The New York City of Saqartvelo

As disgraced former mayor Eric Adams so eloquently put it, New York City is the 

[ insert major city ] of America. Despite the city’s overpriced and undermaintained subway, rising poverty and housing insecurity, and impressively high assault rates, it is also easy to see why people from all over the world, and the rest of the country (#PurgeTheNYCTransplants), flock to The Greatest City in the World.

But long before I learned to complain about the R train, I learned to cross Rustaveli Avenue.

I was eight when I left Tbilisi. Old enough to remember the city vividly, yet young enough that my memories sometimes feel like dreams. Since then, I have returned almost every summer, measuring my growth in how differently I see the same streets. My earliest understanding of urban space came from Rustaveli Avenue. It is the spine of the city: wide and ceremonial with plane tree-lined sidewalks and monumental buildings. The Parliament building, the opera house, and the museums sit back from the road as if to be admired from the sidewalks.

Hidden behind the wide boulevards are tiny streets composed of small pre-Soviet brick structures, or identical concrete apartment buildings. Much of the city I grew up in was composed of Khrushchyovkas: five to nine-story concrete apartment blocks thrown up quickly during the Soviet housing boom. My grandparents lived in one in Saburtalo, a borough I liken to Brooklyn. From the outside, they’re aggressively plain with gray/beige concrete, identical windows, and laundry lines stretched between railings like improvised flags. Inside, however, is life. 

Apartment complex in Vake

The courtyard below was my favorite place. Old men played backgammon on benches worn smooth by decades of use while women leaned out of windows to shout conversations across floors, all the while my twin brother and I jumped on the rusting see-saw and pushed each other on creaky swings. These buildings unintentionally produced intimacy that I haven't felt in my 10 years of living in Jackson Heights.

One of my strongest memories is of the underground pedestrian crossings that snake beneath major roads. To cross Rustaveli or Pekini, you don’t wait for a light, you descend into a tiled corridor that smells faintly of damp concrete and cigarettes, surprisingly not as gross as the subway. Vendors line the walls selling socks, phone chargers, icons, cheap toys, and embroidery sets I could never finish. As a child, this felt magical, like entering a secret market hidden below the city. 

In Vera and Mtatsminda, the streets tilt upward at angles that make the Ithaca slopes look like tiny inclines. Houses cling to hillsides with wooden balconies and peeling brick facades, remnants of older Tbilisi. Cats sleep on warm stone steps. You can see the Kura River glinting below if you climb high enough. This was where my family would walk in the evenings when the heat subsided, the adults talking, me racing ahead and then waiting at corners so I wouldn’t get lost.

Returning to Tbilisi each summer has been like watching a time-lapse of change. Glass towers have appeared along the river. American cafe chains have colonized old courtyards. Some Khrushchyovkas have been painted cheerful pastels in an attempt to soften their severity. 

What has changed most is me. As a child, I experienced Tbilisi as a playground. As a teenager, I saw it as outdated and crumbling. Now, I can see a city shaped by corruption, ideology, improvisation, and resilience. I notice how people adapt spaces that were never designed to be beautiful and make them deeply personal anyway. Nonstop protests flow down Rustaveli Ave like the Kura River itself.

New York may be the (Istanbul/Athens/Mexico City/Islamabad/Seoul/Lima/Zagreb/Abu Dhabi) of America, but for me, Tbilisi will always be the original reference point, the city against which all others are measured.