The Dirt on the Big Apple
Two months before I moved from Japan to New York, I came to sample the city. My notes, jabbed into my phone between jet-lagged apartment tours, read: “Sirens police trucks yelling helicopters onions. Pavements buckling, construction, taxis screeching. Like dystopian city in developing country.”
Moments of kindness pierced the sensory assault—such as the policeman who personally steered me and my suitcase through the Columbus Day parade when I was fresh off the plane—and are what endeared New York to me. Compared to my two previous homes, London and Tokyo, it was filthy, noisy and dilapidated. But it was also gregarious, free-spirited and bursting with tales of personal struggle and redemption.
I adapted, but there has been and in bars and restaurants from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn. And the name of the beast was Hudson Yards (the massive high-rise development over the railroad yards). Until it was Amazon, which was sent packing with its 25,000 jobs, denounced by all those sick of the city’s deference to corporate developers.
