How to Be Depressed in New York City
Written: Jul 29 '01 (Updated Jul 30 '01)
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Pros: For the optimist, the whole Giuliani shinola.
Cons: For the existentialist, the whole Giuliani shinola.
The Bottom Line: see pros and cons
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| Urbanist's Full Review: New York City |
Note: This piece is one in an occasional series on traveling for people inclined to depression or at least a certain existential or fatalistic world view. (The boundary between the official illness of depression and a mere existential world view is something I'll leave to greater minds than mine; I seem to cross it haphazardly all the time, and nobody has checked my passport.) Nothing in these pieces is meant to trivialize depression, a serious and underdiagnosed condition which I know firsthand, and which is best managed by remaining amused.
For a depressed person, reading is crucial in preparing for a visit to New York City. Most of the city’s literature is set in eras when New York was much more obviously depressing than it is today. Read Tom Spanbauer’s In the City of Shy Hunters, E. L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks, and Don DeLillo’s magnificent, searing Underworld. Sure, these books offer their own kinds of uplift, but they also reinforce the rich image of New York that anyone over 30 probably got in their childhoods: a violent, angry city, proud of the rudeness of its citizens, its very bones made of cruelty, where the poor grovel in vomit and filth while the wealthy step from carpet to cab, from roof to helicopter, feet never touching the ground.
If music says it for you better, pick up Joni Mitchell’s debut album, and look for the song, "Marcie," or listen to the Dar Williams masterpiece "Mortal City" on the album of the same name. Showtune type? Sondheim’s song "City of Strangers" will do the trick.
For a properly downbeat visit, it’s important to fill your mind with the rich and sad and angry history of New York before you arrive. Because somehow or other, Rudolph Giuliani and his cohorts have really done a number on this city.
As one resident put it to me, New York has become almost "perky." While this may be a little strong, there’s no denying that the city has been cleaned up to an astonishing degree, and the people who deal with the public, to the greatest extent possible, have been whipped or cajoled into credible simulations of courtesy. There are fines for honking. Police are everywhere, and though they often scowl to each other, they smile brightly when they see you’re watching them. Even historically scary parts of Manhattan, such as Harlem, feel comfortable now, at least in daylight. There are still dilapidated "investment opportunities" there, but with Bill Clinton setting down roots on Harlem’s main drag, 125 Street, the hum of prosperity is in the air. Even in the outer boroughs, which have often been the bleakest parts of the city, many neighborhoods are lively, diverse, and exciting. Astoria in Queens is a fascinating Greek/Semitic/Hindi/Arabic immigrant district, with an interesting history both in the film industry and as the home of the Steinway piano. Downtown Brooklyn has one of the most beautiful skylines of any comparable city in America. So get ready: it’s going to be a challenge.
When to Go
Many New Yorkers love to complain about winter, and indeed, it can be a good time to be depressed. New York rarely goes into the prolonged deep freeze of, say, Minneapolis. Instead, winter temperatures fluctuate, often rising above freezing to melt the snow and then refreeze it into ice. If you go in winter, and especially in early spring, you have a good chance of encountering "slush season", a prolonged exercise in sliding and splashing under generally dreary skies.
Avoid late spring (way too many happy flowers blooming) and by all means avoid fall, unless you know how to read fall colors as emblems of (admittedly cyclical) death.
Unless you just love heat and humidity, though, you’re chances for a good, deep funk are best in midsummer. Even at 80 degrees Fahrenheit, you can feel like you’re in a steambath. As Beautiful People whiz by in air-conditioned limos, drag your luggage slowly from subway to hotel. This can be enough to depress you for days.
Getting There
If you’re coming from any distance, chances are that getting to New York will be one of the most depressing parts of your trip, so make the most of it. Your choices all contain the chance for significant downers.
Train. While New York’s Grand Central is one of the most beautiful train stations in the world, it is used only by commuter lines into the Hudson Valley and Connecticut. All other rail services -- including the very convenient Northeast Corridor Amtrak system, long-distance Amtrak trains, and the commuter trains of New Jersey and Long Island, will dump you at Penn Station. The underground remnant of a once-grand structure, Penn Station is functional but graceless, nothing but labyrinths lined with greasy food, overpriced luggage, and confusing signs.
Air. Most people, including some idiots coming from points on the Northeast Corridor where the train is faster and much more reliable, come to New York by air. Since the aviation industry is in a state of near-collapse, with all airlines selling tickets for more flights than they can possibly operate, you’ll probably have a depressing hassle in the course of your trip.
