by Ron Singer.
Everyone knows about the rich and poor,
and the so-called ‘inner” and “outer” boroughs
—although even that’s in flux, what with
the resurgence of Brooklyn (prices, that is).
Many City-zens are also aware
of how street grids create “Manhattan-henge,”
and we love the perpendicular lines
of brick-and-mortar architecture.
But stop to consider some of the ways
that change in the city creates new contrasts,
and the hidden ones that have long been here.
Take the grid, which includes anomalies
such as the improbable intersection
of West Fourth and Twelfth Streets,
in Greenwich Village, where life is like fiction.
Consider, too, the reflecting skyline.
New glass skyscrapers at crazy angles
vie for pride of place with the handsome old
stone behemoths of yesteryear.
To return to ground level, roads once built
for four-wheeled vehicles —trucks, buses, cars—
must learn to cope with two-wheeled competitors:
like electric bicycles, scooters,
Segways, and all the other traffic-dodgers,
ad infinitum, ad destructivum.
Do we need designated lanes, alongside
those already set aside for pedaled bikes?
Is it time to update Moses’ BQE?
Has “traffic jam” become a redundancy?
Change, they say, is good for the human brain,
but, like other things, too much change, too fast,
can cause fatigue and serial breakdowns
in our neural pathways (not to mention
robots’, whose circuits are prone to the same).
Is there no way, then, to achieve an ideal rate
of change in the city —to spare our poor brains.