Do Cities Sleep?
Message from Manhattan - May 2025
Hallo. First things first:
now has its own Substack and this one is my musings on the fully connected world of humans and machines.Connection in a city like New York, which I tend to visit several times a year and have done since the dawn of time (the dawn of my adult life anyway) is the sine qua non of the city.
Whether you chart the city’s telephone hub of AT&T and the first transcontinental call made from New York, or the digital “Silicon Alley” which made New York rival LA in the digital boom (this is good https://lithub.com/how-the-early-internet-helped-with-the-rebirth-of-new-york-city/) or you read Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, New York has always been an electric current of people, energy, industry, movement and ideas.
“At the subway station you wait fifteen minutes on the platform for a train. Finally a local, enervated by graffiti, shuffles into the station. You get a seat and hoist a copy of the New York Post. The Post is the most shameful of your several addictions. You hate to support this kind of trash with your thirty cents, but you are a secret fan of Killer Bees, Hero Cops, Sex Fiends, Lottery Winners, Teenage Terrorists, Liz Taylor, Tough Tots, Sicko Creeps, Living Nightmares, Life on Other Planets, Spontaneous Human Combustion, Miracle Diets and Coma Babies.” - Bright Lights, Big City (1984)
So in a way this city has not changed. Less actual newspaper, but people glued to screens of pulp non fiction nevertheless. Absorbed, alone.
In a subway the other day a man - ironically wearing a lanyard proclaiming Canada and its flag - sat down with his screen showing a pop video which we could all hear, as he had helpfully and insouciantly attached it to a speaker.
The subway car rumbled on, our eyes were down: no-one wanted to take on the crazy man, disconnected from life but fully connected to his device.
Above ground, well there's is the always-on anyone who comes here will recognise. The rushing, the blaring, the wide awake sense of a city which is not interested in sleep.
Yet oddly New York restaurants close early: it’s all over by 10pm. It’s not Madrid. It's not Cairo or Jeddah or Mumbai. In that respects it’s a bit of a chimera. Great cocktails - but early.
Right at the bottom of the picturesque and slightly peculiar window display snapped on 5th Avenue, not far from Trump Tower, which shall we say over communicates with its gaudy gold, I did notice the smallness of the taxis relative t the buildings towering above.
Literal depiction of scale, yes, but also emblematic of something else: New York taxis embraced digital payments but there’s no AI in them, unlike the buildings where smart money is going on smart systems to help you enter, log in, be monitored, served, the air cleaned or cooled or heated etc.
The big yellow taxi is a very human thing still in this city, in spite of the TV screens wedged into its faded leather, and in spite of the ubiquitous card reader.
And that not-quite-fully connected element of New York remains its joy for me: no driverless cars: yet.