Cities

I am a city person. I love forests, and mountains, and beaches. I love hiking, and swimming, and diving. But for anything more than a week, give me a city. So here, a little homage of cities, with a smattering of great quotes.

You know, I sometimes think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city. You can’t. Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form and when you think that in the cold, violent, meaningless universe that Paris exists, these lights, I mean come on, there’s nothing happening on Jupiter or Neptune, but from way out in space you can see these lights, the cafés, people drinking and singing. For all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

The psychologist John Bowlby described how children explore the world, periodically returning to the secure base of their parents. Bring a child to a playground and she’ll play a few yards away from you and then come back. She’ll then play further away, and come back. Soon, she’ll have the run of the whole playground.

This is how I discovered New York. First, I got comfortable around my home and my school, Murray Hill and the Upper East Side. Next came the neighborhoods where my friends lived, Yorktown and the Upper West Side. Then I began to explore far afield: Greenwich Village, Soho, Chinatown. Finally, there were hours of wandering bike rides. I sought to cover every street in Manhattan. I didn’t come close, but I tried. On a bike I’d sail through neighborhoods, being in them but not really a part of them. The rides were a way of scouting, of seeing if a neighborhood was a place I’d feel comfortable exploring on foot.

Yet once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.

 Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

Cities are special because of their people and places.

Places

Cities fill me with optimism because they demonstrate what a million hands, working independently, separated by hundreds of years, can build. The beauty of cities is made up of private homes and grand public works, of parks and housing projects, of shops and restaurants, of museums and theaters. Because the hands, the cultures, the raw materials, and the construction eras are diverse, cities are beautiful in wildly different ways. San Franscisco, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, and Rome are all gems, but very different ones, diamonds, sapphires, rubies... Get dropped in any one of them, (or handed one if we’re going to torture the metaphor) and you’d never mistake it for another.

There is probably some analogy to be made between capitalism and the growth of cities. There is an invisible hand that guides people, over years, to build what they want and what they need. The product is not always beautiful, or beautiful everywhere, but it is usually interesting. Kaveh Akbar wrote, “Art is where what we survive survives.” Cities are where we survived and show how we survived.

Cities are alive, evolving over time. The changes are never all good or all bad. The decisions about what to keep and what to let change are often fraught. Venice and Dubrovnik are so perfect that we feel we can’t let them change. We treat them like fragile jewels. We treasure them so deeply that we threaten to turn them into museums rather than real cities.

Chicago and New York are always changing. I love what they are, but I miss the gritty streetscapes of my youth. So many have said what I feel about New York. It is safer, and cleaner, and easier, and richer than it was when I was growing up. It is also more crowded, more corporate, more expensive, and less interesting.

New York, you’re safer and you’re wasting my time
Our records all show you were filthy but fine
But they shuttered your stores when you opened the doors
To the cops who were bored once they’d run out of crime

LCD Soundsystem, New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down

There are places I miss that disappeared before I was born: the original Penn Station, the Chicago Stock Exchange.

People

I can’t figure out how to write this without sounding trite. Cities are the people who live in them, who love them, who trust that they can share them. City-dwellers maintain a faith in the people who share their streets. I love the person who says, “Why do I need a yard when there’s a park three blocks away?” Those who do have a yard, and tend to it, do it for their neighbors as much as for themselves.

Walking around Tokyo, a city that makes New York feel like a starter city, I became awestruck by the people. I thought, now these people really know how to live in a city.

Living in a city, there is never a day when you can’t comment on the people you interact with in your comings and goings. Sometimes they’re people you know, sometimes they’re strangers, often they’re that strange in-between breed, the people you don’t know but who you see nearly every day.

Well, they’re the people that you meet
When you’re walking down the street
They’re the people that you meet each day

Sesame Street, The People in Your Neighborhood

I took the subway to school every morning from 1979 through 1985. I’d always enter the first door of the second car of the 6 train at the 33^rd Street Station at 7:15. The same man sat across from me every day. During my senior year of high school, I began to muster the courage to speak to him. In January, he disappeared. I hoped he retired. I feared worse. I still regret not having spoken to him.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities