New York City  is one of the richest cities in the world, and yet I can say that it’s also quite poor. Now you would probably ask me how can New York with its millions of people, skyscrapers, corporate businesses, Wall Street, so on and so forth be poor? Well to start, having millions of people the daily lives of all these people are different. Not everyone lives on the upper west side, and we don’t all own properties, we can’t all shell out $500 on a designer bag and then go shop more. There are people like that in New York and this is what is commonly thought to be New York, we as a city are advertised like that. Welcome to the big apple, there’s a Starbucks at each corner. Have you seen the statue of liberty? Have you been to the Empire State building? Or even Time Square? How about Prospect park and Central park?. What we don’t advertise are the people who work humbly for minimum wage sometimes not even, the long hours poor benefits or even no benefits, we don’t advertise the fact that there are desolate lots in our city, or a completely abandoned ran down park. We don’t advertise these things and we don’t truly see these things they hide in the skin of New York like a festering sore. Now there are New Yorkers know about this, but yet they don’t really care about this situation, it doesn’t affect them. However they do love their city, their city but not the city. New Yorkers have in a way split himself apart and isolated each other and thus for every person there is a different New York.
When I took my  walk for this project I had no idea what I was going to juxtapose, however I luckily stumbled across something interesting to talk about. The path that I took was just me trying to get to York st station because for me to get home I take the F train uptown into Manhattan. Even though I was reluctant to take a detour from my usual path, cause to get  home I take the F at Metrotech. But I knew I had to look around Brooklyn eventually and continued on. When my day was done at City Tech I planned on taking a path that I have never taken before. I  exited the building from the main entrance and continued walking on Jay st in the direction of Tillary the buildings around here have a nice vibrant look  so they were clearly well maintained, I kept walking on Jay st until my friend had called me and asked If I wanted to hang out, and of course I would have rather done that, so In a way I took a detour from my detour. He had told me that he was going to wait for me at the intersection between Gold st and Sands st there was a small park near by to play basketball, still in a place I’ve never visited so I pulled out my phone map. I took myself towards that direction making a right on Concord st, as I continued on I noticed how the buildings got drastically dreary looking and they were a lot older than those around Jay st and the Metrotech area the amount of people I saw also dwindled as well. When I had gotten to Gold st I had realized this area was project housing. This area was ill maintained, the walls stained with watermarks, trash strewn across the area barely making it to the garbage can, and a nauseating stench. There was no one was around, this housing area was constructed by the loud road and bridge you could hear the cars wizz by and the roar of the trains, this place had seemed like a forgotten wasteland. This had stunned me, the contrast between here and the Metrotech area that I had been just 5 minutes away from its almost night and day but I had no idea this area was even here. It reminded me of  this line in “City Limits” Colson Whitehead had said  “Our old building still stand because we saw them, moved in and out of their long shadows, were lucky enough to know them for a time” these buildings have clearly been forgotten, forgotten by the city, completely  ran down, unlike the rest of our city that is so celebrated. We’ve forgotten about those that are less fortunate, and we forget that we are able to do things about it. The people here in the project housing live in a different New York then we do, and I would like to see these places built up once again or even renewed and integrated into the whole of New York City. I want to say that over there is a cool place to check out, or lets go hang out there play some basketball by that renovated park. To sum up what I want to say I’ll use what Colson Whitehead had said “I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else.” And that’s exactly how I feel, I love New York the city as a whole, I would not trade this place for any other place to be my home. And I would love to see my city prosper, not just the parts that are already prospering of course.
