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Autumn in New York, 2005
Jefferson Flanders
What will future social historians think when they look back at photos of New York City’s street scene during this improbably
warm autumn of 2005?
Chances are they will find New Yorkers of the early 21st century to be remarkably distinctive: individualistic, idiosyncratic,
multiethnic, multiracial and, no doubt, prisoners of their specific time and place when it comes to fashions, customs and
behavior.
We can’t see it, of course, the magnificent uniqueness of the here and now. It’s too comfortably familiar. It
might take a Louis Trimble, the protagonist of a marvelous F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, to do our city streetscape credit.
In Fitzgerald’s tale, Trimble wanders around New York soaking up its simple wonders. “I simply want to see how
people walk and what their clothes and shoes and hats are made of,” he explains.
Yet, we later learn, Trimble is no stranger to the city; a native, he hasn’t left its environs in ten years—in
fact, he has designed one of its premier buildings. But Trimble has been blind to its sights and sounds because he’s
been “every-which-way drunk” for a “Lost Decade,” and has now only just emerged from his alcoholic
stupor to begin to appreciate New York anew.
Most of us are so caught up in our daily routines that, perceptions dulled, we miss or ignore the fabulous in front of us.
Unlike Trimble, we don’t stop and delight in the human parade passing us by—garment workers with hand trucks,
mothers pushing strollers, bicycle messengers careening, street vendors and deal-making businessmen, students with backpacks,
slightly-dazed tourists.
Perhaps only an observer with the keen fashion eye of Tom Wolfe could adequately chronicle the variety of styles and individual
statements being made on New York’s streets. Thin women in fashionable black (some things never change). Men in traditional
business attire, but without the fedoras of the past. Instead, today’s hats of choice are from the Boys of Summer—baseball
caps worn sideways, backwards, with the brim flat, with the brim curved, with ponytails protruding (yes, it’s a unisex
style), with Yankees caps the most popular (New York has always loved a winner).
What is also different—and invisible and unremarkable, but passing strange none-the-less—is the ubiquitous electronic
invasion of our city streets by cell phones, Blackberrys and iPods. It seems every third person is jawing away on a cell-phone.
I chat, therefore I am, has become the motto of the age.
A businessman briskly strides along, conducting a conversation with no one, his miniaturized microphone and phone out of plain
view. A tourist holds up her camera phone to snap a digital photo of a landmark, her husband offering guidance in German,
Some of the younger phone-users pause to punch the phone keys with their thumbs or fingers – the text messaging of the
under-30 set.
Will those future historians regard these vignettes as the precursor of the plugged-in street? A preview of a wireless, digital
world to come, where computers and the Internet are built into anything with electricity, and pedestrians glide by always
connected to the invisible Web (shades of the Matrix!)?
Perhaps it will be so. But for now, why not abandon those digital props, and like Louis Trimble, simply enjoy this lovely
autumn in New York, lingering, observing, and savoring the flavor of this amazing city in the old-fashioned, purely human
way?
Jefferson Flanders teaches in NYU’s journalism department.
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