“ Welcome to the greatest city in the world.”
This and glorious rain was how New York City greeted me on my first day on its shores last Friday.
Boasting your city is the best is akin to saying to your friend, ” My mother’s cooking is the best,” as she nods vigorously ready to make the same claim about her own mother.
My residence this summer is technical. I live on the 9th floor of the historic Anthorp building on the corner of 79th and Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan Island in New York City.
Stepping out of my cab, I looked around me and felt like a google map, zooming out, layer by layer into the vastness of the world– a tinier particle with every click. But this was now my place and people for the next ten weeks. How could I acquaint myself with this island of 1.5 million people?
I set out the next day, a bright Saturday morning, to walk around my neighborhood, and did, walking the perimeter of one hundred and two blocks by evening.
I headed east. Central Park is my first destination. Broadway. Amsterdam. Columbus. These handful of streets are now my markers, signs that I am almost there. ( I am going to write a separate entry about Central Park; it deserves it’s own!) Being engulfed by lush green foliage is a welcome shock to the body and I linger as long as I can before hiking north through the weathered park trails until emerging out at 110th St.
I walked furthered north toward the heart of the Columbia University campus: the College Walk and South Lawn. Flanked on opposing side are two majestic sanctuaries of the mind also known as libraries. The white luminous columns support the upper structure which have the names of the greatest Greek philosophers etched boldly across it.
As I exit out of this academic stronghold onto 116th and Broadway, a girl runs after me. We end up praying together on the street corner because she saw me smile towards her and her friends singing praise and worship songs at the university gate. Two members of the body of believers intersect at a particular time and place in a city that seems to swallow you up whole. We part with joyful hearts because of this binding work of the Spirit.
I turn west. One city block later, I am at staring into Riverside Park, which runs along the mighty Hudson River, the initial attraction, but I find respite in the park’s towering trees lining the four-mile walking path as I move south, observing the games played on the endless sports fields parallel to road. Smiling broadly, I know I’ve found a hidden gem I will visit again.
I cross east at 90th St and pass West End Ave and then I’m on Broadway again ( FYI: that on Broadway– jazz hands flailing– is still 30 blocks south also known as Times Square), back on my block, which I now observe is a major retail district, holding storefronts for banks, grocers, retail business, and restaurants. This was once the home of much of the city’s artists but gentrification of the area in the 70s and 80s makes my neighborhood now synonymous to upscale and unaffordable.
But the people milling around me are now my neighbors. God has brought me here to serve and love a place still unfamiliar to me and love people whom I have yet to meet. Walking the streets of my neighborhood makes me confident I won’t need my city map much longer but my heart is still restless until I remember the words I read that morning from Deuteronomy 33.12:” Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him, for he shields him all day long, and the one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders. ” My home is first and always in Christ, I can rest secure that it is not knowledge of this city that will make feel less of a stranger but communion with our Triune God that will allow the grace for my new neighbors and I to belong to one another.
Not ready to end the tour yet, I fly southbound past the window shops and synagogues to my last stop, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Performance Center, home to the New York Ballet, Philharmonic, Opera and the Juliard School. With no show ticket in hand to give me entrance, I stop and turn around at 60th St because it’s late and even though I am in the city that never sleeps, I, on the other hand, relish the thought.
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