I recently made a trip back east, to celebrate friends, their marriage and to see my family. My parents still live in the west village, where they bought their apartment on the west side back in 1981.
I grew up there and remember the piers with degrading wood planks and sunbathers that my cousin and I used to spy on from the window with binoculars. The garage next door was for garbage trucks and there were rats attracted to the juices expelled when the garbage got compressed. There was a lot of grit and grime.
I had a friend up the block whose dad rode a unicycle with a pet boa constrictor around his neck. Towering, scantily clad humans in high heels walked around the meat packing district, back when carcasses still hung on hooks and lined the sidewalk; used condoms and nitrus oxide containers collected in the gutters.
Walking around now, NYC still seems so familiar, the same intense energy and mix of chaos and beauty that results when 8,260,000 people are in the same place. But my parent’s neighborhood specifically has been cleaned up. Examples of cutting edge design and art are everywhere, alongside usable, clean public bathrooms and well maintained landscaping.
The Whitney Museum, just a couple of blocks north of my parents apartment, was showing Calder’s circus. I hadn’t seen this work before and was charmed by its simplicity and elegance. Calder created this work when he lived in Paris in 1926 and performed with it for other artists like Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian, both in Paris and New York. This work, along with some of the pieces from the sixties surreal show downstairs, filled my creative cup, so to speak.
I rode the subway to visit friends and get to the airport and realized perhaps my intense fascination with people was born while riding the subway as a kid. I didn’t have a cellphone back then and so I studied the people. And the MTA brings together all types of people.
I am now removed from the most densely populated city and living in almost rural Colorado. The sense of gratitude I experience for growing up in NYC is great. There are just so many different people, each with their histories, cultures and identities sharing that city. And the surrounding built environment is a direct result of those individuals coming together, their dreams and their gumption to make it. And although so much has changed, there is still the sense of NYC’s character remaining the same: the sum spirit of variety. A place shapes you and I am proud to have been cast in a place that celebrates difference and art, an environment that places you in proximity to strangers all of the time.