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A Long Walk Through New York – OpEd

Yesterday I walked across half the width of the city. To walk across New York City is to see a study in contrasts. The ambitious skyscrapers of the real estate bubble and the declining working class neighborhoods being eaten away at by Halal markets and mosques. It is also to witness the prolonged death of the progressive vision for the city.

New York is not a large city in space. It is walkable if you have the time and the energy. Its largeness is vertical. The buildings push upward around concentrated real estate bubbles. A dozen blocks in a hot zone can be completely torn down and rebuilt into an unrecognizable mini-metropolis in only a few years. While a dozen adjacent blocks remain stagnant and unchanged since the 50′s. Much of this has to do with zoning regulations. Some of it with the ridiculous trends of 90′s gentrification. But seen from above it is undeniably strange.

Walk across one of the bridges between Manhattan and Brooklyn, dodging bike riders with messenger bags speeding across, and you see the narrow strait of the East River, once filled with shipping, now a recreational lane for light yachts and water skiers, and the occasional barge carrying garbage or rubble from some construction project. The industry is mostly gone and the shipping with it. And the city’s working class districts have become an eyesore. Like so many other northeastern towns and cities they are ghosts of their former prosperity.

The city’s new wealth comes from its centrality. New York City is still a nameplate brand. And it attracts creative people. It is not the flow of Third World immigrants, so often namechecked in mayoral speeches, who contribute anything to the economy. There is little for them to contribute. Without much in the way of manufacturing, there aren’t many jobs for them. Cheap labor is handled by the ubiquitous Mexican illegal alien who can be found toiling even in Chinese stores and marts, where mutual linguistic incomprehension is overcome by grunts and emphatic hand gestures.

It is the creative industries which account for the city being the largest regional economy in the country. This is still the city of magazines, tall buildings and the finance sector. It is where news organizations and foreign corporations set up shop to have a presence and recruit from the pool of talent drawn here. They are the ones who drove up real estate prices and financed the construction of unsightly new skyscrapers that look like a Picasso took a nose dive into a swimming pool full of concrete.

Brooklyn/NYC Trip « Just Say Jenn

So hard.

MM and I headed to Brooklyn and NYC for a few days.  It was our third trip together and since we’d already done all the touristy stuff, we were excited to check out some restaurants and good drink spots as well as do some shopping , natch.

THURSDAY

We flew Porter  (the best!) from the Toronto Island Airport to Newark, New Jersey, which I highly recommend to anyone heading to New York. Not only is it super easy to get to Porter if you live in Toronto, but you only have to check in like 45 minutes in advance and there’s free coffee/pop etc. and snacks in the posh lounge. We arrived in Newark and got on the Skytrain to Penn Station, where we purchased our Metro Pass and headed for Brooklyn via the subway (and were serenaded by a very loud and enthusiastic mariachi band).

Thanks God for MM and her navigating skills! She figured out all the subway routes and got us from everywhere to everywhere on the subway, allowing us to cover a lot of the city without shelling out for cabs. We still did a ton of walking (I vividly recall moaning “my hip” about mid-way through the trip), and the weather was definitely on our side (sunnt and beautiful – maybe a little too hot).

We checked into our Brooklyn hotel – ALOFT – which was cute and convenient but we definitely struggled with some of the front desk staff who seemed a little…..relaxed about their jobs.  But the lobby was super fun and our room was large and clean (minus the massive red wine stain on the floor which must be a bummer for the hotel since it just opened in June).

After checking in we dropped off our crap and made a beeline for Grimaldi’s Pizzeria , located nearish the Brooklyn Bridge.

And then waited in line for like 45 minutes.

My GOD that was a wait.

But I’d read so many great things about the food and since we weren’t planning on doing anything super touristy on the trip, I figured this was the one line we’d have to wait in so we stuck with it. The pizza was really good but I wasn’t blown away. Perhaps because coal/brick oven pizza is popular in Toronto at places like Terroni and Pizzeria Libretto . I guess that style of pizza is a novelty in NYC, where it’s all slices. Grimaldi’s only serves whole pizzas (but you can design your own, unlike Terroni and Libretto), but the atmosphere is fun and the small size pizza was HUGE and more than enough for two starving people!

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