New York Magazine captures blacked out Lower Manhattan post-magastorm Sandy. ©New York Magazine
This past week I found myself sitting in a relatively cheap - for New York City - Japanese restaurant on the upper west side of Manhattan after attending an InDesign User Group meeting. I am slightly grumped but feeling a bit improved as I get a hit of warm and savory
mishoshiro in me. But I am just over half way back to my car, and I am increasingly feeling that New York City has become a place fit only for the very comfortably affluent. Before you hit me with the “oh DUH,” and “what rock have
you been living under?” I do have a thread here.
Of course this is hardly news. New York City is legendarily one of the most expensive cities in the world. Where rents for one bedroom apartments are higher than most American’s mortgages. Where Hudson river crossings are the cost of a decent meal. People who would be comfortably upper middle class in the rest of the nation struggle to squeak by. And milk costs more than a gallon of gas... oh wait, that’s everywhere now. But tonight’s journey painted a fresh coat of grumpiness over my already well weathered cynicism.
As a self-employed graphic designer, I keep rather uneven hours, but I do try to concentrate my labors mostly to business hours. But of course clients seem to take a perverse pleasure of hitting me up with that one last tweak or critical thing, at about 4:45... or better, 5:15. My meeting tonight was scheduled for 6:30, doors opening at 6:00. Most times I can get down to Midtown in about an hour, 20 minutes to the George Washington Bridge, then 40 more to midtown, half of that seeking parking. Par for the course, without having to do the gorram Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs. So if I left by 5:15, I should be in decent shape. Even though it’s rush hour, I’d be inbound while the flood of most commuters would be headed out.
So of course, at 4:55 the client email slides in with “one last thing” on a signed off project. It’s easy stuff and I knock it off in 20 minutes. But now Im running late, it’s 5:30 as I blow out the door. But I should still be okay. But I am halfway to the bridge when WINS informs me that something has gone tits-up on the cross bronx expressway, both directions and there is a half hour inbound delay on the GWB. Fuck. Frak. Fark. This is a chronic choke point, routine epicenter of NYC highway gridlock for over a decade. It’s so notorious, that traffic coming up I-95 for New England is advised to avoid the region entirely and cross over into Connecticut on Rt 84 - at Poughkeepsie.
There are no viable alternate routes. As the ripples go out, the tunnels are now even worse, and would be an untenable detour. Sitting in the toll approach, creeping up inches at a time, I briefly contemplate a traffic misdemeanor and honking a youie in the toll plaza. I tough it out. But the caterpillar creeps along and I am finally ejected onto the west side highway. The GWB Toll is $13, which causes out of town visitor's jaws to drop.
Dashing into later rush hour midtown, traffic is heavy but moving, but parking is brutal. The indesign user group used to meet downtown at School of Visual Arts, on 23rd street. Street No Parking ended at 6PM and one could snag a spot on the changeover, or grab a meter, toss a quarter and be good for the night. But at NY Institute of Technology on 61st street, parking changes over at 7PM. There was nothing, and the upper west side has the most costly parking garages in the city. Unless it’s a client meeting and generating some income, I am generally no longer in the parking garage class. I’ve missed the start of the meeting and I am tempted to bail and go the frak home. But I am the son of, and driver trained, by a New York cabbie, so with persistence and precision driving, I do eventually score a spot. Tho’ if it was much further west, it would have been on a pier in the Hudson River. I was nearly a mile away from NYIT and a half hour late. I hustled inland to Broadway, by the time I got there my bad ankle was already aching.
So I did something I haven’t done in NYC in YEARS. I took a cab down Broadway to the NYIT Auditorium. While I missed the first 40 min of the meeting, it was a good one, exploring some of the capabilities of Adobe’s subscription offering, Creative Cloud. Where I may very well end up next time I need to upgrade... And did have a good time talking to some of my fellow designers. One thing I did notice, as an InDesign user group, the majority of attendees were print designers, and most were in my age group, in their forties and fifties. I haven’t quite parsed what that means for the industry, but it means something. It may certainly dovetail with the fact that over 60%, approaching 75%, of my total volume in the studio is web design versus print.
