New York City and its Endless Webs

New York City and its Endless Webs

I was in Manhattan last month when I heard the news: Stan Lee had died.

I believe that destiny made our trip that much better.

It was not the bad news that deaths can illicit normally, those events that are too often the tragic case when you first learn of the passing of person, unexpected or not. He was old; he was accomplished, he had lived a great and well known and lauded life. He had an impact on me, and many others now through the ubiquitous movies. X-Men. Iron Man. Avengers. On and on with the Marvel franchises.

I was a rather avid collector of Marvel comics as a teen. I still have them, decades later, hoping for a bounty of wealth in them. Money and art, and creativity. Stan Lee embodied New York, with the Webbed Crusader... And on and on.

And there I was, with my sons, in the heart of Gotham! Or, rather, New York City, where Spidey was the weaver of his fabulous webs. (DC and Marvel made this city more heralded in the imagination of millions, or billions: Gotham being a reference to the Caped Crusader, Batman.)

Serendipity, perhaps, for us.

I told my sons that this news was significant in hopes that they might always remember being in the streets of Manhattan right then, just when another confabulator (fabulist?) of the Big Apple was first known to have gone on to the next world.

For example, I was in Nashville, Tennessee when my family and I learned that Elvis had died. Close enough to Graceland to think that our proximity mattered. Certainly memorable. I was maybe six years-old then.

New. York. City.

You should go there. Pay your taxes, pay your dues. It's the modern Rome. Pax Americana. Get a feel for our shared humanity and engineering prowess. Get a feel for the pull and push of economic might and the rest of us who hang on sheerly to the cliffs of big money that we hope to not engulf us. That somehow will cushion us... Protect us from ruin. Our hopes lie there, like it or not. The United Nations Headquarters is there, too.

New York has the financial institutions and skyscrapers that lift and crush us, day to day, year to year. Through their intricate endless webs of accounts and markets, phone calls and Internet clicks.

The biggest city in the United States. The capital of the world.

17 plus years ago the terrorists attacked it for a reason. (We are at the end of 2018 now).

This grand metropolis has streets and networks and pipelines that never end. It has influence in investments, information, and news that never ends.

If you have never visited NYC you are missing out on something. I have never been to Paris, nor London, nor Rome, nor Shanghai or Beijing. I guess I am missing out on those.

I have been to Cairo and Mexico City. I used to live in Los Angeles.

Yet, New York, the Metropolis, is a place apart.

First of all, it is five boroughs, each with its own style and charm, then it continues beyond those, into neighboring states. Thousands of inlets and connecting communities.

The heart is the island of Manhattan, where I ended up briefly with my boys the second weekend of November. We did not stay long, but we saw a few things. And of course we were billed, a fate I thought we had avoided. (The traffic/toll ticket came in the mail a few weeks later).

Returning from Boston to the DC area, my last minute plan was to skirt the opposite side of Manhattan through the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and finally Staten Island, crossing the edge of New York Harbor on the Verrazano Bridge and seeing the Statue of Liberty from the side we normally would not see. We had approached from the Jersey side a few times before. And I was tired of crossing the Hudson to the north. I did it on the way up to Boston, and back and forth back in 2014.

The GPS (a digital map tracker, if you are not of our era or lingo) got us out of Bronx and over to Manhattan. By accident, (I wanted to go to Staten Island, the borough, though not notable in comparison, that I had not seen much of...) but not a bad trip all told. The news of Mr. Lee may have capped it off.

We cruised south along the East River, buzzed by Wall Street, crawled through streets of lower Manhattan. We saw the massive Freedom Tower and other notable city sights and sounds, peoples, some New Yorkers, some tourists, hustling and carousing the sidewalks... We got turned around once or twice, and meandered out the Holland Tunnel. It was longer than I remembered. We saw and noted a bit.

The webs of the Great New York. Tunnels, trains, awnings, sidewalks, side-streets, cause ways, boardwalks, plants, trees, sewers... The ever changing skyline. Rain or shine, night or day.

It doesn't sleep, but I have seen it sleepy. Droopy and under constant construction. How many police and garbage men run this town? How many maids and cooks run through its veins?

It has been growing and evolving since the foundation of the Republic. People of import, crazy street criers, news men and women, smelly homeless. The first Jew for Jesus that I ever met, handing me a pamphlet. Or rather, a Xerox copy of the message. I had never heard of such a thing.

New things and happenings in the Big Apple.

Now it has the Broadway "Book of Mormon". Sad irony, really. Joseph Smith sought the ancient writing expert Charles Anton here. Two centuries ago.

Tre Parker and Matt Stone, currently the modern prophets of raunchy truth, coarse nice feely good funniness and hilarity. Thanks for being such kings of New York, my chump brothers of foolishness.

The City is bigger than most of us.I first saw it in person in the 1980s. Back when the subways were still gritty and covered in graffiti.

We, my mother, and sister and I, first emerged on foot from Grand Central or Penn Station. 

Later in the 1990s my older sister and then my other sister moved there, compelling me and others to return. Part of it, this large conglomeration of vertical skyscrapers and expansive neighborhoods become somewhat homey to me. Familiar enough to know some streets, some doormen, some restaurants, some basketball courts and subway exits.

Another return visit in 1997 I was able to rise to the top of the World Trade Center. That would be the last time I observed Manhattan until 2002 when I saw it across the Hudson landing in the Newark, New Jersey Airport on a clear sunny day. After my dose of southern California, the visible missing skyline was sobering.

We had processed that fact for years. Now it is more emotional than physical, for most of us.

I have taken my children to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, I have taken them with my wife to the Memorial of 9/11/2001. We visited Central Park, trawled through Times Square.

New York, New York.

It's a whale of a town.

The inter-knit laces of its influence go beyond the region of the northeast, go beyond the borders of the United States. The plays, the shows, the movies, the styles, the executives, the bankers, the architecture.

The prices and allure, the hub bub and the attitude. The stories, the scenes, the lore...

The first time I visited we went by train, we tooks taxis; we saw Soupy Sales, an entertainment comic who was not really famous but a celebrity nonetheless. We attended our church near Central Park.

I have seen a few more celebrities since, or at least had close relations who have (Adam Sandler almost ran down my sister in his roller blades).

It's a city to visit, a price to pay. While I have enjoyed leaving there every time that I have gone, it is a place that we go to know the best and the worst.

To get entangled in the endless web of humanity on this beautiful planet. Harbor and rivers meet humanity among the steel, glass, and girders.

Enjoy getting wrapped up in this crazy web that we weave.

Enjoy New York. The City of Cities.