New York City is a hectic city to begin with. Steel monoliths reach for the sky, while the people that fill them do the same. The city has an extremely rich history hidden underneath all the steel, concrete and glass. It always amazes me whenever I visit, how the image in my mind is of a tightly packed city on a small island, but when I arrive and walk for even just half an hour, I remember how absolutely huge this place is... and how many people live within its confines.
Buildings in the distance, seem to stay in the distance, even while you continuously make your way by foot toward them. Otherwise, they appear before you in just minutes when you hit the subway, but that is an entire new city in and of itself.
But on this day, we begun at the Brooklyn Bridge. Now, completely unrelated, I had been watching a lot of TV documentaries at the time and had happened to watch a surprising number of shows on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the sheer amount of manpower, engineering innovation and sheer balls it took to build this Modern Engineering Marvel (that sounds like the type of show I watched). So I was silently excited to see this bridge. I knew we had no plans on crossing it as the goal was to have a wander through Chinatown, but still I wanted to lay my eyes on it.
This ended up being like a walking tour in Europe. While the outcome is still relatively the same, the centrepiece is covered in scaffolding. For example: "Come join our walking tour to see (insert roman church)." Then you pay your money, join the tour, only to get to the final destination... "So! This is (insert roman church), the one thing that coerced you into joining our tour... It is currently under-construction to renovate the facade, but will be open for public viewing in 2045!, and that concludes our tour. Thankyou kindly, and we certainly do accept tips!"
In this case, it was fairly minor, but still, I was ever so slightly crestfallen, as my dreams of taking an Ikea-esque wall picture poured into the oh-so-uninviting Hudson River. So we headed on in to Chinatown...
We sort of wandered through some completely silent and empty street for a little while, as we meandered our way to Chinatown. It was slightly unnerving as the whole city was so busy on this normal weekday, that we weren't used to having just a few cars driving around and just a couple of other pedestrians. Even the pigeons were skeptical of anyone walking up behind them quickly...
Then BANG! There were people everywhere. Fruit, seafood and pretty much anything that can be put on display, are sold at will and en-masse. The people who aren't interested flow around stores just as the river flows around the rock.
Yet the rock remains, solid and strong, regardless of the river does for now. If anything, in an area like this, the rock directs the river.
So now there were too many people for me to take photos, and I decided I had to start snapping street-style. Free-form, shoot-from-the-hip... semi-automatic (the safe kind). Well, shooting from the chest, where my camera rested on its straps. The 75-300mm lens a weight on my neck which I had willingly decided to bear for the day, having smashed my normal lens to pieces on the same day I arrived in Los Angeles, a few weeks earlier.
The colours of Chinatown are almost overbearing, and it feels like it hearkens back to a time where neon advertising and street signs were part of the cities essence... A time where an Open Sign was an invitation to an individual, lost and drowning in a sea of individuals. A single clap in a round of applause.
In my mind, this is the area I imagine Arnold from Hey, Arnold would have lived... you know, the football-head kid.
Still, the people flow down the streets, in and out of buildings I will never see the inside of, and giving money to businesses I will never enter.
The fire escapes capture the attention of my lens. It comes off my chest. These steel structures affixed to the outside of every building. This is the image we have of classic New York... the one in our voyeuristic, minds-eye, nostalgia goggles.
Each fire escape is as unique as the building it is built on. It is a safety mechanism, a literal and figurative escape from the dangers that the dense, inner-city living entails. But yet, even the fire escape is a thing of the past.
The tall, glass-skinned sky-scrapers harass the small individual buildings as if to say "We are here, and we are coming for you." They loom silent, and menacing over the chatter-box suburban Manhattan.
"We will take your street, and your suburb, and your soul... all in our name... The Future."