Titania Veda

A Year of Whimsy: Digging Into the Riches of New York

You either love or hate New York. I fall into the former category for what is there not to love about this skyscraper-satiated city by the Hudson, steeped in immigrants and culture, and the object of constant streams of assault in both fiction and reality?

Walking around as a tourist, sampling only the sights listed in Lonely Planet, Time Out or Fodor’s travel guides and watching plays on Broadway may suffice for some. But if you look beyond her usual landmarks and guided tours, you will see the city’s true bounty.

NYC with all her drama and urbane beauty is the life source of stories, whether for the novelist, the poet or the sightseer searching for an entertaining cocktail conversation piece.

As opposed to cities such as Paris, which I think of in black and white, New York offers a technicolor dream, suffused in stories that have inspired many a writer before me to spin a fine yarn and conjure tales from the snapshots of life seen amidst the hubbub, where local eccentricities go beyond the imagination. In this tremendous, eclectic human zoo, I can step onto any street and be entertained by simple observations alone.

Spotted between Third and Second Avenue, a fruit vendor abandoning his customers at the holy hour of prayer as he knelt on a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk, faced a parked bus, and began his commune with God.

Turning the east corner of Washington Square South was a white-haired woman with her Botero-esque behind swaddled in a tight red A-line skirt as she wobbled along on a bike, a bone-white mutt in the front basket.

When the dark bandage of night had fallen over Union Square, MC Hammer’s reincarnation walked by in the form of a slip of an ebony man dripping in black leather, from his studded jacket to skin-tight pants, with eyes veiled by sequin-rimmed shades. On a leash he held a Lilliputian canine the same shade as he.

Each day I wander through the postcard-pictures associated with the city; the New York thousands of visitors come to see every day. The sunsets made familiar by a multitude of movies where, for a brief moment, the metropolis is bathed in honeycombed light that turns even Harlem’s ghettoes into golden architectural delights as the sky turns the stormy blue-gray of a lover’s eyes and bulbous clouds gather like fat Chinese gods.

I slip between the tourist-besieged sights of 42nd Street that display Broadway’s theatrical talents and lights and I delight my eyes with the goodies displayed in lavish, pristine department stores and the branded boutiques on Fifth Avenue.

Afternoons are spent in the expansive sun-dappled, acorn-speckled topography of Central Park, made magical by stone fortresses, green pastures and lakes littered with tots and pups. The park stretches 50 blocks long and four avenues wide, reaching from the excessive riches of Waldorf Astoria bordering the south to the skid rows of Harlem in the north.

This is the life above ground in this decadent urban spread where it costs a pretty penny to reside. But when I seek the real New York I burrow, like a groundhog, deep into the underground where the locals play.

Subways are the quintessential New York. To be a New Yorker is to ride its musky trains in which the city’s multifaceted, multicolored, multilingual mesh of cultures come together in a tumultuous rainbow of body odor and fashion.

The square-jawed, muscle-bound macho men and the sylph-like, oval-faced gazelles who grace the runways of fashion week all board the train and stand side by side. They are crushed into one fist-like body together with Brooklyn hipsters, mustachioed musicians carrying cellos on their backs like curvaceous drunken lovers, buskers and beggars seeking alms, ghetto-fabulous bling-bling girls and Hasidic Jews, all monochrome and sheep-tail curls. Deep down under the concrete they gather and wait, reading their New Yorkers and Village Voices, tuned into their iPods and catching the occasional scuttling of residential rodents. Race, color, creed and social stature is momentarily forgotten as they jostle and brush against each other.

On the train headed downtown a man with a strawberry blond crew cut stood by the “Do Not Lean” sign of the closing subway doors and unfurled a medical pamphlet. On the right side of his neck the words “Made in the USA” were tattooed in national pride.

A black youth on 103rd Street killed time waiting for the train by succumbing to a slow static break-dance, his gray hood half covering a face in deep musical absorption.

Down in the dungeons underneath this urban sprawl is where Martin Luther King’s dream comes true, where all are equal.

Titania Veda writes a weekly travel column. She is a former features reporter at the Jakarta Globe.

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