Photo at the Dia:Beacon art gallery in New York City. By Gabrielle Lipton.
Being in New York City tends to bring out my inner Nell.
On a good day, I look and feel more like the type to crawl out of a yurt than walk past a doorman. I like visiting cities, but I’m more comfortable outside of them and New York City is a place I find more imposing than others of scale.
My past visits there were as a six-year-old religiously obsessed with a book called “The Adventures of Taxi Dog” and during a dark period when I had braces and wore windbreaker pants. It’s always been an exciting and seemingly endless place, but I’ve kept it at arm’s length – a drove of lights and billboards and scaffolds that didn’t warrant the awe of redwoods or ocean swells. Plus the taxis weren’t actually driven by Labradors.
But last week I went back and was reminded the value of revisiting places at different periods in life and stepping outside of yourself to experience them as others do. I stayed with two of my best friends from college who shared their love of the city with me like a gift, taking me around to their favorite spots and introducing me to people in their lives who endeared them to their new home. I started to love it because I could see how they did.
As a kid, New York existed as the space in and around mainstays like Times Square, the Statue of Liberty and Central Park. This trip I spent hours getting lost in Brooklyn’s Hasidic Jewish neighborhoods, admiring the panoramic from the Williamsburg Bridge, eating Egyptian Falafel and Punjabi Indian food in the same day and sipping on a bit of mushroom tea at the Dia:Beacon art gallery.
At Dia:Beacon it dawned on me that what I loved most about the museum was what I love most about a place like New York City: watching how others interact with it all. Every type of person wove through the exhibits in the same way they do the city’s streets. I realized there is an experience to be had in New York City where you passively admire landmarks and attractions, but another where you focus on how the city is shaped by the people who are living and visiting there. The New York that existed in my memory as concrete and traffic lights was supplemented with new experiences like subway concerts and playing banjolin with a little boy in Harlem.
Revisiting reminded me that sometimes a totally new trip is going back to a place you’ve been but in a different time, with a different perspective. Seeing the city with and through my friends reminded me the value of appreciating a place for what others see it as. I can only imagine that my next return to New York City will be the discovery of a whole new place.
Alex Baumhardt is a freelance writer currently based in Iceland, where she is writing for The Reykjavik Grapevine. She has worked for the Land Stewardship Project, and her writing has appeared on lostgirlsworld.com, the Matador Network, Global Journalist and German-based Retomag and has been recognized by the Missouri Press Association and her grandma. Follow her adventures @AlexBaumhardt.
