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A Word from Richard Risemberg for June, 2002A New York State of Mind
We flew into Newark and took the train into Penn Station, where a friendly native guided us through the underground warrens to the street. We hailed a cab and headed to the hotel. My girl stared out the window for a couple of blocks, taking in the tall buildings, the rich variety of street-level architecture, the currents of the crowds and traffic, the sidewalk vendors, the signs, the windows, and then announced, wide-eyed, that she was taken with the place already. It only got better. Over three and a half days, we went from the Battery to the Metropolitan, from Central Park to Queens, from Chinatown to the Upper East Side, from our hotel in Times Square to every kind of eating establishment from half-lighted suit-and-tie rooms with murmuring waiters to raucous delis where you had to shout your order quick to the bored counterman or he'd turn to the next customer without a word back at ya. Much of the time we simply walked, miles and miles without noticing the miles that passed, because everything around us was so distracting; when we were dressed up or particularly tired we hailed a cab, which rarely cost more than five bucks; more often, we took the subways, where my girl, accustomed to the level of service you find in Los Angeles's transit system, kept saying, "We're already there?" We went everywhere we wanted to with ease; we never were stuck in traffic except when we took a cab, and then we didn't care because we weren't driving, and the cabbie didn't care because he was getting paid; we never spent twenty minutes prowling for a spot on the street or spiraling up and down the ramps of parking structures; in fact, we just went places and saw things and enjoyed the trip over far more often than not. We were free: free of the burdens of a car and the driving of it. And we got the chance to see a hell of a lot of the world's greatest city in a very short time. In LA, and in most other American cities, in the same situation, we would have spent most of each day driving, and very little being anywhere. The kicker for me was a visit to Macy's. I scoffed at the sign we saw when we came up from the subway station, proclaiming it the "world's biggest store." Until we got inside. I realized then that Macy's had joined together two buildings that, between them, took up most of a city block, and that this huge edifice was eleven and a half stories high, and that it was packed with merchandise cleverly displayed in genuinely interesting rooms that mocked, by their very existence, the dull beige caverns of most mall stores. And that it had no parking structure, and that it was packed tight with throngs of shoppers forking over their money with a desperate glee. It was a far busier store than I've seen in any mall out west. In fact, because in Manhattan you don't have to waste your valuable property to accommodate cars, you can get more people to your store than you can in other places. It was a real destination, in a real place, with the door right on the busiest street in America and three subway lines right outside the door. Forget the ads that Ford and GM feed you through the tube. You don't need a car to be happy and carefree. You simply need a real city to live in.
Richard Risemberg Go to A Word from Eric Miller
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My girl and I just got back from an extended weekend in Manhattan. Now, don't think we do this all the time: she'd never been there before, and I hadn't seen it in twenty years. Simply, it was about time we went. So I took her out on a sort of extravagant date. We even made reservations at a couple of fancy restaurants before we left.