Past, Present, Future

When you think of New York, what do you think of? The tall buildings, reaching out above the crowded sidewalks? The stars strutting around and the movies shot in one or the most famous cities in the world? Or is it the hustle and bustle that gives “the city that never sleeps” its title?

There’s a scene from the trailer of the soon-to-be-released movie, Lucy. The audience sees, from Lucy’s point of view, the reversal of time in the middle of (ironically) Times Square; she uncreates all the buildings, rips up the pavement, and changes cars back to the classic rounded style that we seem to romanticize so much. If any readers have seen Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, you know exactly what old-timey New York looks like. If we go even further back in time, according to a website dedicated to him, Dutch trader Peter Minuit bought the island of Manhattan from an unnamed group of Native Americans for the meager price of 60 Dutch guilders in 1626. Sixty guilders in this day and age would be a little less than the cost of an Apple MacBook Pro without Retina Display. Fast forward about 160 years, the United States of America’s first President, George Washington, was inaugurated here. Oh yes, it was the USA’s capital for five years, starting in 1785. New York has been the home if many literary, intellectual, and political movements, including the Harlem Renaissance, the Beatniks, the Lost Generation, New York School, Spoken Word and Performance Poetry, Nuyoricans, Black Arts, Romanticism, and Occupy Wall Street to name a few. New York has a long and infamous past as well; it’s impossible to say that it is the best city in the world. Tragedies that have taken place include the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, General Slocum, the sheer and continuing amount of police brutality against minorities, a history of corruption, and perhaps the most heartbreaking, the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

The attacks on the Twin Towers is as much of the city’s past as it is the city’s present, and possibly even the city’s future. It weighs on the hearts of all citizens of NYC, all the families of the over 3,000 people that lost their lives on that fateful day, and the hearts of the tourists that visit the memorial and the site of the towers. Many Americans, not just New Yorkers, view the incident with varying levels of anger, sadness, fear, and loss. Many more people saw the rallying of support, nationally and internationally, around our country and New York City as one of the most inspiring acts of humanity in modern history.

Right now, New York is the place to be, socially, politically, and career wise. There are, as of 2014, 8.3 million people in the city, and the number will double not too far in the future. But let’s talk about logistics. We’ve all seen the expanse of graves outside the city, miles and miles of gray stone waves undulating over the hills. If the popuation is to double, there needs to be more room for these people to live. By 2050, the United Nations have estimated that the world’s population is to increase to close to 10 billion. Besides the sheer amount of people, the amount of waste will increase as well. The amount of pollution will increase as well. At some point, New York will have to adopt greener practices. According to ArchDaily there should be mandatory recycling, an increased amount of personal and community gardens, a dependence on biogas, cleaner rivers, self healing concretes, metals, and plastics to decrease the amount of scaffolding throughout the city, and wind energy instead of fossil fuel. Another improvement that New York can make is solar roadways; if all roads in the USA were replaced by solar roadways, we can harness three times the energy we are currently using. New York is one of the greatest cities in the world, and has been for many years; if they adopt better practices in the future, it may even become a tolerable one.