My wife and I spent the Thanksgiving weekend in New York City. We had not been there since 2004, so I was looking forward to seeing how the city had changed, and how it compared to other great cities of the world, most notably London, Tokyo, and Shanghai.
Here are my impressions:
1. Given the sheer size of the buildings, the number of people on the street, and the vast number of different languages you could hear, NYC feels like the center of the world–even more than London.
2. The city makes you feel small. I don’t really sense that anywhere else.
3. The police are ubiquitous, and you are always aware of their presence. That doesn’t even happen in Shanghai.
4. The predominantly stone buildings around Central Park haven’t really been in existence that long, when you look at the big picture, but they feel timeless.
5. The same cannot be said for the pencil thin new glass and steel residential buildings going up on the south side of Central Park. They are changing the skyline forever, and not in a good way.
6. That said, the essence of NYC is dynamism and constant change, unlike Paris. These kinds of developments are inevitable. You have to accept the negative with the positive.
7. The new development at the WTC is grand and neoclassical, and I think it works. In a purely American way, it is a fitting tribute to the victims of 9/11–even the skyscrapers.
8. If you have a chance to see either “Hadestown” or “Moulin Rouge,” go. The paradox is that two vastly different musicals have remarkably similar characters and plots. There is a message in there somewhere about the power of art.