New York fundamentals

I moved to New York City about two weeks ago. Having now resided briefly in the Bronx and just started a stay in Brooklyn, all the while working in Manhattan, I can safely say that I've moved around the city quite a bit. The transit system works--at a basic big wealthy city level-of-service sort of functionality. You can travel ten plus miles quite easily on express subways or regional trains and walk to a subway within 15 minutes from just about everywhere. You can equally walk the city streets and experience a lot of activity--business, socializing, individual eccentric--experientially it's anywhere from a little rough to mildly pleasant. That is to say that walking the streets of New York is usually somewhat interesting, if not always aesthetically pleasing, and it certainly has felt safe in all the places I have been. Additionally, there are parks, civic institutions, homes, and businesses that are stunning.

I must say, though, that the sum of the parts does not achieve it's full potential. It's easy for me to blame the car and truck traffic for this. Obviously removing private automobiles, moving freight delivery underground or at least organizing it, and then increasing pedestrian and bike amenities would transform this and most other cities. Even you better organized street movement, there still would be something lacking. People love the grid system here for ease of navigation, but I think it detracts from the heuristic acquaintance with the neighborhoods. Neighborhoods here don't generally have entrances and exits--streets just transition to a new place at certain intersections. Park Slope in Brooklyn, for instance, feels like it starts when the nice shops and tree lined homes begin, but it's all the same grid. This adds to flexibility, but it doesn't feel as neighborhood-oriented as it could be.

The other beef I have is that the commercial streets in town seem to be commercial for the sake of commercialism, and give less the appearance of serving the people living in or visiting the neighborhood. The advertising, the featured junk in the windows, and the chic look of the upscale places is what defines New York, but it bastardizes the notion of a city being built for the convenient exchange of goods from the hinterlands and afar. Most everything in the city feels like it is for the entertainment of consumption, rather than the economies of density. The latter certainly exists--I lived in a food desert in Boston and now I see fresh fruit frequently because there are plenty of pedestrians to buy it. Maybe my problem is that I rarely value any of the products sold in the city beyond the food. I certainly value the services--I just enrolled in a German program and watched the Stanley Cup in a bar. My unease is that commercialism is based on the need to make millions of people and thousands of corporations the sellers of products. The needs of the residents for these products are far less than what is being sold, so the sellers and residents have made the implicit agreement that the residents will entertain themselves by buying unneeded products in order to keep the sellers viable. This model means that citizens and leader don't pay much attention to the non-commercial aspects of the city. The recent tiny improvements to the streets--new public spaces and bike lanes--demonstrate how little attention the city had paid to non-commercialized space.

Overall, I want to find another model for living in a city or a town. I want responsibility and control localized while maintaining regional organization, and I want residents to spend time toiling and cooperating to improve the places they live. I want products to be sold with less redundancy and to have a identified origin and clearer purpose. These desires don't match most people's lifestyle, and perhaps not even my own. That's why it's so hard to imagine a place that functions such that we do less buying and selling and more things that strengthen the place.