The City of Many Cities

Cynthia Ozick’s The Sublime City hits very close to home for me because a lot of the points she makes are points I’ve noticed from my time in New York City.  I think that the city’s ability to change and adapt to anything is really impressive and I truly appreciate it. Whereas other places may try to stick to their previous cultures and traditions, Ozick writes, “often enough New York works toward the opposite: it means to impress the here-and-now, which it autographs with an insouciant wrecking ball” (949).  Which obviously made me think of this:

I think New York constantly leans towards moving forward which is why New Yorkers are always walking at such a fast pace both literally and metaphorically. When I think about New York’s fast paced lifestyle and how the city is constantly changing I think of a butterfly undergoing metamorphosis because as the stages pass, the final form is mores unique and beautiful than the previous ones. Even though I don’t think New York really has a final form, as the city progresses it only turns into a more beautiful place.

Another theme in Ozick’s essays was the diversity in neighborhoods within Manhattan. I titled my response to the essay The City of Many Cities because ever since I was little, I always envisioned Manhattan as its own entity, sort of like an independent country. Inside the lovely country of Manhattan, there are small cities which have their own unique culture and lifestyle; Soho, Financial District, Harlem, Chinatown, Upper East Side, etc.

I love this map because it shows how heterogeneous the small island of Manhattan really is. Every neighborhood, or “city” as I like to think of it, has it’s own culture and stereotype associated with it.

Ozick touches upon the diversity of every individual neighborhood and how each part of Manhattan contributes some defining characteristic of the island as a whole. She mentions how these individual neighborhoods in the city aren’t exclusive to one sort of economic class. Even when I’m walking down Broadway and West 75th, the affluent Upper West side will still have homeless people begging to be listened to because “In New York, proletarian and patrician are neighbors” (953). At the end of the day, no matter how different Greenwich Villagers and Upper East Siders may be, they both contribute to making New York City the place that it is.