Living in a big city

Street corner on Riverside Drive

When you spend several days secluded in your apartment, tirelessly working your way through loose ends, missing data, unclear results, all leading up to an important deadline (in my case, finalising a study for a big client), you tend to forget where you are living. Your perception shrinks to a tunnel-vision where very few other things matter for that limited amount of time. If you've ever had to work for exams or papers or theses you know what I'm talking about.

Residential streets on the Upper West Side

Imagine my surprise this morning when, on the first day after the 2h40 of endless barrage of question from the client (they were quite happy) and subsequent feeling of elation (we were quite happy too!), I was walking around the corner on Broadway to get a few necessities from the hardware store and looking up I remembered that I'm living in New York. The place is gigantic! While the scenery is by now familiar, the dimensions have a way of sneaking up on you and reminding you that it's not something you are really used to.

Downtown and the statue of liberty

Last weekend our guide to East New York stood us up and we ended up walking through hipster Brooklyn with our visiting friend. The place feels like a kind of holiday location (as it indeed is nowadays), and watching the sunset from underneath Brooklyn Bridge is surreal. But that environment – the downtown skyline, the bridges, the lights – have been built into our own cultural imagery to the extent that they are immediately recognised but always produce a sort of anti-Verfremdungseffekt. So it was not until now that I started realising that the banal, everyday-looking streets and buildings that make up the better part of this city, are in and of themselves an awesome sight and a feat of construction prowess.

The Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges

And yes, you are entitled to tell me that I could have noticed it sooner, as all things here tend to be a couple of times larger than back home (the people, the buildings, the bills, …). But I might – and probably will – forget again, and then a short outing to get lightbulbs will remind me once again.