Since returning to New York City a year and a half ago, I keep having this eerie feeling that the city has, in some profound yet ineffable sense, lost its soul. What could I mean by that? What is a soul, anyway? Do cities even have them?
I’m excited to explore these metaphysical questions on the nature of the soul. But first, I want to discuss what has happened to New York City — why it seems so adrift here. For many, living in New York always meant some degree of sacrifice. Certainly compared to Rome or Paris or many urban centers, much of the city is not beautiful or even appealing. Nature is in short supply here. Many neighborhoods — particularly lower income neighborhoods — are, in fact, brutally ugly, the concrete buildings almost vindictively utilitarian. Rent — and everything else — has always been absurdly expensive. While crime rates fluctuate from decade to decade, there is always risk.
Choosing to live here was always a trade-off. You traded aesthetics, comfort, a degree of personal safety, and reasonable costs for cultural excitement, for the opportunity to hobnob with extraordinary people, and for the possibility of achieving some outsized creative or entrepreneurial ambition. I was born in Manhattan and spent a lot of my childhood ferrying on the M5 bus between the Upper West Side, where my mother lived, and SoHo, where my father had his loft. I tend to feel like an indigenous person who just happened to emanate from this particularly populous, convivial island. Over five decades, I have, by default, borne witness to the city’s many changes – architecturally, culturally, anthropologically.
Of course I don’t know how much of my felt-sense that New York has stagnated, lost its soul — in some sense, let’s be honest, died — has to do with my age and over-familiarity with the city. It is quite likely that some inspired twenty-somethings who just moved to the city are taking their first bike rides across the Brooklyn Bridge at this moment, feeling that exhilarating infusion of limitless possibility the city used to give me and my friends. I have asked around, however. Anecdotally, people I speak with from various generations and cliques confirm my intuition that the city’s pulse has, more or less, flatlined.
“New York” was always more than just a city. It was an idea, or a complex of ideas. It represented The New, Progress, modernity, the cutting-edge, the avant-garde, globalization, transformation, and, also, power. It symbolized industrial and then post-industrial society’s irresistible momentum. New York was never concerned with the antiquated past; it targeted the next world — the one just over the horizon. It was the “melting pot” where both the elite and the outcast of all of the world’s cultures came together to meet each other, to drop the old feuds and obsolete ideologies (symbolized by the unfortunately creaky, dysfunctional UN), to forge the new thing.
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