The Emerald City Jan. 13, 2024
They still have up their Christmas decorations on the new
and supposedly improved Exchange Place pier, a fact we noticed when making our
trip to Five Guys last night for our usual Friday Night dinner date.
That part of the planet has changed dramatically over the
last two decades.
Although still haunting, less like the ghost town it used to
be now that they have constructed new residential towers along Hudson Street,
trying to turn the historic business district into a neighborhood, and failing
in the same way the Newport section fails, where a string of intimidating tall
buildings and a street so wide it takes a helicopter to get across.
Exchange Place is really the old Paulus Hook, that place
Europeans first settled in back when Hamilton thought to create a financial
district, while eyeing my hometown of Paterson for industry.
The business buildings and hotels line the waterfront like a
barrier reef, impossible to ignore, unfriendly despite the historic pier over
which Lincoln traveled on his way to Gettysburg, and the new kids’ playground
installed to meet the needs of the new residents.
Having missed the first light rail train home, we wandered
out onto the chilly walkway to look out at the amazing light show of lower Manhattan.
New York City looks better at night these days than it does by daylight, partly
because you can’t see the parade of silly looking buildings that have been
installed and mar the traditional vision of what we always though New York City
should look like.
A night, you do not see the odd shapes that were created by
people looking to leave their mark on the world and end up creating ugly scars,
the jagged jaws of a mean city had finally since the 1970s become mean again.
All you see are the lights, a site I even admired during my trips to Manhattan from
Paterson when I took the bus that came down Boulevard East and allowed me to
look out from the top of the Weehawken Palisades at the lights of Nirvana I
ached to reach.
These days there are many new lights, even though at night
the Freedom Tower is less impressive than in sunlight, all the rest lies there
reflected in the waters of the Hudson like the Emerald City we all stroll the
Yellow Brick Road to reach.
At the Five Guys, an openly Transgender served us, thick red
lipstick and quaint mannerisms, and something of an odd twinkle in her eyes as
she saw my surprise. Even though many of the old hip institutions are fading
away in this part of the city – particulary the Iron Monkey – the place is still
a haven for those who might not yet fit in other parts of the city, state or
nation, people like this woman who brave ridicule by being who they are
wherever they are.
The place also seems to serve as a hangout for local teens,
still too young to frequent the bar scene, many carrying book bags and other
implements of their school careers as they waited for their trains to arrive to
take them home to other parts of the county.
Although Exchange Place has been redone, finally getting rid
of the confusing and potentially dangerous cul-de-sac around the World War II
statue and installed tables and chairs for the populism to sit at and drink
coffee. It was too cold for people to sit there now, and too late in the evening
for the lunch crowds that have always used this place and its pier. Most of
those we saw were computers coming off the PATH and hurrying in the cold to get
to other modes of transportation home. If any of those we saw lived in the
massive luxury residential buildings, we could not tell, though I suspect not –
this is a tale of many cities, of people who bask in luxury while working
people pass by envious of their success, in a section of the city embracing
wealth and securing it with unseen yet no doubt efficient security to keep those
who are too obviously poor to fit in.
This is not to say the poor do not have a place in this new
society. Five Guys and other restaurants employed many as part of the new trend
to deliver meals to the wealthy, people on bicycles and motorized vehicles that
come out on cold nights like this to service the rich, much in the way southern
slaves did those mansions abolitionists so resented prior to the Civil War (or
as the south says, The War of Northern Aggression), these poor feeding off the
skimpy gifts and surviving because the wealthy need their kind and their
service.
I suspect the poor don’t mind as much as the previous slaves
did, having a symbiotic relationship with the wealthy that allows them to
survive.
It was a bit depressing, despite the lights on the harbor
and I was glad when our train came and took us home to a place far less extravagant.
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