Living in New York City for the last eight years, I've taken pride in the city's urban form. I love being outdoors in any part of the city; sometimes I would take the train to Grand Central just to mingle with the crowds between canyons of buildings, or I'd end up wandering in some more deserted corner of the city, walked only by the people who live there. These latter places were always more interesting to me because they were a break from the bustle and glass of Manhattan. I always tried to give myself more excuses to end up in these kinds of places. I made it a habit with my friend to spend a Saturday walking around in any random neighborhood, or sometimes I took my school's photography club to these places. Of course they would rather get some nice photos of the skyline, but I wanted to show them how much beauty lied off the beaten path, even if they were blind to it right next to them.
My highschool was in the neighborhood of East Williamsburg, in the northern tip of the borough of Brooklyn. The housing makeup is mostly two to four story vinyl or brick homes, but it is really a total mix in floors and housing materials. For those who've read Kevin Lynch's Image of the City, his description of Jersey City is very apt for this part of Williamsburg. The odd chaos yet overwhelming similarity is very disorienting. The eastern half of the neighborhood is fully taken over by an industrial park, which is my favorite place to wander around. One can tell its not one of the city's premier industrial parks by how disheveled the roads and the buildings look; below is a picture showing this. I think the overall lack of cohesion unkemptness is the neighborhood's beauty: the crooked telephone poles, the cracked sidewalks, the signs of life through discarded wooden pallets and cardboard scrap. Of course I am not advocating for everywhere to look like this, and really its much better if no places looked like this at all. The little dirt that Jane Jacobs says is necessary in cities is far exceeded here. But I see a beauty, one that I can't necessarily put my tongue on yet, in this neighborhood. The image conveys it perfectly.
Another favorite neighborhood of mine is Queensboro Hill in the borough of Queens. Being a 10 minute bus-ride from one of New York City's busiest train stations, with 7 million passengers annually, it is surprisingly underdeveloped. Most houses don't exceed two stories and many are detached, and almost all of the have garages. The neighborhood's space inefficiency is a testament to the history of American planning, and how we seem to be falling behind in righting our wrongs today. It boggles me how an hour's train ride from my Manhattan home can take me to the classic American suburb (with a Queens architectural flair), and I love it. Below is a picture of a typical home; in its ordinariness the neighborhood is unique to me. Squeezing past the occasional pedestrian that I meet, focusing my eyes on the grass growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk, or on the snaking telephone poles dangling above me, or the unadulterated blue sky above that. Some may see the appeal of the American Dream here, but what's there is really only the shadow: the traffic is horrible and yet the sidewalks are too small to accommodate any population of hardcore pedestrians, also keeping in mind that the neighborhood is highly underdeveloped for its location and is costing the city so much in lost tax revenue.
In writing this post, and thinking about these two neighborhoods, many more I leave unmentioned, I realized what I was trying to convey. I love the lived experience of New York City, and the faults of the city comes with it. Appreciating what it is to be a New Yorker, however, comes with no acceptance of the problems of the city, maybe being in its chaotic or underdeveloped neighborhoods, but an even harder push to solve it to make the city better comes along.
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