They're Destroying Houston Street

I remember a card coming from my mom's goddaughter. It was a thank you for a gift but she had included a sort of note to me in it. She moved up here after graduating from college, moved in with her aunt and uncle in the city and started a job at Bloomingdales. And hated it. Hated everything. After moving into a boarding house of sorts, she still didn't like it. Her roommates didn't speak English and wouldn't talk to her. Her job sucked. But most of all, she said, she felt like she wasn't really cut out to be a New Yorker. There was always too much going on in the city, construction that would literally change the way a street looekd and felt and could happen in as little as a day. I didn't quite understand her until I moved up here. Then it hit me. she was absolutely right. The city is always shifting and changing, parking garages being turned into apartment buildings, streets being torn up and repaved only to be torn up again, restaurants opening and closing so fast it's hard to imagine they served a single soul.

But I like this, like that everything is always changing. Every day when I walk home there is something going on. I have o wonder, though, what the city would look like if they took down the scaffolding. All of it at one time. Imagine if they just stopped, maybe even for a couple of weeks. Just stopped what they were doing and looked at what they had already completed, what was great about the buildings that were already standing. Its wishful thinking, I know, for a city with ten million people and new ones arriving every day, but what if. I like the way the city streets look when there isn't anything going on on them. Except movies and fun stuff like that.

The most miserable street of all, now that we're heading towards the summer montths, is Broadway below Houston. It's killing me to make my way through hordes of people all trying desperately to squeeze themselves into Urban Outfitters or the boutiques that line the streets that used to hold warehouses and strange artsy types. It's fasicnating.

Watching New YOrk, is like watching evolution in process. Much of New York rests on filled swamp land. I wonder what would happen if that ever fell apart.