New York has three airports, all of them offering their own miseries:
La Guardia, the closest to Manhattan, is one of the most overburdened, unreliable, and unpleasant airports in the nation. If you want to be late, hassled, and crowded at every moment of your trip, La Guardia is certainly your choice.
Newark International, the next closest, is a permanent construction site. It has been under major, disruptive construction for something like 20 years, always sporting signs about what an exciting new airport they’re creating. In theory, Newark’s monorail system will "soon" connect all the terminals directly to the Newark train station, which has lots of rail service to several parts of Manhattan. Meanwhile, though, you’ll have to take a cab or a bus to the Newark station to get to these services, which means you’ll have to deal with the fact that you’re in, well, Newark. Downtown Newark is developing around the station, but there’s no way to miss the total lack of relation between the glass towers and the vast expanses of misery that surround them. If you end up using Newark, watch the scenery closely for maximum depression.
Finally, there’s JFK. This major world hub is so huge that it seems hardly to need a city. Here, your opportunities for depression will mostly involve the subway’s A-Train, which you will have to access by bus from your terminal. The A will give you an elevated tour of some of the most depressing parts of Brooklyn (Howard Beach, famous for racial riots, is just across the tracks) before finally, mercifully taking you underground. Eventually, this connection will be replaced by a new direct train from the terminals to the Jamaica transit hub in eastern Queens, where you can connect directly to either the Long Island Railroad or to all-underground subways that are much faster into Manhattan. Meanwhile, though, JFK is a long way from where you’re going, unless you can afford a helicopter.
One more warning about JFK: This is the new Ellis Island, the point of arrival for most overseas travelers including hopeful immigrants. Don’t look at their eyes as they arrive in America. You might see the far greater depression of where they came from, and since the depressed person needs to believe that s/he is currently in the most miserable, dysfunctional place on earth, the last thing you need is to meet someone just off the plane from Afghanistan or the "Democratic Republic" of the Congo.
Getting Around: The Subway
The subway, which 20 years ago was a metaphor for urban horror, is now safe, clean, and more or less reliable. Still, get out of the center of town, especially into outer boroughs, and you’ll find plenty of stations that retain their pre-Giuliani bleakness. Some of the subway’s elevated segments, notably the J line across Brooklyn and Queens, take you through what an optimist would call significant redevelopment opportunities, but where daily life still looks bleak. Perhaps the most remarkable subway ride is the A-train to Far Rockaway, where you discover that New York can even make the beach depressing! I know of no other coastal city where all of the neighborhoods fronting the ocean are considered slums, downscale, to be avoided. (This generalization requires that I exclude Staten Island, but many literary authorities have preceded me in ignoring this floating patch of suburbia that somehow failed to escape the city.)
Riding the subway, you may also wonder: "Why doesn’t every North American city have such an extensive, convenient system?" The short answer is that the subway was built mostly before World War I, and almost entirely before World War II. In short, the pillars you pass and the tunnels you rush through were created by men who were paid a pittance, and whose injury or death on the job was of no concern to their employers. And the subway was built with little effort to consult the neighbors or calculate environmental risks, as you would have to do today. So as you ride the subway, feel the labor that went into digging these tunnels, the long hours spent underground in dust and grime, the premature deaths by inhalation of all the geology of New York.
Getting Around: Car
You’ll probably use the subway quite a bit in New York, because it is so relentlessly convenient and takes you almost anywhere. However, if you want to experience serious depression, you must confront the legacy of Robert Moses: the city’s freeways.
Moses, who ruled regional planning for almost a generation after World War II, planned much of the freeway network that chops up the outer boroughs. In European cities, freeways often approach and encircle the city, but do not penetrate the core as they do in USA.
Of course, American freeways are the result of a massively boneheaded exercise in Soviet-style central planning and government waste. Thinly disguised as a national defense need (and indeed, our ability to get tanks from Seattle to Boston without stopping has saved our necks thousands of times), the "National Interstate Defense System" is our nationwide network of limited-access highways. They are ridiculous in rural areas (did we really need a grade-separated interchange at every farming road in North Dakota?) but in the cities, they were acts of unmitigated devastation. They were carefully designed to bulldoze poor minority neighborhoods while sparing the wealthy and white, and they block the flow of pedestrians, cyclists, and other nonpolluters on whom healthy urban life depends. Today, New York's urban freeways are mostly parking lots, because as anyone who ran the numbers could have pointed out at the time, a very dense city will generate more traffic than you can possibly accommodate if everybody drives.
