When one lives in New York – of the so called Tri-State area of cities and towns within the particular geography of New York State, New Jersey and Connecticut – masses of humanity each day move and engulf.
There are roads, bridges, highways, pedestrians, tunnels, tolls, trains, subways, light rail, buses, airplanes, and ferries. Transportation is everywhere. The name of the game each morning is getting from Point A to Point B in as timely a manner as possible.
Riding the New Jersey Transit train, the first leg on a two-ride hop from my suburban house across the Hudson River in the Garden State of New Jersey to my destination at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, I pass the time writing, or to focus on my daily goals. I reach Hoboken, N.J., and transfer to another commuter rail line, known as PATH, which I believe stands for Port Authority Train under the Hudson.
Soon I’ll arrive at my job in the financial district less than a football field away from the 9/11 site. There, two new massive skyscrapers are rising to replace the Twin Towers, but incredibly, neither structure is near completion more than 10 years after the massacre of the 3,000 innocents. Another “Only in New York” story where little gets done on time anymore. The price tag for one of the two new behemoths, which may still yet be called the Freedom Tower, has soared past $3 billion, making it the most expensive office building in the history of the world.
Up the PATH train escalators to the street, people pass in all directions. Food cart proprietors hawk cake and coffee; tourists are hustled for 9/11 memorabilia. A half mile further downtown to the southern tip of Manhattan winds Wall Street, recently occupied but now cleared of the protesting rabble.
Can you cut it as a New Yorker? Do you want to even play with the adrenaline and pressure to succeed? Activity, Activity, Activity. It’s everywhere. Twenty-million people pulsating through the most densely populated place in the United States. One would think there would be an absence of privacy, much less solitude, save for the retreat to apartment or dwelling in one of the city’s five boroughs or beyond.
The surprising secret, though, is that even in Manhattan, Ground Zero, with Times Square, the fulcrum of the Universe, and home to five of the top 10 zip codes in the country by average personal income, quiet exists and can be had if one knows where to look.
Weather and time of year can play a part. On a hot Saturday night in August on the Upper East Side if one is out on the humidity-hovering, baking sidewalks, he or she is basically alone, but also with the bitter realization of being a loser, because everyone else is away for the weekend, on the beach somewhere, in the Hamptons or the mountains. That’s a bad moment – a depressing feeling to be avoided.
The other extreme is the snowstorm that comes every January or so. Walk home from anywhere in Manhattan during a blizzard and one notices what would appear to look like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. This of course only happens between 2 and 4 a.m. and temperatures must hover well below freezing, and the wind must also be whipping off of one of the rivers like a mother. Yes, you will find alone time in Manhattan then with your other intoxicated friends walking along deserted Broadway.
Despite these examples dependent on time and weather, there can still be many a late evening, when a quiet walk or stroll can be had and it is all quite peaceful.
The quiet to which I’m referring, is only found at one time – early Saturday morning and definitely not Sunday morning. Saturday night in New York goes to at least 4 a.m. and the army of visitors from everywhere fill the streets and bars in a reverie that forces sane New Yorkers inside not to be seen until brunch around 11 a.m. Sunday morning. Because Saturday night in New York basically does not end, Sunday morning possesses no solitude.
Friday night though is not that wild, primarily because most people are crashed from the long work week to earn the requisite coin to afford to live in the Big Apple. So, on a recent Saturday morning at about 3:30 a.m., not being able to sleep, I left a West Side apartment and walked alone toward Central Park, the place that I was told as a child in the 1970s was too unsafe to visit at any time, much less than in the middle of the night. I walked the running loop and saw not more than one or two people, someone running, and two people who obviously had not yet gone to bed from the night’s activities.
Following the Central Park stroll, I eventually headed further west toward the 70th Street Pier, which was built by Donald Trump when he created the Riverside Boulevard luxury apartments on the Hudson, not too far from Lincoln Center. The pier juts out into the Hudson towards New Jersey, and at that hour there was not a person to be seen anywhere. I remembered the stories that I had heard about how in the late 1800s, people would actually swim across the Hudson River to New Jersey and back, it not yet having become a conveyance of filth from endless pollution and ship commerce. On the pier, I stretched and exercised with a solo view to the north of the bathed-in-light George Washington Bridge. In a few hours, the sun would rise and the army of joggers and bicyclists would descend to end my illusion of complete oneness with New York and its more than two centuries of memories.
So, when you think about how crazy life often can be, just remember you don’t have to be on a hilltop in Ireland or a national park in Wyoming to find serenity and solitude. Even in the craziest of places, there it is, even in the City that Never Sleeps.
Daniel Wiseman is an independent political commentator, who focuses on national and international affairs. He spent nine years as a professional journalist in Wyoming before working in fund-raising, non-profit management, and is now working in New York City. Wiseman focuses his writing on how to bring the United States back to its Constitutional moorings. He writes exclusively for Canada Free Press.
