Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred moments so dear
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,
How do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets
In midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife
In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,
How do you measure, a year in the life?”
For bonafide New Yorkers, the New Year has nothing to do with the bridge-and-tunnel types swarming Times Square on December 31st or that awful crystal ball they hang above the masses (still don’t understand what the correlation between NYE and crystal? Oh wait, never mind)
In truth, the city is reborn in the fall, with the return of its glitterati and intelligencia from their summer diaspora. Manhattan’s vibrant cultural scene comes to an abrupt halt in august, the humidity causing an exodus of its brightest apples to Europe….err, or to Long Island (ahem, for those of us who can’t afford extended vacations in St. Tropez, Long Island provides a cost-effective weekend escape from the concrete jungle, while still conserving those good ‘ole sub-culture distinctions of the Manhattan grid. So Chelsea relocates to its summer outpost by the ocean at the Pines, Trust-fund BoBos migrate to Montauk, Upper East Siders do not venture out of their make-shift colonies in the Hamptons, and Hipsters tend to stay close to their mothership in Williamsburg.
Yes, fall is the season of renewal, the so-called ‘New Year’, and everything from Vogue’s September ‘Fall Fashion’ issue, to the hordes of unchaperoned noisy children on the subway en route to their inner city schools, to the enticing (yet often predictable) Fall Opera Program, to the scores of Oscar-worthy films finally replacing the summer flicks and the hemorrhage some of us suffer as a result of exposure to them (with notable exceptions), to the fleet of new off-off-broadway shows, not to mention Rosh Hashanah.
In this spirit of renewal, I reflect on my fifth year of residency in this marvelous concrete jungle: in a series of 30 posts, I’ll showcase, digest – and at times – culturally re-appropriate things & persons that I believe are quintessentially New York. I will invariable touch on anything that I consider – in my humble, subjective opinion – iconic, all entities (objects and living beings) that embody or otherwise serve to advance the notion that brought me here in the first place: that this is little concrete island is the cultural epicenter of the world. Romanticized of a notion as it is, it’s why I call this enchanted place, home.
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