Tag: new york city

Some Like It Hot

Summer’s here and the time is right… for freezing indoors?

I knew summer was officially upon us as soon as I arrived at work last Monday morning. Two colleagues were perched awkwardly halfway up a stepladder. One was holding a drill, the other a raw piece of lumber, while each used his free hand to grip the large air-conditioner which teetered precariously between the window frame and the sidewalk six floors below. Beads of sweat sprung off both men, as if time was against them and their jobs (or very lives) hung in the balance. Before I knew it the large sash windows around me were slid shut — sssshhhhhhh-clunk! — and with that went my last breath of fresh air until late September. The bulky machine was plugged in and stirred into life, immediately releasing a wheezy drone. Their makeshift installation job having apparently taken hold, my colleagues slumped back in their chairs and purposely mopped their brows, as if by the skins of their teeth they had narrowly averted a minor local disaster.

By all accounts, it got pretty hot in New York this week. I wouldn’t know, since I now spend my days holed up in an air-tight chamber where the temperature hovers at a permanently tolerable sixty-eight degrees. On the other hand, the noise level is now akin to that on a construction site, though the rickety jackhammers cutting up Sixth Avenue are a far lesser disturbance. The aging AC unit’s grating, incessant din is so obtrusive that even on the occasions when I hear the telephone ring, answering it is pointless.

While I understand the importance of feeling comfortable in the workplace, I consider the air-conditioner a far from essential appliance. My office has no direct sunlight and seven windows which, when opened, create a pleasant through-breeze. On an especially hot day we might require, at most, a fan. In the AC’s defense, it is fair to say that I have not broken a sweat in over a week. Instead I now have to bring a sweater to work, an item of clothing that most would agree should no longer be a necessity come July. On occasions when I pick up the AC remote the whole office leaps up to monitor my actions lest I adjust the temperature or — gasp! — switch the thing off entirely. Maybe I’d have a greater degree of tolerance for the air conditioner if this wasn’t the fourth successive summer I’ve had to put up with the decrepit device, which each year is dragged out of hibernation rather than being put out to pasture.

For many of the city’s inhabitants, it seems no sooner has the depressing winter melted away than the sticky summer ahead becomes the target of their seasonal discontent. Most temper this sweat-related stress by cranking up the AC, which of course is designed to help suffering city dwellers beat the heat. Yet while air-conditioning may be a quick fix for this problem, to what extent does it also encourage it?

New Yorkers survived decades of hot summers with just loose clothing and Coca-Cola for comfort. But images of neighborhood kids frolicking under the gushing spray of the fire hydrant down the block are rooted in the middle of the last century, long before the air-conditioner came along to turn living spaces into temperature-controlled unnatural environments. Perhaps people defer to the AC simply because they can’t remember things any other way. Over the last fifty years this oversize, low-tech, energy-inefficient apparatus has become — along with the baseball cap and dip — something that America as a society has convinced itself it cannot live without.

I’m British, therefore hardly in a position to complain about warm weather. In England, the two days out of the year where temperatures might warrant air-conditioning hardly justify the purchase and installation of such an appliance. Elsewhere in Europe it gets scorching hot, but our continental cousins have come up with their own devices — such as wooden shutters and leisurely lunches — to combat the soaring afternoon heat. I’d never actually laid eyes on an air-conditioner until I arrived in New York. My wife and I had one at our old apartment which we took with us to our current place, where it has remained wrapped up in the closet ever since. As a foreigner living in a foreign land, I don’t wish to tell people how to live, but there are several advantages to enjoying your summer AC-free.

Not taking into account the needs of small children and the elderly, the air-conditioner actually presents more health problems than it alleviates. Exposure to temperature extremes can encourage allergies while doing no good whatsoever to skin, eyes or throat. More significantly, habitual AC use prevents any possibility of a natural acclimatization to warm weather, perpetuating the very problem it is intended to relieve. Precisely for this reason people feel the effect of the heat all the more as soon as they step outside — where the air-conditioner continues to make its presence felt in the form of that irritating drip that has a habit of landing on your shoulder instead of the sidewalk.

