The cacophony
Posted: 10/10/2025
I was reminded, for some reason, of the New York subway system recently. When I was there, alone, in November last year, I found the subway to be a place that oddly gave me some solace. It felt like the heart of the city, always bringing me back to my hostel on Amsterdam Ave. and back out the next morning. The smells, the water dripping onto the tracks when the rain came, the steam venting out as you passed by a station above ground, the real cross section of humanity that you witnessed in those dirty and vaunted hallways that gave you the ability to get around the greatest city in the world. It was quite grounding too...
I remember fairly fondly the morning I visited the Dumbo district in Brooklyn. (I only had enough time to visit Brooklyn for that one day, and I wish I were more organised.) I was trying to go over the Brooklyn Bridge to the financial district which I planned to see in the afternoon. I started walking, feeling the rush of wind as the silver vessels of the subway passed by, when I realised that I was looking at the Brooklyn Bridge from about half a kilometre away- I was actually trotting along the Manhattan Bridge! I stood there for about 5 minutes in the middle on the bridge, suspended over the East River, listening to the carriages clunker by and wondering how I managed to mix up the two. But it was not all too bad; I ended up in Chinatown!!!
Photos taken in NYC in November last year. The first on the corner of 10th Ave and West 37th (I think???) in Manhattan, and the second in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
Note: apparently I can't spell cacophony.