New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
_____________________________________________
New York Stories part 1
I arrived on the Amtrak Carolinian at Penn Station on June 10, 2004 at 11 pm. My daughters, Camen and Jessica were waiting for me at Camen’s apartment on the Upper East Side. The very first change I noticed about New York since I last lived here 10 years ago was that cab drivers no longer necessarily ask you if it is alright to take a circuitous route (always longer by definition) to your destination because the traffic on the most direct route is horrendous. A few cab drives later I realized that it wasn’t just some rogue cab driver who picked me up at Penn Station and took me up the West Side Highway to get to the Upper East Side, which cost me $15 instead of $10. The traffic has gotten noticeably worse than it used to be. It is worse everywhere of course from Austin, Texas to Waynesville, North Carolina.
But in New York, the city with the most ubiquitous public transportation system in the US, streets can turn into gridlock in the blink of an eye. The two freeways, FDR on the east side and The West Side Highway mentioned above, are now often a necessity even for relatively short taxi rides because even if you are not in a hurry, if you get caught in the gridlock and are only inching along, the cab’s meter can click over for time used as well as mileage. And whereas there had always been a surcharge of 50 cents if you were in a cab after dark, there is now a $1 surcharge between 4 and 8 pm because the traffic is so bad that the bonus is needed to get drivers to drive at all during those hours.
The new habit of cab drivers zipping out to the freeways on the periphery of the island is not only starting to clog the freeways themselves with taxi traffic that never used to be there, but it is clogging the east/west cross streets more as well because the circuitous routes (often through quiet residential neighborhoods) that the drivers are using to get out to the edges of the island to take the freeways, and then back into wherever you were originally headed, are themselves adding additional traffic in sheer taxi miles. This phenomenon is still new enough, I can tell, that some drivers are still asking permission of the passenger to take the longer route, while some don’t even bother. But even those who ask permission to go out on the freeways will become agitated and will actually argue with you if your response to their request is, “No. Take the most direct route!”
In Austin or Waynesville, or even out on Long Island, the solution to increased traffic problems is always the same. Build more freeways and widen any street that is clogged. This pattern has led to nothing more than more cars and more traffic. Manhattan Island of course is unique in that there is literally nowhere else to build another street. Or is there? Many parts of the island , including part of the land on which the World Trade Center once stood, is actually a man made extension of the natural geology of the island. I would not be surprised to find that city planners are already working on the idea of building yet another corridor of highways out beyond the island itself. It is an insane idea, but insane ideas from the government no longer surprise me.
In Jane Jacobs new book, “Dark Age Ahead,” the author of the thirty year old urban planning classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” suggests that the demise of urban traffic engineering as a practical science is one of the best examples available of the decline of western civilization. Jacob’s book predicts that if we stay on our present course, we may be headed for a cultural and economic breakdown that could lead to a dark age like the one that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.
Her argument is that the hegemony of the automobile as the only practical means of transportation in North America (and to only a slightly lesser extent in Europe), has lead to the mass destruction of communities and the isolation and alienation of individual human spirits (not to mention the environmental havoc the automobile is wreaking.) According to Jacobs, the existence of communities in which people actually know and interact with their neighbors is the backbone of civilization. Of all the technological inventions in the history of the world, Jacobs argues, the automobile has almost single-handedly destroyed the human interaction that is necessary to maintain civility and community in a city or a region.
And as she goes on to drive one more nail in our coffin, she claims that not only is old fashioned community being destroyed wholesale by what I myself have elsewhere called “automotive architecture,” but even the memory of those communities is being destroyed as well. To ground her claims about the destruction of the memory of earlier and better cultural times she points to the fact, just as an example, that in her own life time she can remember when no one used to lock their doors, then she can remember the time when people talked about the time when no one used to lock their doors, then up to the present when fewer and fewer people now alive can even remember when no one used to lock their doors.
Despite her dire jeremiads, Jane Jacobs (who moved from New York to Toronto, 30 years ago,) still views the street life in New York as the most vibrant in America. And I agree with her.
