I said it out loud one night, which was a mistake.
I'd had the kind of week this city specializes in. The rent is absurd — not "high," absurd, the kind of number that makes people from anywhere else go quiet on the phone. The sidewalks are dirty in a way that's honestly hard to defend, and after dark the rats own the block. Some weeks there's a shooting. Some weeks there's a stabbing. The subway can be unnerving at the wrong hour. The bus arrives when it feels like it. Parking costs more per month than a car payment, and there isn't enough of it anyway.
My kid's school lunch isn't good either. I asked why once — genuinely curious, since food is my whole job — and the answer was food safety and allergen control. Which is a real answer. It's also how you end up with a plate designed by a liability lawyer.
So I told my oldest I was done. That I wanted to go somewhere else. Somewhere easier.
And he said: there's nowhere else that has everything. The economy's here. It's all here. Where exactly are you going to go?
He's a kid. He said it like it was obvious. I didn't have a good answer, and it bothered me for weeks that I didn't.
Then I bought an e-bike, and I lost the argument for good.
I started riding because it was faster than the alternatives. What I didn't expect was that the bike would show me a city I'd been living inside for years without actually seeing. On a train you're underground. In a car you're watching brake lights. On a bike you're in it, moving at exactly the speed where things register.
From the Brooklyn Bridge up to Union Square, the bike lane is wide and protected and continuous — you just go. Cross over on the Manhattan Bridge and come down on the Brooklyn side and it keeps going, all the way up to Williamsburg without ever making you guess. Williamsburg is full of restaurants now, and the view back across the water at Manhattan from over there is one of the best in the city, and it's free, and almost nobody I know has bothered to go look at it.
On my side, Pier 92 — one of the new ones — is genuinely beautiful at sunset. The sun drops behind Jersey and the whole river goes orange. A little south of it, Pier 76 used to be a car compound. Now it's just wide open. People ride bikes across it, rollerblade in loops, and every so often something gets put on there. It's hard to overstate how strange it is to watch a place that existed to hold impounded cars turn into a place people go on purpose.
From there the Hudson River Greenway runs north, uninterrupted, all the way to the George Washington Bridge. You can ride the length of Manhattan on the water.
But the ride isn't the point. What's along it is the point.
People walking by the river with nowhere to be. People standing at the railing just looking at the water — not filming it, not doing anything with it, just looking. Pickup games in the courts along the greenway. Somebody rollerblading in circles with headphones on.
And Central Park, which is its own case entirely. There is no hour at which that park is empty. Runners at five in the morning. Walkers at ten at night. People training for something, people recovering from something, people who apparently never sleep and use the park to prove it. Whatever time you show up, somebody was already there.
And art. So much of it, right there on the water, where nobody has to buy a ticket or make a plan to see it. Sculpture along the greenway that you come around a bend and find. Murals nobody commissioned that everybody photographs.
The one that stopped me is on Roosevelt Island. At the northern tip, in Lighthouse Park, there's an installation called The Girl Puzzle — five enormous bronze faces of women, standing in the open at the very end of the island. It honors Nellie Bly, who faked insanity in 1887 to get herself committed to the asylum that used to stand there, and then wrote about what she found inside. The other four faces are the women she met. What gets you is how they're made: each face is cast in sections, like puzzle pieces. Some of them look broken. Some look like the cracks were repaired. That's the whole idea — people the world broke, who put themselves back together anyway.
I sat with that one a while.
None of this is a New York attraction. Nobody sells tickets. And every single one of those people has the same week I had — the rent, the commute, the sidewalk, the whole grind. Nobody out there has an easy life. They've just each found the one thing that holds them up, and the city is where that thing lives.
That's what I couldn't stop thinking about on those rides. Not that New York is good. That New York keeps handing people something to hold onto.
Once I saw it that way I started seeing it everywhere, including in my own house.
My son got into cassette tapes recently. Cassettes. In this year. And the thing is, there are still stores here that sell them — not one novelty shop, several. He also makes hats. Actual hats. And within a short train ride he can put his hands on wool felt, straw braid, ribbon, blocking supplies, from people who have been selling exactly that to exactly this city for decades.
Neither of those hobbies survives anywhere else. Not really. Somewhere easier, they're a website and a shipping delay. Here they're a Saturday, a train, a person behind a counter who knows more about it than you do. That's not a small thing to hand a kid.
And the same instinct keeps the rest of it standing. There's a woman on her knees in a planting bed at eight in the morning, deadheading roses, who has never worked for the Parks Department. She's a volunteer, and there are thousands of her. And there are the Community Boards — fifty-odd neighbors per district, meeting on a weeknight to argue about sidewalk cafés and liquor licenses and where the bike lane goes. From the outside it looks like bureaucracy. What it actually is, most nights, is a room full of people deciding what their neighborhood is going to be.
And they are, in my experience, genuinely on the side of the small operator. They want the corner to stay a place somebody's family runs. Anyone who has opened a business in this city knows that room — it's often the only one where somebody listens before a decision gets made about your street.
Nobody's getting paid for that. They just decided the character of the place was worth the Tuesday.
So here's the argument, and it's smaller than it sounds.
The bike lane isn't about bikes. It's about access to the thing that holds you up. The reason most people here never see the Williamsburg view or the greenway at sunset isn't that they don't want to — it's that getting there is a coin flip. Give people a way to move around that's clean, safe, and frequent, and they will use this city. That's the whole mechanism.
Which is why I've never understood the push to make the buses or the subway free. Free isn't the problem. Nobody skips a Saturday in Brooklyn over the fare. They skip it because the train is filthy, or doesn't come, or comes and takes an hour. Clean, frequent, and fast is worth more than free, and it isn't close. Make it something people actually want to be on and they'll pay for it gladly — I would.
And, grudgingly, the arrow does point the right way. The protected lane network has grown enough that my rides connect end to end now — a few years ago they wouldn't have, and I'd have given up somewhere around the part where the lane just stops and dumps you into traffic. New parks keep opening on land that used to be a parking lot. More art goes up on the water every year.
None of that fixes the rent. It's not a victory lap. But "slightly less bad every year, on purpose" is a real thing, and most cities don't manage it.
New York is not the best place in the world to live. I'd lose that argument in four minutes to almost anyone from a city with functioning infrastructure and reasonable housing. My son's version is better than mine, and I've come around to it: there's nowhere else that has everything. What I'd add now is that having everything isn't about the economy or the restaurants or the museums. It's that whatever the thing is that keeps you upright — the water at sunset, a pickup game, a cassette tape, a hat — this city still has a place where it lives, and it's getting easier to get there.
If you come, do the thing that actually works here. Get off the train a stop early. Rent a bike and ride the river. Look up at the buildings. Say yes to the block you weren't planning on.
And if that ride puts you anywhere near 9th Avenue in Hell's Kitchen, UT47 is at 683. It's a hike from most places you'd be staying. Come anyway. We'll feed you.
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