Noise, chaos, subway rats, the smell of hot garbage: happily, New York hasn’t changed

I’m always a little scared before going to New York. That’s why I haven’t been back much since leaving a good few years back. I imagine it’s akin to an especially seductive drug that you don’t want to get hooked on again. Writer Zadie Smith put it best, in a now-seminal 2014 essay for The New York Review of Books, when she wrote of Manhattan: “You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality.”

I harboured the delusion Zadie Smith identified in spades – until I couldn’t any more. What clinched it for me was a succession of small realisations which revealed that life in New York was harder than it needed to be: that the streets were too dirty to wear thongs, even in the oppressive summer heat; that I was unconsciously labelling any apartment where the bed was not visible on entry as “palatial”; that only New Yorkers had to make like Santa and carry an enormous sack of dirty clothes to the laundromat on laundry day, and that eating out for literally every meal was perhaps a bit much, even for someone who dined at restaurants for a living. (Needless to say, my shoebox apartment was not set up for home cooking.)

It was therefore with trepidation that I planned a quick trip to New York recently. Stepping off the train at Penn Station in Midtown was a shock because it was very loud and chaotic. It was also sort of comforting, because it smelled just like I remembered: of hot garbage and doughnuts.

The goings-on of the subway were also reassuringly familiar: a businessman barking something about a deal like a bit player in a musical; a garbled announcement about how everything is undergoing maintenance and nothing is working; rats picking at abandoned pepperoni pizza slices on the tracks, working just as hard at their jobs as any of the city’s many investment bankers.

And yet, for all these eccentricities and despite the fact that COVID struck the city harder than anywhere else in the US, New York remains a place where a lot of people want to live. “Manhattan is full up,” sighed a friend who had been looking for an apartment for many months to no avail. The supply is so tight, especially for young people with expansive dreams and negligible furniture, that there is talk of bidding wars to rent one-bedroom apartments. Auctions for rentals, can you imagine?

Against my better judgment, I had a great day. It being New York, I squeezed various social commitments into 45-minute slots – lunch followed by coffee followed by a drink – and no one minded because they were all busy, too. I power-walked around the place in sneakers, noting that there is now a juice bar on every block seemingly, and found myself adopting that jittery and alert New York state of mind.

My final social commitment was with two visiting Australians. One had never been to the US before and spoke with a wide-eyed enthusiasm about how much he loved it here – the diversity, the energy, the bigness of it all. I had to concede that, for all my trepidation, there remains something magical about New York City.

At one point, I stopped in my tracks and looked up at the Empire State Building gleaming in the sun, and then someone quite rightfully pushed me aside because I was a traffic hazard. Zadie Smith had a point about New York and its delusions – but so, too, do all the songs written about it over the years.

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