Most American cities welcomed the Interstate system and eagerly bulldozed their inner city neighborhoods -- many of them prosperous but not sufficiently white -- in order to create complete freeway rings around their downtowns. But New York, already a thriving city, presented some obstacles to the Interstate ideal. Still, Robert Moses did his best for them. Manhattan was too wealthy and built up to punch freeways through. The outer boroughs, though, were poor or sparsely populated enough that his bulldozers could run riot. So we have a complete freeway loop that will take you from New Jersey across Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and finally the Bronx, not to mention the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Long Island Expressway, and many others. Needless to say, they are all gridlocked, impossible to expand, useless except for a few hours in the middle of the night when traffic lightens up a bit, and still devastating to the areas around them.
Be appalled. Be very appalled. For Robert Moses, the one-man bulldozer, one of the most evil influences in the history of New York, still has a bridge and state park named after him. It’s worth the trip just to expectorate on his image.
Things to Avoid
If you’re going to maintain a funk in New York, at any time of year, by all means avoid the following areas: Central Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Downtown Brooklyn and its historic district, Lower Manhattan (below Houston Street), and Greenwich Village. And by all means, DO NOT walk across the Brooklyn Bridge from Brooklyn into Manhattan. Not only because it’s impossible to jump, but more importantly, because this is one of the most spectacular, uplifting walks in the world. Depressed people have no business here, and you’ll find few of them to keep you company if you take this famous stroll.
Why Aren't the Skyscrapers Depressing?
In other cities, when people want to rail against high-density development, they inevitably speak of "Manhattanization." Packed tall buildings turn the streets into deep canyons of despair where the wind is accelerated and the sun never shines. But I regret to inform you that if you want this effect, you'll find better examples in the financial district of San Francisco, or in any number of overbuilt East Asian cities. Sure, you can get a canyon effect in Midtown Manhattan, but the walls of the canyon aren’t sheer, and a surprising amount of light gets through.
The reason for this is a "setback" policy that dates from the 19th Century and therefore affects almost all the tall buildings in the city. Anticipating the "canyon" problem, New York long ago put in place regulations that require buildings to get thinner as they go up. These regulations have produced street after street of facades that rise to perhaps a tenth floor level but then begin gracefully retreating from the street. Other buildings, such as Rockefeller Center, are simply set back from the street all the way from ground level. So not only are you likely to be surprised by sunlight even in deepest Midtown, you will also see some alarmingly inspiring architecture, buildings that step back in many different ways as they rise, with many different kinds of ornamentation at each step.
Things to See
Finally, New York is a city of attractions. Some of these, including the greatest museums, are pretty uplifting. For a good downer, though, I can recommend:
Times Square and 42nd Street by Disney . 42nd Street, also the name of a musical, used to be the epicenter of showbiz. Then, as its theatres were outgrown, it became the epicenter of a wonderfully depressing sleaze. Now, it’s being polished up, largely by Disney, into an on-site theme park. If you want to feel that you’re in any tourist attraction in America, don’t miss it.
Public Housing. Public housing from the 1950s-60s period consists mostly of brutalist highrise buildings, dripping with despair. Manhattan has a huge row of them lining the East River, extending for a couple of miles all the way from about 25 Street down to Houston Street. Get close to one on foot, and you’ll feel a bit of old, scary, New York. However, try not to notice all the playgrounds, nonthreatening security, and other features that have been added lately. Above all, try not to notice how many people are smiling. The architecture is dismal, but they’ve made the best of it, and if you stick around long enough, you might even be inspired.
Far better for a good depression is the row of giants marching out through Brooklyn, east of Brooklyn’s charming downtown. These housing projects are ghastly, irredeemable, and largely unredeemed. Be careful here, too, if you go in. Some of these have actually been converted to condos, and though their shared interiors are still depressing, you might be invited into an apartment that feels like a prosperous artist’s loft in SoHo. (Of course, this presumes that you have friends, which is already a bad sign if you’re trying to be depressed.)
Finally, since depression is often described in terms of a downward spiraling feeling, let’s end the tour at the Guggenheim Museum. Yes, they’re working on a new spectacular Gugg, and meanwhile there’ll be a temporary Gugg out in Queens. But the old Gugg, with its famous spiral shape, is still there on the Upper East Side, and not to be missed. Theoretically, it provides a continuous linear gallery experience as you climb a seven-story spiral ramp. But the cavernous space in the middle is an acoustic disaster, amplifying every sound in the building so that you might as well be in a hard-floored elementary school at recess. The large space is sort of filled with something that might be art or might be failed acoustic baffling, but the gesture only amplifies the misery. The spiral gallery of the Gugg, such a sexy idea in its day, has grown tired with amazing speed, and today I can recommend it as perhaps New York’s best unintentionally depressing attraction.
Enjoy your stay. And if you are lucky enough to get one of the few remaining rude taxi drivers, by all means tip him well.
Recommended:
Yes
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