New Years Day in Times Square

Thursday, January 2, 2020

Street sweepers – many with buckets and brooms – still picked up the detritus from New Years Eve when we arrived at Times Square.

Although chilly, New York City was not unbearably cold, and traffic through the Lincoln Tunnel – so minimal – we passed under the Hudson River in only a few minutes.

The usual rude people – mostly tourists – filled the sidewalks, loaded with baggage they appear to need to travel with everywhere.

Cartoon characters greeted these with hugs and requests for money, photo opportunities that harkened back to the wretched old days when it was still unsafe to walk these streets, days I miss because the illusion of safety did not hide behind a Disney mask, and the robbery often more honest – a simply knife or gun and a demand money. These days, you get ripped off just looking at a cup of coffee or hotdog.

We passed through here numerous times during the transition from the ugly duckling phase to its current knock your eyes out with light phase and saw behind the wizard’s curtain before Disney could hide its sleight of hand.

Change here is inevitable since this is the center of the earth, the place around which the rest of the universe revolves.

And if there is day in the year when you can come here and see unscathed, the first day of a new year is the day to do it, when the world is largely too hung over to express itself in its most obnoxiousness.

We took the tour from the front door of the Port Authority – where The New York Times sign boasts of the greatest deception of all – down the glittering block of 42nd Street to the heart of Times Square, pausing to view the world as it ought to be,  before moving on, taking the bus up town to a neighborhood Sharon grew up in, she acting as my tour guide to point out some of the sights along the way, passing the Hersh building where yellow journalism was invented all the way up to Columbia where the illusion of a free press is taught to impressionable freshman as if truth.

But the little things struck me, the slow intrusion of sky towers into neighborhoods which never saw them before, a promotion to a dark future we will not live to see, the egotist markers of greed that must build up so as to leave their mark on the world, made invisible over time when they all merge into one massive forest of glass – the mayor of New York blames for Climate Change – and so lack distinction.

This week we heard about the windmill that fell when high winds hit it, and made me wonder if a windmill falls in the forest and nobody is there, will anybody hear it?

We are on the downside of empire building, much in the same way ancient civilizations were, showing all the signs of demise after only a few hundred years that the great nations saw after thousands – as our society sheds religious dogma for the illusion of enlightenment, hiding all the same flaws that Times Square hides behind its bright lights.

It is unlikely I will live long enough to see the mass decline that comes at the very end, but will be witness to its prelude, the illusion of social justice, the crusades, the ghost dances that will try to restore what has already been lost.

New York City is symbolic of such changes, progressive hindsight alternating with progress – as the young come up with solutions for age old problems previous generations were clearly too ignorant or selfish and greedy to solve, only to turn into the old people against whom a new generation of young will pass, none of us learning anything from history because we have revised history so much as to lose any possible lesson there – putting up new billboards on Times Square so we are not reminded of what was there in the past, giving new evidence to the Biblical phrase, “This too shall pass.”

Traveling by bus in Manhattan is slow torture – yet also an education, forcing passengers to pay attention to a changing landscape we would miss by the quicker underground alternative, seeing the alternations made since we last passed this way so as to better understand how significantly the world is changing – people talking themselves in 1970s were crazy, but in 2020, they may simply be talking into smart phones (crazy in a different way.)

We got off the bus at 113th Street, strolled through Columbia, then down to St. Johns, walking back down Broadway for about 20 blocks before boarding the bus again, this beginning and ending at Times Square.

In some years, we go to the Village – the real Mecca of my youth – but that’s a more painful journey, because it is so personal, filled with the ghosts of places that have ceased to exist, The Filmore, the Electric Circus, Seize the Day, and the one time poetic coffee shops along Bleeker. But even these memories are the memories of ghosts, the last vestiges of change that I saw when I was young, from the real heyday of the 1920s when that place was hip, or the 1950s folk scene ghost dance that briefly revived it.

Unlike Times Square, nobody there bothered to put lipstick on the pig, and just let the open wounds bleed.

Through each of these trips, I have to keep reminding myself that what I see today will be somebody else’s nostalgic memory tomorrow, and that some other change will change this place into something the people here today won’t like or won’t recognize, longing for what I see as sad as something worth saving.

I think this as the bus passes the place which was once known as The Americana,” where Jerry Lewis once held his telethon, outside of which I once met Soupy Sales, and I realize we keep that New York alive as long as we continued to remember, and sometimes, manage to pass down these memories to others, who remember our remembering them, and sometimes that’s all we can count on in this ever changing world.