NYC, ahead of the apex
The thing about NYC is the density. It’s the physical proximity we have to each other, and the teeming thrum of the streets. It’s the tightness of the buildings, the closeness of cars and bicycles, and the throngs of other people. It’s our bodies navigating around each other, and sometimes into each other, in restaurants, bodegas, clubs (the private, public, underground, or temporary kind), outdoor concerts, parks, galleries, stores, the subway — and sometimes just waiting at the corner. It’s the visible output of the productivity and the innovation of the city’s remaining artists and newly arrived tech folk. It’s the sheer number of languages and dress styles and cultures in neighborhoods that change character every few blocks from Inwood to Crown Heights, Hunts Point to Huguenot, Astoria to Nolita.
The city sends out a constant buzz no matter where you are, provoking and inspiring us to its particular hustle, its “steely resolve.” It’s the thing so many tourists and visitors say exhausts them — and the thing that people who live here, who drink the city’s air, crave, even as we complain about it. (And we like to complain. It’s a common pastime. It’s a form of love.)
The city has lost its hum and succumbed to increasing silence — broken only by sirens cutting through the air in short, frequent spurts over the past few weeks — as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps through it and…
