Longform - Manhattan - Anna Peele
STREET APPEAL
BY ANNA PEELE
MANHATTAN WAS NEVER my dream. I grew up across the river in New Jersey, near enough to take the city for granted but far enough that any excursion was a stressful inconvenience. My family spent countless hours hunting for public parking spaces. A spot?! No, just another hydrant.
We were never organized enough to know what time we would be done at the crowded museums we trod, sweating through parkas my parents assured us would actually be more inconvenient to check. And so, instead of elegantly making a reservation, we ate every meal at the first restaurant we encountered–inevitably someplace Italian, where we were invited in by a barker with an oversize menu–after our collective blood sugar had dropped to a critically obnoxious level. There was never anywhere to go to the restroom, and it always seemed to be on the verge of raining. As tri-state residents, we were not technically tourists, but we did not belong.
This was my concrete view of New York, set for 18 years. But when I moved to the city for college, something mundanely pragmatic transformed my thinking: walking. By foot, Manhattan morphed from a chore into a story I was telling, along with millions of co-writers–a scene crammed full of unexpected, decadent moments and eternally being edited and shaped by the singular figures rendered in it. I walked from my shitty walk-up on Avenue B to a high-rise on Varick Street for an internship at Comedy Central, from a pie store on 42nd Street to the Christopher Street Pier to nap at a breezy picnic bench during a heatwave, from the north side of Central Park to a sketchy 3rd Avenue apartment to pick up Decemberists tickets I bought on Craigslist. Then there was the High Line.
I commuted to my first magazine job on the High Line, which had just reopened in 2009. The elevated, 22-block park had previously been a treacherous 19th-century railway used to transport beef and coal up Manhattan’s West Side. Now it transported me halfway to the 21st floor of a glass skyscraper. The slatted concrete walkway was so quiet in the early mornings that I could hear mice skittering through the asters as I passed old industrial buildings and new art galleries and the swooping glass Zaha Hadid condo, where the then-affianced Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson lived. Sometimes in the winter, I woke up early to do hot yoga in a studio under the 20th Street exit before finishing my journey, my hair steaming from the shower and asanas as I schlepped toward the office.
I saw Joan Jett and pre-scandal Louis C.K. on the High Line, and thousands of German tourists. I watched outdoor dance performances and weepy breakups and art tours. One day, I walked past a miniature film set capturing an actress I’d booked for a magazine story, set to take place across the country in Los Angeles the following weekend. Another time, the High Line deposited me at my once on Columbus Circle, where I saw that the 76-foot monument, and the statue of its namesake explorer topping it, was covered in a large box. Was it under construction? No. An artist had created a living room–homey with a co ee table and wallpaper–around Columbus. You could walk up a six-floor staircase and stand opposite the 14-foot stone man, with his hand on his hip, looking thoroughly annoyed by the spectacle.
One May afternoon, five years after I started my magazine job, my boyfriend met me after work on the northern end of the High Line. We ambled down from 30th Street, talking about our days as we weaved through the sunset crowd, strangers who were, at least for this walk, our neighbors. “What’s your favorite part of the High Line?” he asked me. I immediately listed the greatest hits: the panoramic cityscape installation, the Mexican popsicle stand, the place where you can look out over the Hudson. “But I guess I love this part, right by our house, the most,” I added. My boyfriend, presumably exhausted by the verbal tour, dropped to the ground. “Great!” he said, pulling a box from his pocket. “Will you marry me?” Tourists clapped and took photos as we kissed. I grabbed one of their arms and told her the price of the show: “You’re sending me those photos.” She did.
Because my secret place was in the middle of the greatest city in the world, everyone else discovered it too. The High Line became clogged, with fellow pedestrians onboarded at the Whitney Museum and meatpacking district on one end and Hudson Yards on the other, and with more and more luxury condos squeezing in from all sides. The trainyard was covered. The Mexican popsicle stand disappeared. You couldn’t stop and linger and discover any more than you could on a moving sidewalk in the Detroit airport. When the High Line became a hindrance rather than a pleasure, I stopped taking it. Instead, I trudged up bleak 10th Avenue, filled with bus and truck exhaust but at least devoid of people.
And then, when COVID hit, in early 2020, everyone else stopped taking the High Line too. The park was closed. The whole city, it felt, was closed. The human body replaces most of its cells with new ones every decade or so; Manhattan, in much the same way, is always in the process of becoming another, different Manhattan. When the city’s shelter-in-place order was finally lifted, New Yorkers emerged from their apartments as different people. We learned how to cram together safely, how to avail ourselves of the world’s greatest restaurants when we couldn’t pack their booths, how to exist and enjoy and indulge and fret productively. At least we tried.
In the fall, I tentatively returned to the High Line. I had to reserve a spot in the now-empty park and wear a mandatory face mask. There were fewer selfie sticks, fewer vendors, no film productions. It was a canvas, blank except for the wildflowers and the relentless progress of industry looming over the idyll. Once weekday reservations were no longer needed, the High Line resumed its place in my daily life, though I no longer had an office to commute to. In September, en route to heat-lamp-toasted outdoor drinks, I passed a young couple, surely cutting school, entwined under a yellowing tree. I cut around a line of preschoolers chattering on a field trip, linked, presumably by sticky little fingers. A mouse skittered by. It was the same Manhattan as always. But, like all living things, its cells had turned over, becoming something both familiar and new.
ANNA PEELE is a writer in Manhattan. Her work has been published in Esquire, GQ and The Washington Post Magazine.
Taylor Bruce