City afraid of change could learn from N.Y.
Seems like everybody here in our little city by the bay is talking about the almost finished 1,000-foot-tall Salesforce Tower. It’s terrible. It’s awful. It’s Manhattanization.
However, after a quick weekend visit to Manhattan, this native son and his native daughter companion began to think that maybe San Francisco could use a little Manhattanization.
New York City seems to be a little cleaner, a little safer, and a lot less stuck on itself than our fair city. They’ve cleaned up their act in New York. In San Francisco we’re still talking about it.
I have to admit that SFO gives a much better first impression than JFK, New York’s biggest airport, where there’s a hustle right away: Furtive-looking men with signs held up on iPads: Uber, Lyft, limousine. This is accompanied by a blaring, metallic public address soundtrack that warns, “Do not accept rides from unauthorized persons.”
There’s usually a big line for authorized taxis, even in the middle of the night. And the ride into the city is dreary, past sad neighborhoods in Queens, past cemeteries, into the mother of all traffic jams, a prelude to an ancient tunnel, full of fumes.
But then, Wham! You are in midtown Manhattan, a million people on the streets, maybe 2 million, lights, camera, action. Gosh, Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in SoMa anymore.
This really is a big city, the Crossroads of the World as the Daily News is pleased to call Times Square.
We’re no experts, but we’ve been in New York before. We traded New York stories from other lives: a White Christmas in the ’50s, walking through Manhattan in the ’60s and ’70s, when the big city was a dangerous place. A subway trip in a rattletrap train, covered with graffiti. A visit to a friend who lived in an apartment with six sets of locks and bolts. Menace on every corner. You looking at me?
It was different this time, different even from a trip two years ago. Even though some nutcase had run his car through Times Square targeting pedestrians only days before, the place seemed safer.
There were homeless people hanging around with the same sad signs you see in San Francisco, but fewer of them. Other panhandlers were dressed as Batman and Minnie Mouse or the Statue of Liberty. We didn’t see people shouting crazy stuff the way they do at Powell and Market in Everybody’s Favorite City.
The morning before we flew to New York, I saw a man crawling on all fours down a San Francisco street. On the next block a man taking a dump. We saw nothing like that in the capital of Manhattanization.
We felt like refugees from the city where Anything Goes, so we did the tourist things: stayed on Times Square, went to a Broadway play, pricey but worth it. We visited the pastrami-flavored chaos at Katz’s Deli on the Lower East Side, had a dark ale at McSorley’s Ale Old House, once patronized by Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Joseph Mitchell. We had dinner at Sardi’s, strolled up Fifth Avenue to Tiffany’s, which is right next door to Trump Tower.
We walked all over. And the best walk was on the High Line, a decommissioned elevated railroad freight line that has been turned into a park in the air, wandering through and above an old industrial district. At one time, West Chelsea, near the High Line, had two lives. By day it was an industrial area, by night it was a gay mecca.
Now it’s a promenade, a park, a showplace, with pieces of the old freight tracks still in place, a reminder of past days. It wanders through old meatpacking plants, and next to glass-walled condos.
At one end, where the High Line skirts the Hudson River, a new arts center is being built over a rail yard now full of shiny commuter train cars. This is Hudson Yards Plaza, a huge development of glass towers. The day we left New York, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave $75 million to the Shed arts center there.
“No neighborhood in New York has changed identities so profoundly as this stretch of the West Side,” Justin Davidson writes in “Magnetic City,” his new book about New York. The High Line’s story, he writes, “is far from over, because the city that changes around it is a show that never folds.”
I scored a window seat on the flight back home. Hours of flyover country, and finally, the plane started the last descent, San Francisco glistening in the sun just over the right wing. What a pretty city. Too bad it’s so afraid of change.