Gotham

Yesterday I took the wrong train.

I don't really know how it happened. I'm sure that I was on the uptown platform when the train pulled in. I was rushing to jump onto the train, and I guess I wasn't paying very much attention. I probably would have figured out that I was headed downtown if I hadn't completely zoned out for the next ten minutes. But, alas, I was thinking about a certain coastal city, and didn't see or hear anything until all of a sudden, everyone left the train and I found myself mysteriously at South Ferry. I automatically got up and left the train, then turned around and got back on the train to head back uptown, and then thought better of it and got off the train again.

Afterall, I'd never been to the bottom of the island.

So I left the station to go explore.

The Financial District is unlike anything I've ever seen. It looks exactly the way I've always assumed it would look and yet never really thought was possible. I had a movie version in my head, the New York of Batman, of stock brokers and playboys, of winding streets and powerful business - sleek, imposing, mysterious. In the blinding afternoon sunlight, the broad tourist ways were jammed with people and movement, everyone looking up or looking ahead and going somewhere. Then I'd duck into a darker alley, and I'd walk for blocks as lone business men on cell phones passed me individually. It didn't seem possible that this small area could hold such contradictions - even the building themselves were either bright and tall modern mirrors, or small and sturdy brick colonials. And it all existed simultaneously, but nothing seemed out of place - it all just served to heighten the reality of the neighborhood itself.

I stepped into Battery Park and walked to the water. I looked out over the heavy sunlight to Liberty Island, and thought, as I always do, that it's a real pity that the Statue of Liberty has so much land behind it - it should be water out to the horizon! But no. I walked around the park, listened to a man doing a old-New-York-vaudevillian "I'm a stah!" song and dance for some people in lawn chairs, and then watched what looked like a very easy and amiable citizen's arrest, complete with handcuffs.

I decided to try to find Wall Street, and consulted my trusty NFT guide. Unfortunately, it ended up doing little for me because once I ventured into the cavernous side streets, I was hopeless lost. I must have checked my guide eight or nine times, and got completely turned around when I realized there are two Pearl Streets and two Broad Streets. All the business men and women gave me a knowing look, and smirked as they passed. But I didn't care - I was unabashedly staring around me in wonder. The buildings and the crooked streets make you feel impossibly small. I've never been inside a canyon, but it has got to feel something like that - a kind of awesome power infusing the air. I walked past a row of bars catering to the afterwork crowd, and thought about the fact that I will probably never go into any of them. Delis were shutting down, and everyone had somewhere to be. But it is not frenetic, the energy, like it is in Times or Union Square. It isn't explosive - it's highly directed and clear. There's no room for the energy to go, and there are no bright lights or blaring horns - the momentum is totally pedestrian, which is what makes the whole place so darkly mysterious. It's kind of wonderful and kind of terrifying.

I finally found Wall Street. I was not as impressed as I thought I would be, but that's in the context of being generally awed, so take it with a grain of salt. I stared at the stock exchange, and thought about the name Exchange Alley and wondered what it must be like to work there every day. I'd always thought of Midtown as the center for all things business - the Financial District seemed so far away, and my father works on Park so Grand Central Station was always the beginning and the end of the center of New York, center of the world.

Boy was I wrong.