New York, you are a city like no other in the world.
I explore your neighbourhoods as a Manhattan stranger yet meet your streets with a sentimental familiarity. In a surreal consciousness, I wander your iconic city blocks as if in perpetual Deja Vu. I’ve grown up with these landscapes but only experienced them through TV screens on the other side of the planet.
I feel you’ve sucked me into an episode of Seinfeld, Sex in the City, Law and Order or NYPD Blues. I imagine I’m walking through movie sets with a cast of a thousand extras simulating daily city life as I pause on every block, capturing famous corners.
Kids play on the steps of brownstone buildings out of ‘Sesame Street’ in Harlem and street vendors sell hot dogs outside the corner diner from Seinfeld on the West Side. Couples sit at corner cafe tables under the shadow of old steel ladders and railings that zig-zag in unison down the side of flat brick buildings between large rectangle windows in Greenwich Village. Groups laugh, chat and sip just like a scene from ‘Friends’… It’s all too much.
I wander your sidewalks as wide as roads under the watchful gaze of the Empire State Building and I push out into the harbour on the bulky orange Staten Island ferry past proud Lady Liberty as she stretches upward toward a chrome sky. I stand feeling small and humble at Ground Zero under bright and fluttering star-spangled banners and remember where I was that fateful day in September.
I weave through your perfect grid, exploring nighttime streets illuminated in a neon, artificial day of red, blue and yellow. I traverse skyscrapers, carried up their throats by art deco elevators to stare back down at your sprawling city blocks and your perfectly straight veins peppered with bright yellow cabs.
I cross the historic Brooklyn Bridge, suspended over the cold, glass-like surface of the East River, held high by the intricate spine of woven steel cables and raw brick towers and I climb ancient bedrock to stand and gaze across the divide where nature meets the city in Central Park.
At night I wander Broadway and Times Square, past drains wafting white steam that catches neon colours. I walk along cold pavement, regularly feeling the heat of the subway through grates under my feet as it rumbles and squeals beneath me. I stop, camera-in-hand under bright billboards framed by warm-yellow incandescent bulbs, freezing the light and colour with a lazy shutter speed. I move through the square to the eclectic soundtrack of honking horns, sirens, talkative tourists and Sinatra’s ‘New York, New York’ blaring from speakers at the entrance to a theatre.
It’s all too iconic. Too familiar. Too exotic. Too cliched. Too perfect.
New York, you have captivated me and exceeded my expectations. I long to wander your streets again at another time when I’m transported into your movie set landscapes to explore like an actor without a script and absorb your gritty, pulsating neon, classic landmarks, chaotic sophistication and pockets, East and West, of eclectic village life squeezed between your art deco skyscrapers.
Until then.
Love NYC!