In so many ways, London was the city for me…now I am in New York, and it is very different. Insidiously similar enough to keep my mind’s compare/contrast machinery running in constant overdrive, but different enough that almost no aspect can be described as fundamentally “the same”. So here, after two weeks and past the acute culture shock phase (brief — I am American after all), are my initial impressions.

(see full introduction in Part 1)

One of the frustrations in using New York’s public transit has nothing to do with the system itself. It’s this: if you can get there in 40 minutes by subway, you can probably get there in 10 minutes by cab. The time opportunity cost of taking the train is much greater than in London, where the irregularity of roads renders transport by cab a relatively luxurious but hardly ever fourfold faster option. New York’s wide roads and grid layouts heavily favour car travel over other forms.

Anyway, moving along to the pedestrian perspective:

London spiders out organically, a vast network of winding roads whose every metre is completely unique. As a pedestrian, angles and curves and junctions are at first overwhelming, but there is inherent pleasure in getting to know any particular area: the initial skeletal imagery — “Which way do I go from this tube stop”, say — gets fleshed out by new layers of stimulating detail each time one frequents an area.

New York is almost perfectly opposite, a Brutalist fantasy of big burly rectangular blocks arranged in endless series of harsh grids. Finding one’s way around is indeed often challenging, particularly in areas where streets are not numbered, but for me the familiarisation process has thus far been dryly functional. Developing mental frameworks seem one extra level abstracted: I do not feel, as I did in London, like a living navigational creature is blooming in my mind; I feel like a light is illuminating more and more of a flat, pre-existing map.

City as blooming organic creature vs. city as rigid man-made creation: this is a narrative that could underpin a book. London is a wild juxtaposition of extreme oldness with ambitious newness. The (slyly beautiful, look closely!) argyle torpedo known as The Gherkin and the towering glass triangle of The Shard are both more futuristic (and far more off-centred) than any skyscraper in New York, while nearby buildings can date back to Renaissance or Medieval times. The architecture in London is filled with curiosity, suggestion and humour: an inorganic row of building material emanates a lively story of time and existence as the sagging wooden beams of a Tudor-era pub jut out from between an intricately appointed Victorian home and a dull brick what-were-they-thinking façade from the 20th century.

There is certainly history embedded in the architecture of New York, but it is both compressed and buried deeper into the mix. The structures of lower to mid Manhattan present like an offering vaguely of the 20th century. Elements of the older and the newer exist, but feel appended on to an overriding something that gives the city a character of being from some timeless but particular era* — vs. London’s continually morphing mash-up of many eras. In Brooklyn, that single-era vibe presides but often feels shifted back, as late-1800s brownstone row houses impose their monolithic grandeur. In Queens…I didn’t notice, actually.

Not noticing has been a feature of my first two weeks here, and that is different. That switch London turned on has not been fully reactivated here. And I do not think it will — not in the same way. New York does not touch back to the beginnings of its civilisation’s history; it is not a slowly evolved product of countless ages and cultures. Grids are inherently artificial. There are anonymous corners. It’s possible to get bored.

But I am beginning to understand this in a new way: New York is New York because of its people. A New York stripped of human life would be a massive empty nothing. An empty London would still be…London. And in my currently homesick mind, this is a clear and melancholy win for London. But I suspect I will gradually develop a comparative appraisal that converges toward separate-but-equal. You see, in many ways the human life of New York is far more bold, colourful and defining. No matter where I go (except perhaps expectedly anonymous cosmopolitan Midtown) the sense of neighbourhood identity is palpable. Chinatown, East Village, Flushing, Astoria, Sunset Park, Bed-Stuy — the people in these different places exude an attitude like “This is MINE. This is my HOME.” Neighbourhood is real in New York. This city has numerous centres of life and identity.

“I don’t usually go much further than three blocks that way and that way”, bartender Jeff tells me in the Lower East Side. Such a sentiment would be unheard of in London. London, long a premier international conduit and now bulging under the strain of free-for-all EU immigration, nevertheless clings valiantly to a citywide sense of purpose. To live in any neighbourhood of London is to live, first and foremost, in London. Life in the city involves certain commonalities, information conduits and dialogues. Every day, swathes of population from all directions cram onto the transport network for a shared ride into central, holding copies of the daily Metro handed out free at most stations. After work, they are in pubs, entering into conversations whose substance and tone are transmutable citywide — a London pub conversation can be about anything, but it is always an open-source construction from shared social currency. No one is a stranger in a pub.

The other side of this identity is a relegation of neighbourhood to the background. While I lived in London I experienced socialising as a whole-city pursuit. We come together wherever we choose; we eventually disperse or pick up and move somewhere else en masse. Eventually we end up back at our homes, whose locations are footnotes, defined by the convenience of transport links from central. In the four places I lived, I never knew my next-door neighbour. I never felt a sense of street community. My reaction to interesting upcoming local events was “huh, cool, I guess that’s close by!”

New York seems to have long ago given up on the idea of cohesion. Whether due to its sheer size, its less attractive transport system (and less hub-like geography), its more confident and deep-rooted minority groups, or something simply culturally different, the same energy that pulls London together drives a pulse of entropy through the fabric of New York. Identity seems to flow outward from block to neighbourhood and only then on to citizenship of the city. While on my housing search here, I encountered a self-contained vibrancy and community spirit in places like Bed-Stuy, Sunset Park, Astoria and Flushing that felt far more embedded than what I ever felt in any particular London locale. Furthermore, the local offerings of commerce are more robust and across-town trips to shop less necessary. My own behaviour has already been affected by this: while London sent me onto buses and tubes and into central for energy, here the exhausting transport and the energy of life all around me has shifted my wanderings increasingly to local walks.

An emotive thing just happened tonight, Saturday. Walking back for the second night at my new sublet in Bed-Stuy, the mild June twilight glowed ethereally on the leaves of the massive Brooklyn sidewalk trees and the brownstones — a luminosity I recognised from childhood Junes in Indiana, a distinctly sub-London-latitude heralding of the oncoming July/August swelter and of picnics and community and simple American living. In seamless harmony, the blocks were alive with the manifestation of that visual cue: church Saturday services spilling out onto the sidewalk, commingling families and darting children sending up a hum of warm human chatter between post-service sacred music and the bumping hip hop competing from down the block. Walking along, it seems there is no In the same way that London’s inanimate essence would permeate me, Brooklyn’s human essence lifts me up, expanding my chest and relaxing my head. The blocks are alive with what I have heretofore experienced as the forced and inadequate aspiring to some prototypical American community leisure. It’s not forced here; it is everything neighbourhood is supposed to be, refreshingly actualised.

London doesn’t have that. London’s neighbourhoods are often nominal, its residential streets dull, its immigrant communities muted, and its street vibe bland. London has something different. It has the pub…which is where we shall start in Part 3!

Link to Part 1

*Some time after writing this, I walked into the marble behemoth of Grand Central for the first time. “A monument to what was…” — I remember articulating that to myself. Maybe it’s the comparatively short historical timeline; here I feel myself picturing whole historical layers receding, where London often had me imagining individual elements leaping forth from the past to puncture the present.