Oh how I worry about you. I worry about your health, your moods, your mind. I worry that your once resolute railroad has become the rails for runaway rolling stock, gathering steam and trundling inexorably towards the abyss like a clip from Road Runner. Beep beep.
You’ve had a very tough year, I get that. We all witnessed the ping pong picture of outrage as reality was batted back and forth, back and forth, CNN to Fox and back again as if the battle could ever be won.
I think of you as a good friend, so please understand this letter is well meaning. I lived at your epicentre for four full years, on the corner of 22nd & 5th where Broadway slices Fifth Avenue to form the triangular land that gave birth to the Flatiron building. From a few floors up I would look down upon your angry yellow traffic with a gentle smile. I knew that your incessant haste and irritable horn-honking was nothing more than the grouchiness of the engineer in charge of the world’s greatest engine. I did my best not to pester you, as I could see you were busy.
It was a privilege to know you back then. I arrived the evening before Hurricane Sandy stormed in and I witnessed your patience and stoicism as everyone pulled together to face the crisis. The streets were shattered and deserted then too, but somehow you kept your New York cool.
This time it’s different. More recently your temper has become unbearable. Of course the pandemic was a massive blow, as it was to all of us that watch you from afar, but as Spring turned to Summer your rage only worsened. Outrage after outrage left you with windows smashed, shops burned and looted, families with lost livelihoods and yet still your anger fumes within you. Like a possessed teenager your shame turned to even more anger and more outrage. To be honest with you, we turned our backs and looked away in the hope that you would come to your senses.
Don’t get me wrong, we owe you so very much. From rock ’n roll to Hollywood, from Elvis to Monroe you can out-icon anybody. You gifted us our twentieth century: art, music, film, literature, animation, even the pizza and burgers we got fat on are all yours. Your technology took us to the moon and gave us the phones and laptops we’re staring at now. But your clever technology also created the social networks that fuel your outrage and the self doubt that eats away at your soul.
Please listen to me. Your mood swings must stop. The good people that became our New York friends have moved upstate or further afield to warmer, saner climes. These people truly loved you and spoke with pride of living with you in what felt like the centre of the universe. They were actors, traders, property agents, dancers, entrepreneurs, all of them genuine, branded-to-the-core-like-Coney-Island-rock, lovers of New York, New York. They may never return. Your golden glow you see, the glow that made it worth paying a lol price for a double decaf latte with soy, has faded.
The same is true on your West Coast. Gentle folk are abandoning Los Angeles and San Francisco and leaving it to the permanently angry, the borderline insane and the perpetually terrified. It is not good news.
So from Fifth Avenue to Rodeo Drive your stores, bars and restaurants, your markets and food halls lie in wait for visitors to return. Once bustling breweries and bakeries, bars and boutiques sit silently, patiently behind corrugated clothes. Sadly, many will not live to see daylight again.
But daylight will return and when finally you do open your doors, when Spring releases the pastel clad yoga girls who skip to the jazz of the rattling trolleys, when the reassuring aroma of Starbucks and McDonalds wafts awake your bleary avenues, when the streets squeak again to the lolloping cabs and silly-sized Suburbans, and when your manholes can once again puff furiously like it’s their very first cigar, only then will we know that you’re back.
Please, please come to your senses. We miss you so very much.
Follow me on Twitter @retailfuturist for daily insights and musings.
