If there’s an opposite to a peaceful June evening on St. Peter’s Church Road, when the moist evening air rolls off the flank of Blue Mountain and flushes an armada of hopeful fireflies from the field grass, it has to be rush hour in Manhattan in the vicinity of Broadway and Canal.
Elbows, pocketbooks, and briefcases rain down like hammer blows; sidewalks pulse with the rat race; construction crews tear at the city’s bowels, smashing entire streets and avenues into oblivion.
Everyone is talking into the air, their smart phones held out in front of them like Geiger counters, their ears plugged with Bluetooth whatnots, studiously avoiding eye contact, shuttered islands in an unimaginable sea of consciousness.
Every language is heard. On every side, the city is simultaneously destroyed and built. Workers pour along the sidewalks like storm runoff. Everyone is talking, but no one is talking to anyone else, a textbook illustration of the Tower of Babel a week or two after the divine punishment.
You scarcely dare to tilt your head, the better to take in the new Freedom Tower, rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the World Trade Center, for fear of being ground to dust by the madding crowd.
God forbid you should have to go to the bathroom. The line for the single restroom – one restroom! — at Starbucks is half an hour long.
Everyone jockeys for position; millions of tiny vectors intersect; countless collisions are narrowly avoided, or not. Even army ants have the courtesy, when they meet head to head, of sniffing each other for information before deciding who should make way. Not so the home-bound commuter of Manhattan, who plows ahead — damn the torpedoes! — until he encounters the only force that will make him yield: a lethal torrent of yellow cabs at a cross-street.
How, one wonders, is it possible to live like this, in a place where every queue is a form of combat, where getting from point A to point B involves the strapping on of armor?
Answer: by enjoying the sublime fruits of all of this manic energy.
By going to a play, for instance, like the superb production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia we saw last week at the Barrymore Theater.
Or by visiting a museum like the Morgan Library, which welcomes visitors into the sanctum sanctorum of a bona fide robber baron. The Morgan Library mounts excellent art exhibits, but equally impressive is a tour of J.P. Morgan’s private reading room, a jewel-like fortress complete with an impregnable vault for his rarest tomes.
If the reading room of the Morgan library is too ostentatious for your tastes, too gauche an expression of personal power, there’s always the New York Public Library (NYPL), which is nothing less than a temple of learning, as dedicated to the freedom of information as Mr. Morgan was to the concentration of capital. The NYPL is celebrating its 100th birthday with an exhibition of treasures from its collection, including, for instance, the final draft of George Washington’s famous Farewell Speech to the American People – in his own hand. Oh, and a handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence by that other guy, Thomas Jefferson.
Not to mention cuneiform seals from the Third Millennium B.C.; a Beethoven manuscript; Audubon’s magisterial Birds of America, a copy of which can be had for a cool ten million dollars; and countless other jaw-dropping artifacts.
Admission to the NYPL is free, as are many of the great pleasures of New York City. I don’t recommend walking on Broadway at rush hour, unless the goal is to feel smug about living anywhere else in the world, but walking is generally very rewarding, especially if you treat the thoroughfare like an open-air museum of architecture.
If pounding the pavement starts getting you down, pop over to the High Line, a public walkway along a former elevated freight rail spur, which has the feel of a hanging garden.
Also free is the Staten Island Ferry, which may not be the most picturesque boat in the world, but does afford nice views of lower Manhattan, Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty.
Of course, Manhattan is famous for hoovering money from your wallet, no matter how many freebies you find. Take that as a given. Also, the exhausting crowds. And the relentless barrage of advertising that makes crossing a street feel like running a gauntlet.
Oh, and good luck with the rest rooms.
On the other hand, prepare to be well fed, amused, amazed, entertained, shocked, and awed.
What can I say? It’s a hell of a town.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 23 June 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