Unfortunately, this is not the only threat to the well-being of Manhattan’s pedestrians. So prevalent is AC use that it’s not uncommon for store-bought air-conditioners to be installed improperly. A few years ago an upstairs neighbor’s hefty appliance was destroyed after plummeting onto our second floor terrace (which, fortunately, we were not eating dinner on at the time). Last September a 67-year-old man was hospitalized after an AC unit fell six floors before bouncing off a canopy and hitting him in the head as he walked his dog down Second Avenue.

A more long-term concern is the enormous waste generated by continuous and unrestrained air-conditioner use. Studies have proven that the average AC unit wastes 40% of its input energy, while research suggests that air-conditioners use up over 15% of a home’s annual energy consumption. Needless to say, all of this puts a major demand on the electrical power grid. Just today both the AC and my computer abruptly shut down when a colleague attempted to use the office microwave. Luckily I’m not the one paying the Con Edison bill.

When I dared broach this issue with my boss his quipped response (“Go back to f***ing England”) suggested the matter was not open for discussion. It seems air-conditioning has become so deeply embedded in our culture that its necessity cannot even be questioned. Even elevator small-talk has been reduced to an impromptu appreciation of the air-conditioner’s savior-like qualities, and how it has once again rescued us all from an otherwise brutal summer of pure misery. New York’s latest heatwave should come as no surprise to anyone who’s spent a July here before, but if these same people were denied their precious AC I get the feeling they’d collapse not due to heat exhaustion but rather from sheer panic. Just what exactly are they so afraid of?

There are so many elements to the New York summer that make it such a pleasurable experience for the senses: a daily diet of gazpacho and watermelon, intermittent bursts of salsa wafting from an open window, the glistening patina of perspiration on tanned limbs… Like it or not, summer’s here and it’s going to get hot. So what if you sweat a little? It’s nothing a cold beer can’t fix.

Island Life

“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.”
— Thomas Wolfe

Last week, three years after moving to New York, and two and a half years after marrying my lovely American wife, I received my Green Card in the mail. According to the letter which came attached, I am now a Permanent Resident of the United States of America, although to me my new immigrant status still seems excessive. After all, I’ve only ever been to twelve of the fifty states, and generally never leave the island of Manhattan except to return to Europe. As John Lennon once said to an interviewer in reference to his deportation struggle, “Couldn’t they just ban me from Ohio?”

A colleague of mine left me a note which read “Congratulations, official New Yorker!” It was a sweet thought but one which left me confused. I wasn’t a New Yorker, just a Brit who got lucky enough to live here. Naturally, it begged the decidedly abstract question: when does a “New Yorker” become a New Yorker? I’ve heard it said that you’re only a New Yorker after you’ve lived here a certain number of years, but if so, how many? Whatever the answer may be I’m probably a few years away yet, but I’ve certainly feel like I’ve put in enough overtime studying this city to have shaved a few months off my sentence.

I know I have no greater right to be here than anyone else in my boat, but I doubt most new arrivals devote hours to meticulously researching the shooting locations of long-forgotten New York movies. Nor do they embark on a pilgrimage to the Upper West Side to photograph the city’s last remaining phone booths, or spend entire afternoons seeking out Manhattan’s humblest coffee shops on a self-assigned mission in search of the city’s finest egg cream. Nor do they drop $60 on an original 1974 Massimo Vignelli subway map (an exorbitant amount of money for something that was once handed out for free).

While I recognize that not everybody cares about these things (and nor should they), I also believe that a person is obligated to obtain an historical, cultural and social sense of their city, especially their chosen city, because I consider it important to understand where you are and what that means. When I see a group of young people in untucked shirts and trilbies exit a Barbie-pink stretch Hummer on Avenue B, it makes me sad that none of them look up from their iPhones long enough to realize they’re standing feet away from the former home of Charlie Parker. That is, if they know who Charlie Parker is to begin with. Personally I think they should make all would-be New Yorkers take a test. Anyone who fails has to spend six months in New Jersey swotting up on their Newyorkology. That would hopefully weed out all those who consider food trucks to be the height of urban chic.

