Local Landmarks
Recently, a joke about New York City popped up on one of my social media accounts:
“How can you tell when someone is not from New York? . . .
They’ve been to the Empire State Building.”
Which made me laugh because, despite having lived in New York for many, many years, I’ve never actually been to the Empire State Building. I’ve seen its cool nighttime lights from afar, of course, which change to reflect current events/sports news. And the building has a witty social media account that I follow (@empirestatebldg). But I’ve never “been to the top,” as they say.
That joke—and how little we know our own hometowns—came to mind a few days later when the subway train I was on, a local line, unexpectedly switched to an express, and I had to get off at a stop I’d only passed through before. The tracks at that stop are elevated, so you can see for miles around. Directly below us was a neighborhood I know well. Yet, for the first time, I had a bird’s eye view of both the Gowanus Canal and Lowe’s. And just down the street from the store, I could see the mammoth crane that sits in the middle of our local scrapyard. Which got me thinking. I’ve lived close to the scrapyard for over 25 years. I’ve driven by it countless times. And yet, I have absolutely no idea what the place is called, who goes there, or how it stays in business. All I know is that their huge crane is constantly in motion—its grabber claw swinging back and forth moving big clumps of discarded metal from one tall pile of junk to another in an endless loop, all day, every day, the piles never actually growing or shrinking.
Why don’t those piles ever change? And who would even know?
Obviously, living in a big city like New York, you can’t possibly be familiar with everything, even major landmarks. But no matter where you live, there are tons of small local landmarks or eccentricities. For me, it’s not just that massive crane in the scrapyard. It’s also the one street doesn’t go straight across Court Street and instead is misaligned, the portion on the east side of Court half a block further south than the portion on the west. Or how Henry Street suddenly becomes much wider halfway between Kane and DeGraw. Lovable quirks of the neighborhood that you might register subconsciously but don’t usually think about. Until something changes your routine and offers a different perspective. Like a friend visiting town who insists on going to the Empire State Building. Or a subway ride that suddenly goes awry and forces you to look around and see things in a different way.