Built, Not Assembled

Vegas and LA had left me skeptical about whether America had any cities worth caring about. Manhattan and Brooklyn changed that immediately—the crash of high-rise glass against actual neighborhoods with history, people who moved like they belonged there, subways that actually worked. New York felt built rather than assembled.

I was surprised by how fast I fell for it. The relentless collision of wealth and grit, the way the city managed to feel both towering and claustrophobic at the same time, the sheer density of people who all seemed to know exactly where they were going. Four nights wasn’t enough.

I crashed in a hotel near Central Park for three of them, then in an apartment someone lent me near Times Square and Rockefeller Center. Ate the best pastrami I’ve had at Katz’s, though different places excel on different days. Wandered through a dozen Starbucks not for the coffee but for the space and the ambient energy. Stopped by the 9/11 Memorial and was struck by how matter-of-fact it had become—people using it as a transit hub, grief folded into routine. Ten years was apparently enough.

The subway figured itself out fast. What took longer was not reflexively wincing every time someone chirped Awesome! or You’re welcome! at me. The relentless friendliness was genuine, which somehow made it worse. I got lost the same way twice, running up and down the same street like an idiot trying to find a building number I’d written down wrong. Rain didn’t help. Being German didn’t help either.

One night in Brooklyn we wandered so completely off-course we ended up in what looked like a warehouse district pulled straight from a bad CSI episode. The kind of place where people get mugged and shot in television shows. Some exhausted taxi driver took pity on us and drove us out of there, which probably saved whatever version of this story would have been written about us.

If Tokyo wasn’t already locked in, I’d have seriously considered a year there. New York had that Berlin quality—the sense of a city that actually matters, that was built by choice rather than accident. But harder, bigger, less apologetic. Vegas and LA had let me down twice. New York didn’t.