Well, we’re nearing the winter solstice, which means living in New York City becomes even more like living in a cave. We’re finally shipping ourselves and the dogs back to DC this weekend for a total crash-out Christmas. You know what I’m craving the most, after living in a second floor apartment in one of the less built-up neighborhoods in Manhattan? Light. Just light. Last year was the first in my life when my bloodwork came back with a Vitamin D deficiency. And I’m not alone, as this city of darkness grows ever more impenetrable:
On Ludlow Street in Lower Manhattan, Alice O’Malley, a photographer, now gazes dolefully across the street at the relentless rise of her neighbor due west — a 20-story hotel that has wiped out the last of her apartment’s gentle pink light.
On the Upper West Side, Ilonna Pederson greets a darkened apartment for the second winter after nearly 50 years there; her southern windows were bricked over a year ago to make way for a high-rise inches away. And in a once-sunny pocket of the far West Village, many are finding themselves in the large penumbra cast by the newly built 150 Charles, which rises 15 stories and houses 91 residences selling for an average of $8.6 million.
“Going higher and staying narrow would’ve allowed light and air,” said George Sanders, 58, who, with neighbors, waged a losing battle to get an alternate structure built. “Now we’re just plunged into darkness. It’s just too bad.”
I went to a party a couple of months back to mourn a friend’s loss of view and sunlight. I haven’t lost it, I’m glad to say. I never had it. Maybe a half hour of reflected sunlight a day is all I can get at almost any time of the year. What I didn’t understand about New York until I actually lived here is that all that amazing skyline is, for actual non-one-percent residents, a series of vast, light-blocking concrete blinds, shuttering out elemental things like the sun or even clouds. There isn’t even greenery anywhere unless you go to that massive over-kill, Central Park, which much of the city never stumbles across. How do you live without sunlight or green, without the sky and grass? I guess I grew up in a rural part of Sussex. To live without trees or green or birdsong or sunlight is just not part of my DNA.
What will I miss in New York City?
A great parish … hanging with a couple of great friends more regularly, while leaving many more friendships back in DC … and, er, that’s it. I should have moved to Brooklyn, I suppose. But then I already live in the equivalent in Adams Morgan in Washington. Everything else – the vast sucking sound of your wallet being emptied, the daily street warfare, the boundless self-love and provincialism, the mad cults of money and property and buzz – I can’t wait to leave behind.
I’ll be back, of course. And maybe when I don’t live here, I can learn to love New York the way I used to, with blinders on, enjoying the madness for brief periods of time, after which I can return to live in something most human beings would call civilization. I don’t regret coming here for a year and a half. It was vital to keep the Dish on the road. But at some point, the city of darkness overwhelms the human spirit. And you long to be where the sun sometimes shines.
Update from a reader, who gives me a kick on the way out:
You left. Good for you. Just as I left the shit-hole that is DC (and from where most of my friends cannot wait to escape). There have been more negative articles written about DC than NYC this year (including Sam Youngman’s recent ripper in Politico). You enjoy it more. Go. Stop blogging about New York. It is tired, and honestly beneath you. New York didn’t owe you anything.
Another New Yorker:
I live in a lovely (rental) apartment with great light, a living room with windows on three sides and the trees from the backyard next door reaching up to my third-floor window. And I live there because … it’s the apartment I chose to live in. Why take an apartment you don’t like and then blame the entire city for it?
Another:
Andrew, I love you. But if you ever state that Adams Morgan is the equivalent of Brooklyn again, I’m canceling my subscription. Adams Morgan is a single neighborhood in DC. Brooklyn is the most populous borough in New York City, with 60+ neighborhoods, depending on who is counting. Wikipedia tells me that Brooklyn has 2.6 million people while Adams Morgan has 0.016 Million. “They both have hipsters” is not the same thing as equivalence, thank you very much.
Another in Queens:
Brooklyn? Really, you should’ve moved to Queens. I mean, I saw a peregrine falcon on the opposite apartment’s roof the other day. And provincialism? Pretty hard to find in a borough that speaks 138 languages … but I ain’t here to defend my wounded New York pride. I’m here to praise your beloved England’s excellent common sense about the matter of sunlight in cities. Check this out: the law of “ancient lights,” passed in 1663 and still on the books – and very much in active use. We should’ve been so wise.
Another much farther north:
Here in Fairbanks, Alaska, this solstice weekend, we are enjoying a grand total of three hours and forty-two minutes of daylight. As I write this email at 10:35 AM, the sun is not yet risen. When the sun does finally crawl above the horizon at 10:58 AM, it will climb a total of 1.7 degrees above the horizon before sinking back at 2:41 PM. Think of the amount of light you get in the last ten minutes before sunset and you have an idea of high noon in Fairbanks. A hundred miles north of here the sun never clears the horizon at all.
So you don’t get much love from us for complaining about New York being dark.
(Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty)
The Dish 