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Back in April, my wife and I visited New York City to see a friend of hers and her husband who were spending a weekend there. It was our first time in the city for about eight years.

I’d never really liked New York City—by which I always meant Manhattan—growing up. My father commuted to Manhattan every day, and we would daytrip in on the weekends fairly often. This was in the late 1990s and early 2000s, so New York was probably about as clean and low-crime as it ever was or will be. We never had any safety issues. We saw homelessness, though not of the aggressive or intoxicated variety—once I gave a homeless man a quarter, and he said I made his day.

But despite never having any issues or close encounters, I always found the city too loud, too dirty—too much. I remember the drives home more than the days out, when we’d pull off I-78, then U.S. 22, and get on a quiet country road heading home to our multi-acre lot.

Looking back, I probably took the city for granted. I had no understanding that it was something unique in America. I remember my mother, who grew up in Manhattan, would always seem so excited and lively when we first stepped out into the street (from a parking garage—I think we drove into Manhattan and parked for the day every time we visited). I could never understand that. I certainly never felt it.

Part of this, in addition to not really understanding what a “big city” was, was experiencing it through the lens of the prevailing suburban attitude. I experienced my parents’ sensible advice, about not pointing at people or yelling “Mommy why is that man doing that?” and whatnot, as evidence that cities were places where you could never let your hair down. I think, even at that age, I felt that the difficulty of arriving to the city by car meant that it was somehow walled off for me, not for me—the car, in my imagination, being like the air I breathed. And since I had little understanding that millions of people lived in cities, these annoyances seemed arbitrary, and directed at us. This, I think, is how so many suburbanites develop a vaguely conspiratorial view of cities.

I understood, if that’s the right word, that your house and your land was your refuge, and that you ventured out into the city and braved its discomforts once in awhile for the amenities the city had. Museums, shows, food tours, fine restaurants, quirky neighborhoods, the highest forms of things like Italian and Jewish delis. I don’t think it ever even occurred to me that cities have these things mostly because cities have a lot of people. Cities were just sort of there, for other people, their existence inducing a kind of suspicion.

In other words, I never really saw the city for what it actually was—a large, densely populated human settlement full of all of the things people do. I really wonder how many people never think of it this way at all.

All of this is to introduce the fact that, visiting Manhattan for the first time since I was in college, I wasn’t sure what I’d think of it. In the intervening years, I’ve “become an urbanist”—I like cities, but more importantly, I appreciate them. I think crime and disorder and nuisance behavior are real problems that some urbanists take too lightly, but I don’t define cities only by their problems.

But would the Big Apple still be too much?

Nope. I loved it. And for the first time, I felt like I was seeing it. You hear so much on talk radio, in the pages of the New York Post, from folks in suburban Jersey griping about the crime and the homelessness and the illegal immigrants getting credit cards and the subway pushers and the pot smoke and the bike lanes and the (since canceled or delayed) congestion pricing and the incompetent mayor (though nearly everyone seems to agree on that last point—no matter who it is).

The tenor of all this commentary is that this is all a sort of tribute exacted by the city against the responsible people who trek in every day to work. Whatever merits there are to these complaints, there is rarely any apparent understanding that some things are the way they are for the people who actually live in the city—nearly three-quarters of whom, in Manhattan, do not own a car.

What struck me about my visit in general was how little the on-the-ground experience I had resembled the gripes you hear; how much you would have to add to the raw experience to end up making those complaints.

New York City still feels like what it looks like. The sense of aliveness, activity, bustle is palpable. It’s one of the only places I’ve ever been where there’s so much foot traffic the sidewalks get congested. The view of the city at night, which I remember, at the ground level, from some late drives home, is still captivating, an expanse of angles and lines and lights in all colors as grand as the skies and the plains.

A few images capture the essence of this country, and this must be one of them. I don’t know how an American can’t look at this view and have their heart swell with pride:

There are so many restaurants, so many stores, the little corner slice shops and delis and bakeries from so many different national cuisines, the street food carts selling gyros and halal platters and roasted nuts, the bagel shops with 30-foot-long counters full of smoked fish and prepared foods. The variety juxtaposed with the specialization. It feels like a European city—multiple European cities. There’s a sense of enterprise and commerce, at a granular scale that is missing in most American places.

We say that places like this are “magical,” as though there is no explanation for why they are this way. The explanation is density. Proximity. People. That’s the magic. Or rather, there’s nothing magical, nothing inherent in the unique character of a specific place, that gives it this kind of delight and variety. It isn’t in the air or the water or fate or chance. It’s the people. Maybe density is not a guarantee—New York City is culturally and economically diverse, and you probably need different kinds of people—but this kind of thing isn’t possible without the people.

There is not, in other words, any such thing as an immutable “neighborhood character,” some Platonic form in the ether, of which the actual, on-the-ground place is merely a sort of shadow. Our places are what we build them to be.

What really struck me was that I had new thoughts and ideas running through my head as we strolled around. A sense of possibility and aliveness. A reminder that the world is big. I remember a friend of mine saying back in 2020 that the pandemic turned her into an old lady. She was talking specifically about going to bed early, but there’s a general truth in that.

Here in the city, I wanted to stay out another hour or two, get a late night snack or a second dinner, just to exist longer in a place so full of human interest. I looked at how much walking I did, amazed at getting that much physical activity just getting around.

