New York City sure has changed a lot since the last time I was here in 2007, and it's changed even more since 1995 when I made my first trip as a starving grad student traveling via Amtrak from Austin to Manhattan via Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC. Astounding changes since then:
1. Bicycle infrastructure everywhere! Seriously, if you only needed to move around south of 59th Street, you could use Citibike to get everywhere, complete with European-style street furniture. Still a little sketchy riding on some streets, but those bikes are incredibly sturdy and easy to control. It really is amazing. As I rode down 2nd, then 5th Avenue from my midtown hotel (bike station across the street!) to Washington Square park in the drizzle yesterday morning I felt like when I was a kid and my mom let me ride in the overflowing gutters in Lake Jackson, TX during a heavy rain. Joyful!
2. The High Line! It's hard to overestimate what a magical thing this is. Yesterday as I was walking to 28th street from the new Whitney, I floated above the city on this greened walkway in the sky, overlooking the traffic and feeling like a God on a magic carpet, complete with people lying on grass, sitting on benches reading trashy novels, tending their children. You see the roofs and yards and the sides of buildings at your eye level. And, right in the middle, a Blue Bottle coffee cart with a line shorter than any seen since when the first cart opened at the SF Ferry Building. I probably just got lucky there, but I had my Gibraltar as I realized that this replaced the experience of walking in the streets with a sense of grandeur and peace. New York may have lost its grand old Pennsylvania Station, where, to quote Vincent Scully, "One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat," but now you can at least stride like a god through Chelsea.
3. Parklets! New York has taken to this San Francisco treat, and as I sit writing in lower Manhattan I see one nearly identical to the one we have on 24th St in sleepy old Noe Valley, down to red cafe tables and steel flower planters.
I was here to celebrate Gay Pride on the 46th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots, and hoping / knowing that the Supreme Court would rule as it did. What started as an act of defiance by drag queens, saddened by the loss of Judy Garland and angry at the rejection of their freedoms in the land of the free, blossomed over the years into at least some agreement in the general society that the mere fact of being gay shouldn't mean a life of desperation on its margins. In fact, there is still legal discrimination in many states, and informal discrimination in many others, and our transgender, bi, and poly friends, and gay people of color, still face a more difficult road than the white affluent gay men of our big cities. But at the very least, if you want to tie your life to someone else you love, to make your own way together in life, you have that choice. We may not need the government to grant us dignity (thanks, Justice Thomas, for that piece of philosophy) but at least now it's not forcing us to accept the lack of dignity so many in our society wanted to ensure in perpetuity.
In myth, when I was young, New York was a frightening place: the New York of the French Connection and Mean Streets, of graffitied subway cars and fires in the Bronx and 2000 murders a year. I've only seen post-Giuliani New York, but I think of it in the same way: not perfect, but much improved. There's still an energy to New York not felt anywhere else in the country, and probably not in many places in the world, still. I think I was right to not try to make a life for myself here, although I was dearly tempted 20 years ago, but it still holds a place in my heart as a magical place where merely walking down the street can be a new adventure. I'm getting ready to head uptown to visit the new Whitney, displaced from midtown to downtown, in a bigger building anchoring the High Line. Much as I love San Francisco, its charms will always be smaller. Those who wish to develop in San Francisco would do well to remember this.
