Tendances

My City of Dreams

They say there are only two kinds of people living in Manhattan today: those who can afford to stay, and those who can’t afford to leave.

Every time I get on a plane to New York, I prepare to hate it. Not that I have seen its heyday. By the time I arrived there in late 90s, Manhattan was already on its way out, according to the grumbling memories of artist friends who once occupied SoHo lofts for a laughable fee, or to historical movies like “After Hours” which show the Downtown of the 80s as a place no man in a suit would visit in his right mind.

But although I never saw a Prada-free SoHo, I still have memories of it that would stand up to any Left Bank nostalgia, and give me a life-time of reasons to find any other city desperately wanting.

And so, like any old-timer, I squirm at the yuppie faces that now sip lattes at the sacred cafes of my youth, and grow depressed at the number of shops that besiege West Broadway. Then there is the Meatpacking district, which once did smell of meat and sewers and is now the poshest real estate in the city. It’s in the Meatpacking that I saw a group of tourist lined up in front of a giant shop, the guide droning on “and this is Stella McCartney store, opened in…” like it was  the Mona Lisa. The tourists, to my shock, were Midwestern, not Japanese.

Around the corner from Stella’s shop is the much coveted SoHo House, where the yuppiedom and Sex And The City reign supreme. Set up like a lobby of a trendy hotel, the club defines what a former New Yorker like myself misses the most: instead of fascinating creative faces, creased by too much drink and laughter, one is confronted here by something smooth, upscale and excruciatingly comme il faut.

What’s so wrong about that, you ask? How does one start to describe a City where those of us who always felt like strangers to a normal society, unable to belong to any community, choir, or nation, have suddenly found our match —  a place that like a magnet drew to it all the weird off beat lonely dreamers, as long as they shared one belief: that there must be more to this life than the cards we’ d been dealt. It made New York the most human place in the world – and the most creative one. It unlocked incredible energy and gave it the “if you can make it here you’ll make it anywhere” attitude. It was never an easy city, and for every dream realized there have been a dozen that flopped on their face. Yet, one thing New York never asked from you  was to conform, to be normal, to be like others. If anything, that was your ticket out of here, and many of us left, trading our dreams for the demands of real life.

Then, on a weekday morning, you walk into the streets of SoHo early enough for the shops to be closed, and you might fall right back in love with this city of great expectations. It still feels like a big village, with everyone on the doorstep drinking their coffee and reading the Times – a millionaire with his dog, a model with her iPhone, a construction worker taking a break from whistling at passing by girls, a homeless guy with a flair for stand-up comedy. They are out on the street, sharing this summer morning, because it’s the stage to be on, with the shop windows and ads lined up like a giant backdrop behind them. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” – no city lives out Shakespeare better than New York, and certainly no stage has a better set design.

Can New York change those who come to it, before they forever transform its spirit? Perhaps the epic skyline and the indomitable energy of those who’ve built it can withstand the invasion of  the bourgeois mentality, after all. For once you are on that doorstep, your coffee in hand, the world passing by and winking at you, you suddenly need to go beyond what your life is supposed to be – and that makes you a New Yorker.

natalia@cominmag.ch

Ses brillantes études l'ont amenée à Harvard et au MIT. Depuis, elle s'intéresse à l'évolution de la télévision. Elle vient de lancer une chaîne musicale sur IPTV.

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