Hello from New York;

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    no viewshed ordinances here

    By Arnold G. York/publisher

    Greetings from New York City, the first stop on the overground railway to Paris.

    It’s the beginning of winter here, with cold crisp air and winter clothing. It takes some getting used to, traveling with equipment again; the layers of clothing, gloves, a hat. I’d forgotten the amount of time you spend constantly taking inventory of all your winter gear. If the outside is cold, the inside of every building is steam heated to the point you immediately have to go through a New York striptease, taking it all off to survive without suffering from heat prostration.

    New Yorkers don’t seem to notice it at all. I assume whatever internal thermostat allows them to stay comfortable under the intolerable conditions of heat has long since broken down in my body, and simply no longer works.

    Yesterday we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, something I hadn’t done in years. In the late afternoon sun it’s a spectacular view of lower New York harbor and the Statue of Liberty. There is a plaque on the bridge commemorating the building of the bridge at the turn of the century and the opening of the city of Brooklyn, then on its way to becoming one of the first big city suburbs.

    What I had forgotten was, that Brooklyn and New York were separate cities, which then consolidated into the one city we now know as New York City. At the turn of the century progress meant bigger was better. That meant joining everything together into one giant metropolis.

    One hundred years later we look at it differently, having seen the downside of bigger and bigger. We are definitely in the smaller-is-better phase now. Every place you turn in L.A. people are looking to secede: The San Fernando Valley, West L.A., Venice. It’s the same here. Staten Island, the smallest borough, keeps threatening to secede. I suspect most other New Yorkers wouldn’t give a damn if they did, since most have always viewed it as some strange outcast portion of the city.

    The interesting thing about New York is that people actually live here in the city. From the outside, what looks like a continuous metropolis is really a big string of connected neighborhoods, and, most important, most of it is covered on foot. Whereas practically everything we do in L.A. is in a car, in Manhattan it’s all walkable. Trying to drive cross-town is so difficult that feet are a lot easier and quicker. Whatever we end up doing in the center of Malibu, we ought to think about doing it on foot.

    The downside, of course, is that the scooter craze is as bad here as it is in L.A. But that added element of danger makes walking the streets just a little more exciting. You have to be constantly alert to these little helmeted, elbow-padded nightmares slaloming through city foot traffic.

    The city itself is looking pretty good. They’ve cleaned it up, replanted the parks and parkways, and in good economic times like this, particularly when the stock market is booming, the city coffers are filled. So in good years they clean everything up. Then in recession years, they just hunker down, let it all slide, and wait for the good years to come back.

    Like in Malibu, real estate is booming, and they’re recycling all their old buildings. Little town houses on the upper west side, which are renovated turn-of-the-century brownstones were slums, only a few years ago. They have been completely, and very expensively, recycled and are selling for a small king’s ransom. The hippest of the hip is to have a two-story loft in some old recycled industrial building in lower Manhattan, or on the other side of the river in Brooklyn Heights, which looks out at lower Manhattan and Wall Street.

    A little peek of river view does not come cheap, and is a major gamble because there are no view-protection ordinances. My sister’s apartment, which used to have a great view of the Hudson River, now has a great view of an even bigger high rise that stands between her and the Hudson.

    Still, the Big Apple is a fun place to visit, particularly when the Yankees and the Mets are winning.

    Tomorrow we’re off to Paris.