Edward Hopper once said you get the greatest sense of a place upon arriving or leaving for the first time. I think he was right. To this day I still get a slight twinge the day before I leave New York or when heading to the airport at dawn, as if I begin to appreciate the greatness of the city knowing I’m going to be away from it (if only for a few days). But each time I return to Manhattan after a trip, I get a rush of the same excitement and awe that I felt the first time I got in the back of a yellow cab. Somehow the city looks, smells, even feels different. Streets I walk on every day are seen in a different light. Even the people with whom I jostle for space on the crowded sidewalk suddenly appear exotic and appealing. Could this be the same town I left less than a week earlier? That elusive magical feeling hits me like the first few seconds of “(Love Is Like A) Heatwave” and — at least for the duration of that cab ride — I remember why I always wanted to be here in the first place.

elizabeth lennard 2

Maybe you become a New Yorker the first time New York feels like home. Not long after I moved to the U.S. I took a trip to visit my girlfriend’s family in West Virginia. It was the first time I’d left New York City, and I remember feeling an unexpected sense of blasé familiarity when I landed back at JFK, an airport I had until that moment associated only with extreme excitement and anticipation. Now, it was other places gave me that feeling; New York had become “normal”. The slightly bittersweet compromise but inevitable consequence of living somewhere you’d always dreamed of living is that that very special feeling — that urgent, frantic desire you once felt, perhaps even years before you got here — is lost. Of course, it’s replaced with something arguably much better: the real and more rewarding experiences that come with actually living somewhere.

Colson Whitehead says “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.” I can definitely relate to that, and I’m always surprised just to what extent the New York in my head differs from the city I experience everyday in 2010. I confess to occasionally standing on street corners and squinting, trying desperately to recapture the sensation of walking down Broadway for the very first time, or even attempting to recall how I’d imagined New York all those years before I ever arrived. But whenever I start to wonder if this is a city best enjoyed through books and movies or my own imagination, something will jerk my senses suddenly and it all comes flooding back: early evening light on the side of a building, the sudden sight of one of the last Checker cabs bouncing down Seventh Avenue, or the inviting mix of pizza and Martha & The Vandellas floating out onto the sidewalk on a July afternoon. It’s all here, and it’s all real.

My daily commute is punctuated by the clatter of storefronts opening, a siren’s intermittent wail, hosed sidewalks, and, as I stand waiting for lights to change, the urban morning aromas of coffee, perfume and garbage. My heart lifts as I turn onto Irving Place and glimpse the Chrysler Building, half-hidden by summer’s haze or gleaming in the crisp winter sun. On the walk home I always remember to turn and look the wrong way up Lexington Avenue, to glance at all that steel and chrome rendered golden by dusk. Just in case I ever forget what I’m doing here.

In his 1949 essay “Here is New York”, E.B. White eloquently suggests there are three New Yorks, that of the native, the commuter, and the immigrant, claiming “the greatest is the last — the city of final destination, the city that is a goal.” He says the immigrants give the city “passion”, which accounts for its “high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.” Certainly New York, more than any other city in the world, owes its very existence — social, cultural, political, even physical — to the steady influx of people who have dared to dream that this could be their home.

Jeremiah Moss says “a New Yorker is someone who longs for New York.” While it’s true that not everybody who lives in New York automatically becomes a New Yorker, by the same token he implies you can be a New Yorker without actually living here. New Yorkers are a unique breed unto themselves, and maybe it’s enough to be one in thought and spirit. Maybe New York really is a state of mind. Maybe you’re a New Yorker when you can’t imagine living anywhere else. In which case, though my adjustment of status was only recently made official, maybe I’ve been a New Yorker all along.
 
 
All artwork by Elizabeth Lennard.