I did take the organizers to task over the new location, and pointing out that local street parking rules changed over after the meeting start, making finding parking problematical for us commuters. I don’t really expect anything to happen about that. Like just about everything everything else in the Region, it is Manhattan centric. The time, 6:30, is appropriate for after work for city dwellers. Most cityfolk arrive on foot, public transportation or cab. That hour is just reachable from the boroughs. It’s a bit of the hustle from the ‘burbs.
The previous meeting was not long after Sandy battered our coasts, and in midtown, there was hardly any sign, or acknowledgement of the devastating storm, while folks in Staten Island, the Rockaways, Coney Island, Red Hook, Sheepshead Bay, Sea Gate were still digging out, without power, heat, water. Mayor Bloomberg wanted to hold the NY Marathon the weekend after, until shouted down by Sandy victims and the Media. Those folks are still digging and drying out and trying to recover. Imagine your busted up place in February in the fucking Northeast.
This is not a new phenomenon.
For years and years, when people referred to “The City”, they were taking about Manhattan Island. Apparently the real New York City. The outer boroughs are where worker bees and poor people lived. The Manhattan centric focus has only deepened over the years, with ever more goods, services, and attention sucking inward to “The City” like a quantum singularly of wealth, prestige, culture and privilege, letting the boroughs languish for city services and funds. Industry and business also followed this trend, leaving the outer boroughs to scramble, as stepchildren of The City. Mayor Bloomberg’s corporate leanings only makes him the perfect figurehead for the trend.
The New York Public Library on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue is a national landmark and a point of city pride. The Brooklyn Public is only known for its iconic central library in Grand Army Plaza, and it struggles for funding. Most neighborhood branches are only open two days a week, and is NOT networked to the NYC Public.
When I ran an interfaith volunteer chorus, we interacted with a Pagan oriented networking organization that could hold no event or meeting off of Manhattan island except for the occasional sparsely attended beach excursion. Even members who lived in the boroughs would disdain events planned for off the island. Few of our friends were willing to journey out to visit us in Coney Island and Sea Gate, apparently the edge of the Known Universe. Since we moved to Rockland county, we’re now apparently dead to many of them. It no longer startles me that many New Yorkers don’t even know where Rockland County is. “Nanuet? Is that up by Albany?” “Rockland? That’s Upstate? Like Syracuse or Rochester, right?” To a New Yorker, anything North of White Plains is “upstate.” It’s the first county north of the Jersey border, by the way. Westchester and Nassau counties, beholden to The Singularity for their prosperity, face The City and pay homage like medieval fiefdoms. One New Jersey bedroom community north of Hoboken has no illusions concerning their dependency, the town is called "West New York."
The Singularity exerts it’s powerful gravitational pull. The sky high cost of rents, living and real estate in The City exert a powerful lift in surrounding communities. Westchester and Rockland counties, Nassau, Fairfield in CT and Bergen and Hudson in north Jersey pay some of the most brutally high property taxes in the nation. Commuters, even in other states pay income tax to New York City.
Finishing goyza and ten don and drinking the last of my ocha, all these thoughts run through my head. Despite all this, I am still a New Yorker, even if a bit displaced. The Hudson Valley has it’s own calm beauty and charm that I’ll always adore, but I am still a Brooklyn kid. I pass over the county chamber’s golf outing and tell them to call me for the basketball outing. I took the brutal hurt inflicted on my old neighborhood of Sea Gate and Coney Island by megastorm Sandy personally. More of my jeans are black than decent American blue. No matter where I go, I will always be a New Yorker, and I love my home town down to the bone.
But it is not at all clear if my home town loves people like me.
I hiked back to the car through the subsiding upper west side and retreated into the night to my suburban lair.
Banzai.