I call that “feeling young again.” But I am young! It’s just, perhaps, that so much of what we think of as being due to age or stage of life is down to our surroundings, and whether they work with or against our desire to get out and do things. It’s hard to tell the difference between tiredness and boredom. Between quieting down and moving to the suburbs, or the suburbs quieting you down.

I wonder if it wouldn’t do a lot of people a lot of good to get out of their routines and comfort zones and experience this kind of thing. And I wonder how much of what we call the “loneliness crisis” is really just that when a critical mass of people live physically spread out, there just isn’t enough external stimulation close enough at hand for people to have good everyday mental and physical health and fitness.

That’s one thing I took away from New York: just how full of everything it is, and how, with more maturity and a better understanding of what cities are, I was able to experience that old too much feeling as so full. I was seeing the same thing, but I was experiencing it differently.

Just like I used to not really see what I was looking at, many of the people who grumble about cities are not seeing what they’re looking at. They’re not seeing what’s actually in front of them.

Walking around the city, we saw some Hispanic immigrant women, with their children by their side, selling chilled cut fruit in little cups. April was maybe a little early in the year for a cool treat, but it was sunny out, and I can imagine dropping a few bucks on some fruit that’s ready to eat. I’m sure it’s at least as safe as the kebab trucks. I can also see disliking seemingly unregulated street commerce, and wondering if these people are licensed to do business.

What I have trouble understanding is the chain of thought that goes something like, “Here are immigrant women selling fruit. Joe Biden let them in through his open border, and the New York government is giving them credit cards and free hotel rooms and letting them work illegally while their fraudulent asylum claims go through the system.”

I don’t mean that I can’t imagine opposing illegal immigration. What I mean is that I can’t imagine getting so worked up over a Hispanic woman selling fruit on the street that you file that experience away in your mind as having observed with your eyes Joe Biden’s anti-American open border policies. That seems to me like it requires something in addition to having direct thoughts about what you’re looking at.

Similarly, say a cyclist almost hits you while you’re walking. What I can’t imagine is connecting this to the push for bike lanes and congestion pricing, which you connect to progressives who hate cars, which in turn means they hate American life. And so a random messy human encounter becomes some kind of attack. A random clumsy cyclist becomes a foot soldier in the war against drivers, against responsible people who schlep to work, against you.

We saw policemen sort of being around, observing, sitting in their cars in Times Square, amid a handful of beggars and buskers and homeless people, as well as lots of tourists. There was a black man with an amplifier doing some sort of racial-harmony routine that was hard to pin down politically, with a small crowd around him. I don’t know if anything they were doing was technically a minor crime, or if it was all allowed.

I can see being a real tough-on-crime guy and wondering why those cops are standing around if this guy isn’t allowed to use amplified sound. I can’t see connecting the cops in their cars to the police standing down because left-wing prosecutors won’t have their backs. I can’t imagine looking at a black guy doing a street show and someone playing an instrument for a buck and some homeless folks sitting by the curb, and thinking all of that is an abstraction, and the real thing is the left-wing forces behind them fighting a war against normalcy and respectability and America and using these random people on the street as their battering ram.

If I sound crazy, that’s because you’ve never heard right-leaning New Jersey suburbanites talk about New York City.

But I can guarantee you there are plenty of people whose general idea of the city goes something like this. To those folks—and I hope some of them see this piece—I only say, turn off that filter, that overlay, and consciously train yourself to observe and take in only what you are actually seeing. And if you do that, I find it very hard to believe that you can arrive at the narrative about big cities, or at least about this city, that so many people believe or claim to believe.

Nothing I observed suggested that New York is free of crime or noise or nuisance or dirt. But nothing suggested that it resembles itself at the peak of the crime wave, or as the talk radio guys and New York Post editors describe it. There are families, children, elderly people, visitors, businessmen. Everybody seemed to be casually going about life. There is utterly no indication that the average New Yorker or visitor understands themselves to be living in some kind of precarious, deteriorating situation.

The typical response to this observation is something like, “Well, they’ll learn the hard way.” But why is the actual experience of the vast majority of these people less real than what might potentially happen to a tiny fraction of them? What is more plausible? That millions of New Yorkers and commuters are complacent and naïve? Or that this city isn’t really going to hell?

It is true, as far as crime goes, that sensational crimes can produce sensational reactions. The punches in the face, the subway pushers, the lunatics who turn subway cars into powder kegs waiting to blow. These are like the school shooters of urban crime. Statistically they are rare, but they are scary, and random, and take up mental space. It only takes a little bit of that to create a sense of fear far out of proportion to the likelihood of it actually happening.

And once people are in a pose of fear, suspicion can easily follow, and assurances that the problem is not as bad as it might subjectively look or feel can begin to sound like denials or even soft endorsements. It is important not to break social trust, and to the extent that some left-leaning urbanists are soft on these matters, I think they are wrong.

But again—none of this has to run through your head as you actually walk around the streets of New York. Sometimes philosophizing is important. But sometimes, there’s so much in front of you that the only reasonable thing to do is pause your mind and open your eyes.

Related Reading:

When I Say “City,” You Say...

Who Is My Neighbor?

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