New York

Map

November 25–30, 2011

After landing at the Delta terminal, I spent two and a half hours in line at passport control. Moscow hasn’t had conditions this crappy—in terms of appearance and waste of time—in about ten years.

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There are still stacks in the street venting underground steam above the cars.

Every taxi passenger is greeted by the mayor of the city and some other transportation dude. Again—God forbid anything like this were to exist back home in Russia.

But New York has its plus sides. The subway ticket machines speak Russian and take credit cards.

And there are real Christmas trees for sale on every corner.

The whole city is decorated with giant holiday symbols. Huge Nutcrackers. Enormous Christmas bon-bons. Gargantuan tree ornaments.

A homeless man sleeps tranquilly on the LOVE sculpture.

Trees are fenced off on three sides—from pedestrians.

The railing at the subway entrance has rotted away.

The train on the platform consists of vintage cars dating from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Curiously, individual handholds used to be made of metal; they were quite hefty and had a mechanical spring to snap them back into place.

It’s also interesting that there used to be fans right on the ceiling. If you’re on the tall side, they could easily whack you on the head.

The train is a live exhibit of the Transit Museum. The passengers—so it seems—have aged together with these cars and never left.

Not far from the city, on the shore of the bay three minutes away from the Floyd Bennett Field airport, is the site of a former municipal landfill. The landfill was capped fifty years ago and forgotten. The airport closed. And the ocean began to gradually erode the shoreline, eventually exposing all the refuse from the mid-20th century. It’s all clean and pretty now. What’s left is mostly glass, ceramics and a bit of rubber. The metal has almost fully decayed.