A Walk in Manhattan

Cold is the main word I can use to describe my walk through Manhattan from the intersection of Wall and South streets (after being dropped off by the NY Water Taxi Ferry from the Brooklyn Army Terminal on 58th Street) up to the Starbucks on 41st and Park Avenue, yesterday. And after a distance of roughly 4 miles in under an hour I was pleased to reward myself with a crispy marshmallow square (because they are too scared to call it a Rice Krispy Treat) and an iced tea.

But the point of this story is Manhattan itself, without its mass transit system. And quite a mess it was. Cabs were everywhere running to and fro, filled with 3 to 4 different passengers, all going to different locations. The police were out enforce: directing traffic, handling disputes and keeping the city calm. The people were everywhere. I have never seen so maybe people walking through so many streets in Manhattan. Side streets, main streets, back alleys; it’s true that during the day the population of Manhattan swells to over 8 million people, but yesterday these people, who are usually working or taking the subway, were walking everywhere, on every street I turned. Long lines of people were waiting for private buses that were nowhere to be found, or waiting for the city busses to come back. Others were pilling into cabs or just walking the same as I.

Today, the strike is over and the mass transit system is back to normal (if you can call slow, rude and dirty normal) and we are glad to have them back. I wasn’t terribly inconvenienced by the strike, but it did anger me, mainly the ignorance of the striking workers. None of them seemed to realize why he strike was happening, they all had different reasons and they were all different from their president’s public reasons. I consider myself to be a progressive (not communist!), pro-labor guy; but this was a blatant abuse of power that cost New York City over $1 billion in lost economic revenue, probably killed a large number of small businesses, endangered a lot of lives and made this a miserable Christmas season.

Still, it’s over. When you ride the subway or take a bus in the next few days, instead of being angry or frustrated, look at the transit worker, take mayor Bloomberg’s advice and


Wisdom of the Day: say: “Glad to have you back, we missed you.”