An Excursion to the UN

This morning I went on my final excursion aside from the trip I'll be taking back to the airport tomorrow. It is a freezingly cold day, and the downtrodden icy snow on the sidewalks is a definite hazard, though in Manhattan the ground is laced with salt, which improves the matter. No clouds, only clear sky. This means that tomorrow it'll be colder, but on the other hand there won't be snow that would prevent my flight from taking off.

I went to the UN Building today, as I didn't know anything else I especially wanted to see, and it is accessible from the E and V trains with a little walking. The streets in between Lexington Ave/53rd station and the UN are pleasantly grungy as far as the apartment buildings are concerned, gnarled brick edifices so dark with age that they look black, but host to a lively though mostly hidden variety of stores and inhabitants. Along the sidewalks the people were of all sorts of ages and origins and income levels; they weren't thronging along, but merely happened to drift by. Of course there are lots of skyscrapers, too. It could be a seedy place but it isn't, only interesting. One of the benefits of southern Manhattan's condensed layout is, as far as I've seen, that everybody goes everywhere and there isn't much ghettoization.

The UN building itself is adrift in a wasteland of road and empty waterfront, and there is construction being done at the row of flagpoles, which are bare. So, though the tower itself was distinctive and recognizable, it had a sad and isolated air. There was a tented visitor's entrance, where a security official or two was standing, but I had no intention of having my purse searched, etc., so I stood in front of it for a while and took in the surrounding scene, and left again.

In general I find that the New York of popular culture is a very boring and untruthful depiction of the real thing. Physically, it is much too glamourized in films and photos, and one only truly sees a tiny, and then unrealistically aesthetically homogenized, portion of it. Psychologically, the most fascinating nuances of the people who live here are ignored in favour of facile stereotypes. As for the poorer areas, it's not fair to cast violence as the only problem in the poorer areas, and to absolve society at large of all responsibility. One has to look at cause and effect. The greater problem, I'd say, is that the infrastructure is so severely lacking. The greatest problem is ghettoization: living in circumstances that others can't understand, not being able to get out of a neighbourhood, and not having the resources at hand that one needs. That said, I think that conditions are changing. The neighbourhood of the hostel is predominantly black, but you only have to look at the people to see that they have as different personalities, backgrounds, and mentalities, as if (to employ a rather grandiloquent phrase) they were all the colours of the rainbow.

At any rate, I'm extremely glad I came here, not only as an amateur observer but also for myself. It has given me a lot of courage and energy.