New York — Summer heat, and I have begun to wilt and retreat to watching one too many Netflix and Amazon prime series and films. Still, I expect the heat will let up, and I hope to return to New York in September as intact as someone with my many ailments can be. As a result, my thoughts have begun to return to the city, and I read the New York Times and skim pieces online that capture aspects of my roiling, problematic, and sometimes exhilarating city. But at the moment I want to focus on what is positive—the negatives are always there and too easy to experience and rail against.
Recently, the Sunday Times contained a few articles that offered a relatively optimistic take on the state of the city. One was a piece by the very perceptive urban columnist, Ginia Bellafante, about the difficulties of quick delivery services and the disappearance of dark stores where they warehouse their goods. I share with Bellafante the feeling that this is good news, because it’s a sign that people want to escape isolation and seek human contact by desiring stores they can go into and interact with other people. She also mentions how full the city’s restaurants are, which usually means that public life is hopefully well on the road to recovery.
Another positive article deals with the Port Authority’s revamping the area’s airports at the cost of $25 billion. After many years of disrepair, the area could have three of the most modern airports in the country by 2030. The first to be completed will be the once decrepit LaGuardia where Delta has opened a lustrous $4 billion terminal—the last section in the airport’s total overhaul.
The third article also appeared in the Times on another day. It describes an unclassifiable art exhibition of 820 works of art crammed into a modest storefront space—most hung salon style, but also creeping onto the ceiling and spread on the floor. The gallery was O’Flaherty’s at 55 Avenue C, and the crowd (about a thousand people) that desired to enter had stretched around the corner down East Fourth Street and was coming close to Avenue B. They had come for an exhibition that was very different from the usual glossy, carefully curated exhibits, by being based on a democratic open call and attracting hundreds of artists desperate for exposure.
The exhibit was built on excess and chaos, and almost every medium was represented from paint to busted hockey sticks. Most of it was far from first rate art, but it conveyed how deep and frantic the city’s artists’ need to be exhibited and recognized is.
The exhibit also shows how the city still remains a center for many aspiring artists, despite the innumerable obstacles—creative and financial—thrown in their way. On another level, I liked the fact that a mass evening gathering took place in the city in the name of art—not violence or even politics. It exemplifies the city at its most spontaneous and alive—harking back to the days when the East Village was a center of artistic ferment and bohemian life. It’s a vision of New York at its most exciting and creative—a counter to the crime, poverty, and excess privilege that so often defines it.
