Gotham impressions

It is said that as in New York it is 3 in the afternoon in Europe it is 9 PM of ten years before.

In spite of its relatively short history as a city (the Dutch founded New Amsterdam on Manhattan's southernmost tip in 1624), you get the feeling you find yourself right in the middle of a place where big things happened and continue to happen. As if the History, to compensate for a late start, raced by at vertiginous speeds.



That's maybe the reason why New Yorkers live fast: people talk fast, people eat fast, cabs drive fast, pedestrians walk fast, people laugh fast and, I guess, they dream fast. Or maybe it is the other way around, and it is precisely them who accelerate the Big Clock's pace with their uncorrectable crossing in red and their never ending horn symphonies.





New York City has a soul, even though the multiple and surprisingly contradictory identities she possesses, turning one into the other as you walk few steps, even as you cross to the other side of the street. This is nothing new, though. Visitors to the seventeenth century Dutch settlement marveled that eighteen separate languages were spoken on its streets at a time when its total population was below one thousand. But New York City has a young and strong soul. You just need to stand in the middle of the street, in the middle of the roar, to feel its powerful beat below your feet.




New York City conveys a strange feeling of familiarity in all her faces, in all her images. No matter where you look at, a known icon will impress your retina, the frame of that one movie, a picture that maybe never existed, but which was long ago digested by the collective subconscious after decades of audiovisual exports.




As you walk out the door, you face the most difficult decision of the day: should we turn to the left (to the south, downtown) or to the right (to the north, uptown)? But in fact it's the same, because this city is great in all directions.



It is said that comic editors gave instructions to new illustrators and writers to help them with the locations for their stories. Metropolis, Superman's city, is Manhattan's Midtown on a sunny day at noon. Gotham, Batman's city, is Downtown Manhattan on a rainy night. And Harlem is Harlem, of course. We could walk around Metropolis to exhaustion. But unfortunately we did not get the chance to see Gotham. The only time it rained we were in Harlem.