Yesterday morning, when I arrived at the park, I made a point of taking a picture of the street, which was closed a few weeks ago as part of the mayor’s lackluster open-streets initiative. It wasn’t much, of course — this road through the middle of Fort Tryon Park should have been closed to private vehicles a long time ago — but I felt like it was important to document something good, a policy response, that had arisen during the pandemic. I wanted to have evidence that this closed street had existed in the event the mayor opens it up again, as he has said he will do as soon as things get back to ‘normal.’ (I also admired the New York City Helvetica typeface of the sign, which is maybe a small example of something beautiful about the city that those leaving will never find in the suburbs.)
I’ve also had a long relationship with this hill. I’ve run down it thousands of times. I’ve trained for marathons on this hill, running 400, 600, and 800-meter intervals on the way up before jogging down and repeating. (These are brutal workouts.) I did one of these workouts last summer in the very early hours of the morning on the day that Dante died, which means I sometimes think about Dante when I’m running down this hill. I’ve pulled my hamstring on this hill (and pretended that the injury wasn’t as bad as it really was). Once, when I was running down this hill, my phone bounced out of my pocket and the screen broke when it hit the pavement. Another time, in the pre-dawn after a storm, I tripped on some fallen branches. If I’m running down this hill in the early morning, which is usually the case, the sun, rising in the east, will filter through the bank of leaves on the bushes that line the right side of the road, and the light is grainy and saturated like an old film, and for a few seconds I feel like I’m flying through time. I’ve had cars come very close to hitting me as they speed down the hill and follow the bend to the right. I don’t blame them for speeding or being reckless; the road invites that kind of driving. As with so many other parts of the city, the park is not built for cars, but for people. Who thought it was ever a good idea to build what’s effectively a race track through the park, where people walk and jog and bike? It’s good to know that, for a little while, the mayor has acknowledged this basic fact about the park, even though he’s done nothing for the rest of the city.
Or in some cases, he’s done worse than nothing. As I noted last week, or maybe two weeks ago, the NYPD — looking for a sense of purpose in the pandemic — have recently started to invade sidewalks and bike paths with their SUVs. Here’s a shot of Riverside Drive at 150th that I took on Friday around 6:30 in the morning. It probably seems like a small thing, but it’s yet another example of why the police are distrusted. They don’t engage; they obstruct and intimidate. They hassle (black) people; they give off the edgy anger of someone looking for a fight. Like most who exude this kind of anger, when given the slightest pretext, they snap.
This kind of policing is a (another) reason why there should be no talk of going back to ‘normal’ from anyone in a position to lead us away from normal. The old normal is police brutality and income inequality and environmental degradation, the effects of which are disproportionately shouldered by minority and working-class people. It’s so obvious — and so obviously unfair and immoral — that it seems almost laughable to point it out, or to express surprise when an ‘incident’ boils over into the kinds of protests we have been seeing. One of the reasons I supported Bernie is that he was the only candidate (among the presidential nominees) who seemed capable of expressing the outrage that the situation in our country calls for. Democrats like Biden and de Blasio call for ‘calm’ without acknowledging that a return to calm has always meant a return to the immoral conditions that created the unrest.
In addition to our leadership, there are a lot of people who are too insulated from the problems related to policing and inequality to understand why anyone would protest anything. We can imagine these people driving on a highway, admiring the vistas without realizing that the shoulder of the road is covered with the bones of those who built it.
So far, this has been the year of asking what it will take for our leadership to change. The death, the unemployment, and the violence isn’t prospective: it’s here, killing us. How could there *not* be massive protests?
What’s equally dismaying is that the solutions to our many problems are equally apparent; but none of them involve ‘going back to normal.’
There’s an ugly, dangerous road — a superhighway, filled with speeding cars — that has been built though the middle of our country.
It’s time to close it, permanently, or at least slow it down so that everyone has same opportunity to get from one place to another.
