Love Train Tour, Pt 2
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
New York, NY
Written by Jon Hecht, Photos by Gina Garcia
I’ve lived in New York City for 6 years now. It’s a city of the interlocking concrete grid, the Great White Way, the screech of subway brakes, and some not-bad dive bars that sometimes have good music. I realize that people who don’t live in this city are probably sick of people living here ranting about how great it is, especially considering how much it’s also what happens when a bunch of exceedingly rude cockroaches all start arguing about who has the best pizza.
But there’s a part of this metropolis that is somehow overlooked, despite all the annoying people talking about how great this overcrowded rat maze is. It’s interwoven by water. I’m obsessed with it. I have a roommate who works with boats, and most of my life is just living vicariously through her. I have a book called Gotham Unbound sitting on my coffee table, tracing the history of the city’s waterways ever since the Dutch came to this swamp. I have on numerous occasions read the Walt Whitman poem, “Mannahatta,” and relished in his version of an old (olde?) New York, when it was a “City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!/City nested in bays! my city!”
I guess that all of this is a roundabout way of saying that I really enjoyed seeing Nikki’s Wives and CeeLo Green on a boat in the Hudson River.
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