As far as New York’s traffic problems go, the only solution of course (as Jacobs and others have been arguing for nearly half a century) is fewer cars. Talk of banning private automobiles in Manhattan has been around for decades. There is virtually no likelihood of it ever happening. But the sheer aggravation of trying to own and operate a private car on the island does evidently have a mitigating effect on some people. Jacobs herself cites a successful neighborhood struggle 30 years ago to stop the flow of automotive traffic through Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village against the prophesies of traffic engineers that it would destroy the neighborhood. The record now shows that automotive traffic in the Washington square area actually went down after just that one critical street closing thirty years ago. And in our own time the overwhelming burden of having a car in Manhattan came close to home for me one more time only a week after I arrived here.
Just last Friday my daughter’s boyfriend who lives and works in Boston, drove down to New York for the weekend. He parked his car on the street as close as he could get to her apartment, but still about 10 blocks away. When he went out Monday morning to drive back to Boston, his car was gone. He assumed it had been stolen but was told by a policeman that it had been moved by the police later on Friday because a street fair had been planned for that street on Saturday. No warning signs had been posted until after he had parked the car. When he found his car parked a few blocks away, it had been parked facing the wrong direction by the police wrecker and then on Saturday or Sunday had been ticketed by another police officer for being parked facing the wrong direction. He was actually able to track down the officer who had been in the wrecker, and she said there was nothing she could do about the ticket. It is an ongoing story as to whether or not he will have to pay the fine, but it is just another reason for me to be relieved that I did not drive a car to New York this trip. And knowing what I know now about the intensified congestion, it is highly likely that I, myself, may never drive a car in New York again.
As sad and unnerving as this particular incident was, it actually hints at the idea that in New York, a street fair in which there are no cars and every body is on foot, is more important than someone’s right to have a car here. This strange incident (unlike anything that might be likely to happen anywhere else in America) could be pointing to the beginnings of a Kafkaesque fascist totalitarianism; or on the other hand it could be pointing to the beginning of the end of (or at least the resistance to) a cultural dark age. I’m not sure which. What would Jane Jacobs say? I do know that like Jacobs it is becoming easier and easier for me to abjure the automobile. And like Jacobs, though I ,too, no longer live in New York, I will always be in love with New York street life (that is, people on foot) because as my oldest daughter, Camen, said upon arriving in New York for the first time at age 15, “This is what the real world looks like.”
“Out of the mouths of babes,” the saying goes. But really! The fact that a 15 year old girl who had already lived in Houston, Dallas and Austin, just to name the largest cities she’d lived in, would see New York City streets with their sea of people walking up and down them in all directions for miles and miles and describe that scene as the” real world,” has always had a profound effect on me. Maybe she was just overwhelmed by the tall buildings. But I believe it was more than that. I think she was immediately in touch with the energy of the New York streets. An energy that is nothing more but also nothing less than the collective organic spirit of 8 million people without the mediation of any form of technology (save maybe cell phones, clothing and shoe leather).
After I had my "sweet tea" with the young entrepreneurs in the photo above this afternoon, I went around the corner to the Biography Bookstore where I found a 1/2 price copy of Wallace Shawn's "Designated Mourner" and sat down at the outside picnic tables at the White Horse Tavern (Dylan Thomas's legendary stronghold) where I could drink a heavier brew, drink in Greenwich Village street life and be drunk in as a part of it myself. I got to New York for the first time in 1968. Too late to meet Dylan Thomas. But I actually, literally ran into Wallace Shawn on MacDougal street a few blocks away back in the 90's. He was as humble a man as he appears in films, slouched over as he was and carrying a huge and unwieldy stack of manuscripts (or maybe it was tax records). We both apologized for jostling each other and we went our separate ways. Sweet New York street life. Sweet as a little girl. Just like southern sweet tea. Cars be damned. New York is still so very sweet to me after all these years.
Complete Site Index
Copyright 2005 by Larry L. Dill
All Rights Reserved
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
www.newhopejournal.com