Perhaps it's the pot calling the kettle black. But hear me out.
Every time I go to New York, I try like hell to avoid the tourist death-trap that is Midtown and the Times Square area. When my efforts prove unsuccessful, I usually get stuck trudging along at velocity-at-which-a-baby-crawls speed behind a family of smiling tourists who seem hell-bent on taking individual pictures of every billboard in the tri-state area.
And I'm always -- always -- muttering, "Goddamned tourists." And then I go into Kill Mode.
I know. I don't live in New York. The rules of reason and logic would put me, a guy who lives in Boston and periodically goes to New York to drink, under the rubric of "Tourist."
But you know what? We have double-standards for a reason. And I'm sticking to my hypocrisy.
Which is why today, when I saw that Bloomberg Co. plans to turn Times and Herald Squares into redundantly-named pedestrian walkways, I was happy.
Now I don't have to walk on the street anymore, weaving between cars because, unlike the tourists, some of us are cursed with having something to do. Now I don't have to run over old ladies or leap over baby carriages. Now I don't have to throw elbows in the hope of attracting a fight that will hopefully clear the sidewalk. Now I don't have to rip cameras from hands and enter into a RAGE BLACKOUT.
Now we can just walk. Thank God.
1 comment:
...you do know this is only going to increase traffic on the outskirts of this blocked off area and make New Yorkers (the ones driving the cars, the ones sitting in the back of cars, the ones on the buses, taxi drivers) even angrier human beings (if that is even possible) and probably just increase the foot traffic in these proposed pedestrian areas to an outright chaos of walkers and mobs of people with strollers, walkers, cameras around their necks following no guidelines or rules that the sidewalks formerly attempted to establish. Long story short, that's why I'm doing a day in Brooklyn when I visit in a couple of weeks.
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