Everything West of the Hudson Was Practice
Las Vegas and Los Angeles had already done their damage by the time I landed in New York. Vegas was exactly what it looked like: a machine for separating people from money, which at least had the virtue of honesty. LA was stranger—built entirely from the outside in, all surface and freeway and the ambient anxiety of everyone trying to be somewhere else. Two cities designed by committee, assembled from prefab ambitions, both of them feeling like they’d been sketched out quickly by someone who didn’t care whether the streets made sense.
New York felt different before I’d even cleared the airport. By the time I was underground on the subway watching the tunnel walls blur past, I already understood I’d been wrong to group it with the others. This was a city that had grown around itself, layer over layer, the kind of accumulation that takes actual time. Manhattan from below looks like something that happened to people rather than something people built.
I was there four nights—three in the Empire Hotel near Central Park, the last in a small apartment off the Rockefeller Center borrowed from a cross-eyed Japanese woman who was never home and whose shelves were full of art books I didn’t have time to read. I walked most of it. The particular pleasure of New York for a first-timer is that the mental map fills in faster than you’d expect: a few key streets, a handful of landmarks, and suddenly you’re navigating by instinct rather than phone.
Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side: I’d been told by everyone with an opinion on this kind of thing that the pastrami sandwich was the one. It is enormous and impractical and costs about as much as a decent dinner anywhere else. It’s also genuinely extraordinary—the meat has that almost-falling-apart quality that comes from years of getting one specific thing exactly right. I still think the version at Mogg & Melzer back in Berlin edges it out, which makes me either a contrarian or a person with standards, depending on who you ask.
I developed a Starbucks habit purely out of logistics—reliable seating, reliable power outlets, reliable wifi. I must have been in twelve different locations across four days. Not proud of it. Also not apologizing for it.
The 9/11 Memorial surprised me. I’d expected weight, ceremony, the particular hush of grief formalized into architecture. What I found was a transit hub. People moved through at speed, checked their phones, caught connections. The memorial pools are striking up close—the water disappearing into a void at the center—and I stood there for a while trying to locate the appropriate feeling. But more than ten years had passed and the city had resumed its velocity. Maybe that’s its own kind of tribute. Maybe it’s just New York.
Brooklyn nearly killed us. We got turned around past the point where maps get vague and found ourselves on industrial waterfront—the kind of block that appears in procedural crime shows specifically to establish that the victim was somewhere they shouldn’t have been. A cab eventually materialized, the driver wearing the expression of someone who had done this exact pickup before and long since stopped finding it funny.
What surprised me most was how quickly it felt like somewhere I could actually live. I’d expected the density to be alienating—the noise, the taxis, the scaffolding, the smell that changes every half-block. Instead it felt like Berlin with the volume turned up and the self-consciousness removed. Berlin is still a city thinking about what it is. New York stopped having that conversation decades ago and is better for it.
I already had a Tokyo ticket booked for six weeks out. Otherwise I’d have seriously considered staying a year. I’ll carry New York as a debt—a city that gave back more than I expected after the other two had made me cynical about the country, and one I owe a proper second visit.