among the tourists taking pictures down here. Must be the strong Euro.
The site itself is rarely, and then only partially, visible from ground level. Today there was additional distance between a potential viewer and the present, flat World Trade Center, provided by a human wall of police gently cajoling the commuters to change their usual routes and accommodate the memorial service. The only change I noticed was the presence of two large hanging signs hanging from 7 World Trade visualizing Silverstein Properties’ finished product, which the banners seem to promise in 2012. I was also directed to a website.
Trinity Church is still there, as beautiful a thing as that is, the worn stone graves and the easy scale, the building visibly unconcerned about economizing on space and unfazed by the canyons surrounding it. The trains are running. Over two million people work in Manhattan, and I saw thousands of them this morning, face after beautifully distinct face in trains, on buses, and walking down the street. For a moment another subway car was running along next to mine, and then it slipped behind us, revealing in a row of little yellow windows tableaus of commuters that struck me as so wonderful, so beautiful, that I could almost picture it, the whole city humming, above and below ground the millions moving, the gears turning, the cash registers ringing. New York is home to two of the largest three central business districts in the country (Chicago’s is #2), and the experience of wandering around both with wide eyes in a single morning is one I highly recommend. I hope against hope I can do this again next year, collect a few thoughts and blog by the river to remember. The idea and the image of this city is powerful, no doubt, but in its details, in its indescribable and infinite minutiae, it’s beauty can move you to tears, and the only way to experience that is to get out in it, and look.
Oh, and the lights are going back up tonight.
This Joyful Noise 