Manhattan is an Island

The skyline can make you forget this.

When I worked at NYC Media at the turn of the millennium, my office was in the tower of the Municipal Building in Downtown Manhattan. The tiers of the “birthday cake,” as we used to call it, had observation decks all the way up to the gleaming topper called Civic Fame.

Coworkers and I often stepped through the various windows to look through the marble columns and balconies at the surrounding city.

One evening, facing northeast, in the shadow of the Trade Center Towers, I had a feeling of unease. Reflected in the midtown skyscrapers, the retreating sun burned so hot and bright, that even the older buildings next to the Empire State and the Chrysler, the ones made of stone and brick, reproduced its shimmering fire. It was a city of 24 karat gold.

Squinting at the gilded view, I thought of the ancient legends of El Dorado. Maybe some distant Spanish conquistador spied the same alchemy at work on Mayan pyramids high above the Mexican jungle. Maybe a sunset five hundred years ago fed the myth of a capital built with bullion.

In the summers of 1999, 2000, and 2001, New York City was “the Capital of the World.” Pope John Paul II coined the phrase long before the city’s revitalization started, but my boss, Mayor Giuliani, used it like a mission statement.

Still in my twenties, I believed in the phrase too. I chose New York for my home. The international pedestrians around me every lunch hour on the sidewalks of Chambers and Fulton and Wall Street represented the ambitions of every type of person on Earth. I wanted our unique diversity, drive, and destiny to lead the world into a better 21st century.

My companion that evening at the massive granite balustrade was a few years older and more skeptical. She headed the new channel at our station for the many struggling immigrants that populated the five boroughs. She called the channel “New Americans” and I was storyboarding promotions for her.

Looking beyond the skyscrapers, to the rivers and bridges, she questioned whether the dotcom optimism of the moment heralded a new age, or if it was simply another golden one. The more I thought about this, the more the historic examples lined up in my mind. Ancient Rome, the Renaissance, the medieval cloisters in the dark ages—they were all islands in time as well as space.

Our periods of enlightenment and centers of learning are flashes of a beacon above a stormy, rock-strewn reality.

As the sun disappeared, the Con Edison building on 14th, the Met Life Tower over Madison Square, and the Pan Am building over Park Avenue each blinked from light back into lead.

I shuddered in the fresh cold.