Don't Cross at the Crosswalk

Vampire Cyborgs of Manahatta

• You and me are vampires. Our weird, over-built minds are drenched in jet fuel, unleaded gas and coal. The great nights we've had in the far-flung corners of our personal maps were all facilitated by fast travel and electricity. We've sucked the black blood of the earth from her veins and burned it to make ourselves smarter, safer, and more voracious than ever. Was it worth it?

• The first intercity railroad in the world connected Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. Before this, the fastest thing on land was a galloping horse. People wondered if humans would be able to breathe traveling so fast. Were they right?

• I'm tucked in at a coffee shop on 34th after giving a tour on the High Line. It's an unworldly place, full of retooled industrial buildings and wild new condo towers. I am never not overwhelmed by the amount of work required to build and maintain this place. The High Line itself is built on a defunct railroad built in the 1940s, that was itself built to replace ground-level tracks laid down in the 1840s. What has 200 years of irrational speed done to our perceptions of reality?

• Before the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, time was a local concept. You couldn't move fast enough to get out of the bubble. But once people could wake up in Liverpool, lunch in Manchester and sup back home on Merseyside, the world was suddenly much smaller. People started to talk about the 'annihilation of time and space', made possible by the burning of coal. Was this the moment we became cyborgs, or was it earlier, when we first picked up tools?

• Reliable service required time to be the same in Liverpool and Manchester. As railroads spread rapidly across the globe in the mid 1800s, so too did this new, shared concept of time and precision. We know what we gained. Do we know what we lost?

• At the southern terminus of the High Line used to be the centuries-old Lenape village and tobacco fields of Sapohanikan, connected to the rest of the island by trails through the woods. In the 1630s, the Lenape were violently removed by the Dutch. Now there's a Shake Shack. 400 years later, should we care?

• A person with one watch knows what time it is, but a person with two is never sure.

• Whenever feasible, don't cross at the crosswalk. Don't submit to the tyranny of the orthogonal. Time is not slave to seconds, minutes, and centuries. Don't forget what it's like to follow a winding footpath through the forest. The highway, train track and street will get you where you're going, but they will bend you in ways that are difficult to see.

Thank you for absorbing these pixels. Long live New York City, land of hope and regret.

DF