The Moynihan Train Hall in Manhattan is a major portal through which people of the world come to see the greatness of New York City. This is the Amtrak train stop, and the new train station is tolerably fine, if not as thrilling as Grand Central Station.
The problems begin once you start walking around within a four-block radius. The muck is everywhere. The people are a mess. There is this strange feeling of wreckage. The stench of weed, human waste, and trash is everywhere, each element competing with the others for dominance.
I was never tempted to wear a mask for COVID-19, but I wished I had one on this Saturday day trip. It was almost unbearable. I was in a suit and tie. I’ve never felt so out of place. People were looking at me like I was a visitor from another time or place, wondering what I was doing there.
This was the daytime. I cannot imagine what happens after nightfall. The experience was alarming, to say the least. In New York City, tens of thousands of businesses closed their doors because of COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and the hell that followed. Longtime residents fled and the migrants moved in. The city has never recovered.
I was headed to a venue for lunch, which turned out to be a private club. I entered into a new world with plush sofas and curtains and polite staff. I sat to wait for my lunch partner and looked at the realistic flower display on the coffee table. I touched a flower, only to discover that it was real. The entire thing was real. I could only marvel at the magnificence of such a creation. It was clearly the result of master craftsmanship. Fresh, too!
The contrast between the outside and inside was truly alarming. How can the outdoors be so unbearably shabby and the indoors be so wonderful? Something is odd. Later, I looked up the cost of the club. It’s not tremendously expensive: $5,000 per year, which entitles you to eat there and pay, stay there for a fee, and otherwise be safe in a jungle (I’m sure that jungles are cleaner).
Long a champion of private property and membership rights, I totally get it. With membership, you control the environment, keep out the riffraff, and enforce the rules. It’s the path to preserving the beauty in certain spaces and maintaining high quality. Such clubs have every right to exist. Good for them.
That said, there is a sense of tragedy here, too. It’s like this entire area of town and many other areas have utterly given up on what we used to call the commons. These are spaces shared by everyone: the streets, the air, the public houses. There was a time in U.S. history when our commons were glorious, like those of Paris. Restaurants were places for the public. Great restaurants were public accommodations.
My concern is that we are increasingly just letting all our common spaces go to the dogs. That’s an expression meaning that roaming dogs just eat and live wherever. But of course, there are no roaming dogs in Manhattan. They would be snapped up by animal control in minutes.
The same is not true of the homeless, the bums, the criminals, the vagabonds, the drugged, the layabouts: They are the ones allowed to roam free and wreck the place for everyone else.
To be sure, I’m not the one with the answers about what to do about this problem. If someone made me dictator over New York City, I would have no idea where to begin with fixing it. It seems too far gone to me. Fanning out brutal cops throughout the city would not get us where we want to be, not really. Banning drugs and weed hardly seems practical. No amount of spending alone would restore the city.
The real problems seem much deeper, tracing to a demoralized population, a frightened merchant class, and city workers that seem to have given up. Not even the sewer system seems to be working anymore, unless the stench is really from people who gave up looking for an open public restroom and instead decided to just treat the sidewalk as their toilet (as has happened in San Francisco).
How many communities are going in this direction?
Is all of America headed toward becoming a place dominated by members-only spaces? I genuinely hope not. I miss the commons. I’m unpersuaded by the idea that we should just abandon them to the jackals, whether animal or human. We need common experiences, common spaces, common environments. There is no getting around it.
I’m all for privatization, but private everything? I once believed that this would be the ideal, but the reality is not shaping up as I imagined it would. That seems like a different country than the one in which I lived only a decade or so ago.
I’m for private property, but there is no getting around the need for public access. And I don’t just mean for libraries and churches. I mean for stores, bars, restaurants, streets, and views. More and more, these spaces are having to seal themselves off.
We used to hear that without the government, there would be no streets, but now you can’t drive in New England without an electronic zippywop on your car to pay the endless tolls. It can get expensive.
None of this is a good sign for the direction of civilization.
Let’s consider another example: Costco, a thrilling business enterprise and a wonderful store. It’s remarkable how great the prices and quality are. I was just there, and it felt safe and fun. The entrepreneurs and managers of the store deserve every congratulation.
That said, you simply cannot get in without a membership. To be sure, this is one reason for how wonderful it is.
Do you see the point I’m making here? Was there a time when public-access groceries were this great? Yes, there was. These days, the walls seem to be closing in, to the point at which normal public access is going away.
Loyalty programs offer price discounts and they love getting extra data from you. But even these are getting out of hand, to the point of extreme price discrimination, as if to punish anyone who would dare think that he could just come in off the street and buy something. Loyalty programs are members-only solutions by piecemeal.
In many cities, the public stores have ever more items under lock and key, even things such as hand lotion and laundry detergent. This is a response to rampant criminality. This, too, is a surreptitious means of stopping access. It is entirely necessary, to be sure. It’s no less a tragic commentary on our times.
In San Francisco, everyone knows that anyone is more or less entitled to steal up to $1,000 of goods from stores and get away with it. This is why so many retail shops are leaving. Those that are staying are also restricting themselves to being private places accessible only to paying members.
How much of our lives is headed this way? I don’t blame the businessmen and owners for doing this. They are only trying to survive in lawless times, when police can no longer be bothered to enforce basic standards of civility. The forced immigration of millions of people in a few short years, people with no interest in acculturation, has not helped.
But look at the big picture. We are losing the commons. We are losing public spaces. Public life is degraded. National culture is shattered. To be sure, many public spaces still exist in functioning communities. I personally treasure our local gardens and parks that are open to all. They symbolize social trust and high-functioning communities. I take pride in them and use them constantly.
How long will they be around? No one knows, not with the current trajectory of putting the whole of civilized life behind a paywall. No, I do not have the answers. They probably trace to some kind of spiritual renewal, something that no politician or city manager can engineer.
My plea is simply that we shouldn’t acquiesce and be just fine with living amidst crime, squalor, and addiction as long as we can find a paywalled hiding place for ourselves. This is not a good life. This is not thriving. This is not civilization. In the long run, we really have no choice but to protect public life from vandals. How to get from here to there is another question entirely.
