An Isle of Joy
The more I visit New York City, the less big it feels. Its grandeur — the pure sweep and scope of humanity and the density of its built environment — is no less thrilling than when I first started going as a teen-ager, but it’s cleaner, safer and friendlier than ever.
I can only figure that it seems less big to me because I have been there often and take the perspective of someone who lives in a city. I used to visit there from a small town when it was filthy, unsafe and no one made eye contact. 
Clean, safe, friendly places are stable incubators of community. You can negotiate them on a human scale, no matter how big they are.
New York may not be America’s most liveable city; we all know which one that is. But it is the most inspiring and stimulating.
Nearly every October, I go for a few days, and I always stay with friends on the Lower East Side who have a 19th floor apartment with a balcony looking south. I lay in the guest room — the living room — at night looking out the picture window at the new World Trade Center. What will be a towering building on the skyline at the bottom of the island is now a work in progress, a spectacle of tiny lights climbing up to where three cranes sit like giant woodpeckers to finish the top.
Each day, we walked. And walked. And walked. But I have never walked enough to know how far I can walk without being unable to walk anymore. In past trips I have walked from Harlem all the way to the Battery, and another time from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine all the way to The Strand on Broadway, which advertises 81 miles of books.
Leave me there and come back in four hours and I’m still not ready to leave. But we did a 40 minute sweep of the Strand between lunch and coffee at Cafe Reggio on MacDougal Street in the Village. These are places I return to to confirm that although all things change, some stay the same for a while.
One gorgeous day, we walked in Central Park and stopped to pay our respects at the Imagine memorial just off Central Park West near the Dakota apartments where John Lennon lived and died. Many people stood around it, their fingers jammed in their jeans pockets, their heads bowed. A photo of John sat propped on the mosaic circle, on which people have laid handfuls of roses and other flowers. My friend Steve left some morning glory seeds in the center.
Then we walked up to W. 86th to meet my old friend Bob for some happy hour Belgian beer and buckets of mussels.