I am probably not the first person to say this, but the trip through Queens helped strip the veneer off the whole thing. I am still wrapping my head around the fact that New York exists at all. In my head, it has always occupied an almost mythic place, next to Atlantis and Metropolis, the archetypal “City,” capital C. It’s not just a matter of scale separated it from Chicago or Detroit--it’s an entirely different plane of existence.
Taking the el to the Mets’ stadium helped drag this city back to earth. Above ground, looking through windows, it was possible to see this place as it really is. And it wasn’t too desperately unfamiliar. The tightly packed single family housing felt like Chicago. The dilapidated industrial buildings felt like good old Michigan. The whole thing fell into a scale I felt I could comprehend.
Manhattan feels like an entirely foreign entity, and it makes this city easy to mythologize. It is defined in extraordinarily grandiose terms, each with implications that reach far beyond what a city can normally hope to imply. The Empire State Building is the archetype for skyscraper. The Manhattan skyline is the archetype for skyline. The Statue of Liberty is the archetype for freedom itself! Even its street names conjure up images far beyond the brick and mortar and steel that line them. Wall Street is finance, is shorthand for big business. Madison Avenue is advertising, shorthand for manipulation. Broadway is theatre, shorthand for entertainment.
But Queens was very clearly just a place where people lived their lives, went to work, raised their kids. Seeing it laid out helped remind that Manhattan is too, actually, that this whole place is just another patch of land where humans have decided to make a go of it. This is a special place. There is no doubt about that. But it’s a real place, not a movie set. For all New Yorkers say about being the “greatest city in the world,” it’s really just a city, and cities are made of people, not buildings. There is a special mass of humanity here, but that’s just as there is literally everywhere else.
(Also, the Mets are lousy.)
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