Sidewalks:Life in New York

“They say the streets of heaven are paved with gold. But they’ve forgotten to pave the sidewalks at all.”

    Any New Yorker knows that there are distinctly different types of concrete comprising the sidewalks of the city. Of course you have the basic, white, slabs stationed all the way from Williamsburg to the Upper East Side, but the closer you get to Bushwick the more dark gum spots stain the floor beneath and the dirt from your shoes seem to have permanently sunk into the pavement. I mean yes, the Vanderbilt's could transport the yellow brick road from Oz itself if they really wanted to and I’m sure the Rothschild’s have purchased the London Bridge at some point, but when you step out of the subway onto Park Avenue the dichotomy is almost as clear as the marble. 
    Take a walk downtown and you’ll see how the early rockers carved their names into the streets by its resemblance to the alleys of Europe. Cobblestone, bricks, and pebbles lead the way to Electric Lady Studios on West 8th. Abbey Road is in Camden but it could just as well be in Greenwich Village. Until NYU moved into town, at which point much of the original cobble dripping with pigeon droppings was replaced with new cobble, cobble made somewhere in China as a red-carpet for the piles of Midwestern kids moving in to discover their inner Clapton. 
    If you can bear to be on the train for so long, take the E and transfer to the M into middle of nowhere Middle Village, Queens, where you’ll be greeted by a roller coaster of stone, brown rocky-mountain slush-turned concrete placed in squares too small for their size.
    And when you can’t take it anymore, when you want uniformity and less disparity, you’re perfectly free to take a PATH or LIRR train out of the city. Go to New Jersey or Long Island and you won’t have any more problems. Complete neighborhoods have selected their ground in a zoning meeting somewhere and so everywhere it’s the same. Or maybe there is no sidewalk at all- after all, why walk past the homeless man and be forced into making eye contact with him when you can drive by the mall on your way to soccer practice?  In New York, even the Vanderbilt's have to step out onto the pavement on their way to the Opera.

- Alexandra G. Kytka