Have you ever read A
Cricket in Times Square? It was a popular children’s story written in the
early 60’s. It was so popular that Chuck Jones, who was responsible for
bringing us Tom & Jerry made an
animated version of it in the 70’s. The story revolves around a cricket named Chester
who accidently travels from Connecticut to New York City with the train. Chester was overwhelmed with the size and all
the noise of Manhattan, it was such a scary place for this country cricket.
I’ve been that cricket.
In the later part of the 80’s, my high school music
department announced that we would be planning a weekend trip to New York City.
I was pretty excited about it, because I’d been in Pittsburgh once or twice
before, but this was NYC – the Big Apple. This was a whole other league. Of
course there was no way for us to pay for the trip out of pocket, so we had to
sell candy bars and other candies to raise the money. I won’t even go into how
much of my allowance had to go into my “sales envelope” to pay for what I
miscalculated, let alone consumed. But I managed to scrape the money together.
The bus ride was exhausting, but we finally were crossing
one of the bridges into Manhattan. With all of the kids pushed up against the
windows of one side of the bus, I was suddenly afraid the bus was going to tip
over. When we got into midtown, I had already developed a crick in my neck from
staring into the sky. It was something that I hadn’t seen before, it was like
10 time Pittsburgh. The skyscrapers seem to go on forever. We visited the
Empire State Building, the Chrysler building, and of course the World Trade
Center observation deck. I still remember the horror I felt when I saw them
fall in 2001.
But for me, what I really wanted to see was Times Square. I
had seen it so often in movies, I’d read about it in books, and in Spider-Man
comics. All the lights, all the billboards, and all the people. Yes, I, like
Chester the cricket, was overwhelmed… But not really in a good way. It was very
loud, which I had expected, but it was scary. There were so many people packed
in such a small place, people were pushing, they were rude, and it smelled bad
– everywhere. One of my classmates lost his wallet somewhere along the trip.
Stolen? Maybe. I’d never seen so many homeless and strange people. One of which
was talking to himself, yelling at who knows what, and kicking garbage around.
Needless to say, “The Big Apple” appeared to be a rotten one, and I swore to
myself that I would not be coming back.
Over 20 years later, I found myself in a position where I
was required to go back there for a collaboration between the German and the
New York offices of the company that I worked for. My boss told me that they
needed to send me there for 3 weeks! I could hardly handle 3 days, let alone 3
weeks. I had considered trying to get out of it, but I knew that would be noted
in my record. So what choice did I have? My boss tried to reassure me that NYC
was not that bad and that she had been there often in the past couple of years.
When I got there, I was positively surprised how it had really changed. I
didn’t see nearly as many homeless people on the streets, the streets also
appeared cleaner, but then I saw some crazy guy talking to himself and yelling.
But then I noticed the earbud, the guy was on the phone! While on a stroll past Central Park I actually bumped into Tom Selleck. I was pretty excited, but I realized that he wasn't there to sign autographs, he was just another person on his way to wherever he was going, so I didn't bug him. I was surprised how tall he really is.
But I couldn't get out of my head how different this New York was compared to the one I visited 20 years earlier. So I asked my New
York counterpart about these two New Yorks. She told me that this
improvement was largely thanks to policies that Rudy Giuliani had implemented
during his time in office as mayor of NYC.
I only had to work Monday to Friday, so I had the weekends
for myself. I was really surprised how nice it was there now, don’t get me
wrong, it still smelled bad. I walked the entire island, seeing sights, doing
the tourist thing, hanging out in Central Park. I even walked to the Apollo
Theater in Harlem and nobody bothered me about the color of my skin. The trip
really changed my opinion of NYC and I looked forward to going back, on the
company’s tab, of course. I went back a couple times, the last time was in 2013
and I haven’t been back since.
I hadn’t given much thought to NYC in the last couple of
years, so I wasn’t really aware of how far they had fallen until I saw the
riots in early 2020. I never really followed the whole “Occupy Wall Street”.
But the more I see in the news about New York City now, the more I realize that
either the real New York was masked so well that I only saw an illusion, or the
city has regressed so quickly and so badly that it reminds me of that John
Carpenter film and we’ll soon need a wall for that island. Judging by the way
they are handling the Teddy Roosevelt statue in front of the Museum of Natural
History, I believe it to be the latter.
I hope you've enjoyed this episode of "Tales from the Dorkside".
Be sure to recommend, if you did.
Thank you
