On the move

If you were watching this city on TV I think "FFwd>>x8" would be an appropriate little annotation in the corner of the screen. It's nuts out there - high-speed nuts, and probably not a place for a Japanese tourist to be stood curiously filming the world go by at 5pm in Grand Central Station. Camcorder in hand the bemused little man was pinged this way and that by a criss-crossing hoard of New Yorkers all late for something or the other. Slumped back here on my sofa - sorry, couch - this evening all I can see out of the window are bodies being whisked from N to Y and back to C and the picture hasn't changed much over the past 24 hours. A continual stream of cars pouring across the bridges, a water taxi zipping up and down the river, the worming army of silver subway trains slipping by every 3-5 min. The airspace isn't any less dynamic. Where one or two airports are usually more than enough to service a large city, here that wouldn't be heard of. Newark, Laguardia, Teterboro and JFK - four airports crammed within a 15 mile radius of New York City handling over 100 million passengers per year and making the airspace above my head the busiest in the world.

Awake or asleep, on the move or in your living room, you are literally surrounded by people - above, below and next door - it really is three-dimensional chaos. Of course, about 150 years ago, it was only two-dimensional chaos. There was a time, as Manhattan expanded, when it was projected that the island would soon reach its capacity for growth. In the 1880s The Brooklyn Bridge was built not to join Brooklyn to Manhattan but to join Manhattan to Brooklyn and the open, expansive farmland of Long Island beyond. Growth, it was thought, would continue in that direction once the small island of Manhattan had outgrown itself. However it was around that time that refinements in the mass production of steel came about - ironically heavily used in constructing the Brooklyn Bridge - and the vertical limitations surrounding building construction were overcome with steel frameworks and the steel-cabled elevators needed to service them. Manhattan began a new growth phase - upwards - and it hasn't looked down since.

I never really enjoyed history at school. It was all names and dates - the last thing you want to be learning. I think it's a whole different story the moment you realise you're surrounded by it though; when you can walk across a piece of history, or when you realise that your commute is taking you through the world's largest train station and that the Japanese tourist standing in your way is actually transfixed by its vast astronomical ceiling of stars overhead. Looking up you realise you're seeing a reversed view of the constellations - reversed as if seeing them from "God's perspective" - a result of the design being based on an outdated manuscript from the Middle Ages.

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I'm beginning to see that by taking a step back from the chaos there are stories to be found everywhere.