City Sidewalks, Busy Sidewalks

New York City’s sidewalks aren’t made for klutzes or space cadets. My daughter is waiting for me to fall into a gaping, cellar access door. I’M waiting to fall into a gaping, cellar access door. They start out innocuously enough: they’re just iron plates lying flat on the sidewalk except for their large padlocks.

But when they open, storekeepers can load their stock from the truck and put it right on a ramp or conveyor belt or plain old stairs to get down to the basement. Unfortunately, if you’re looking around, you may wind up in the basement, too. I wonder how many people on smart phones have done that. (I hear they fall off subway platforms in Japan.)

New York City sidewalks are remarkably free of dog poop, but there are plenty of other obstructions. The food carts – the hot dogs, the pretzels, the halal dishes – and the cannoli, gelato, vegetables, depending on the neighborhood – are everywhere. In Chinatown, merchants and their roots and remedies + 7-T-shirts-for-$10 have taken over the sidewalks; in my neighborhood, it’s the fresh flower guys.

The rows of bright blue CitiBikes take up a lot of space, too. I don’t mind any of them; pretzels satisfy the hunger of too much looking around and not enough sitting down and eating, and the CitiBikes come with map posts. Besides, they’re above ground and obvious so I’m less likely to fall over them.

It’s just that the available sidewalk space is getting squished. It’s incredibly clever for businesses to construct arctic entries in front of their doors. It keeps customers warm and saves energy. But they look like dark, soft-sided phone booths – big boxy things – sitting in front of many restaurants. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to walk in, but they’re just like tent vestibules in front of the building, with doors.

I also don’t mind the huge masses of garbage bags and recycling at the curbs. They’re neat, and all their recycling is separated meticulously. New York’s garbage is organized … and it gets picked up.

 

So organized that wherever you see a trash can, you see a recycling container next to it.

The Mayor of New York’s Vision Zero program is working to reduce street injuries and fatalities to pedestrians with enforcement, speed limits, etc. But the plan also includes changes in street design with things like posts and bollards and … obstructions amenities. So you can be walking along and then suddenly, there are trees. Or benches. Or tables and chairs. Don’t get me wrong – I like to sit; I like benches. It just means I have to pay attention to where I’m walking.

I have to pay attention to where I’m walking because everyone loves a parade. When streets are closed and everyone is kept safely corralled on St. Patrick’s Day or during the March for Our Lives, parade detritus left hundreds of police barricades gathered on sidewalks. I only walked into one batch.

I have to pay attention to where I’m walking because there are interesting things down there! Look down at your feet along lower Broadway, and there are granite commemorations of all the ticker-tape parades held along the route to City Hall.

In SoHo, artist Francoise Schein has created a subway map “articulating the message of the ‘universal declaration of human rights.’” I don’t get it. It doesn’t even look like a subway map to me, but it’s there, on the sidewalk. Where I’m looking. Where there are also subway grates (and my map points out Marilyn Monroe’s famous subway grate).

Another reason to look down and see where your feet are going is to avoid looking up. Looking up is a vertigo experience, a tip-over-and-feel-dizzy experience because there is an awful lot of “up” to look at. I can’t look at all those tall buildings and not think, “What if there were a fire?” Or “Yikes, they’re surrounded by concrete and steel.” So I’m not really looking up when I’m gaping at New York: I’m looking at all the things right there at human scale: shops and food and posters and art and buses.

But every now and then, there’s something up there that truly startles.

What is Lenin doing there on the roof at my corner? It’s a story, a New York story. No matter where I look – at my feet, on the sidewalks, on the rooftops – this place is full of stories.