Professor Nolan Chessman GS 102 Pre-College Writing 3 August 2013 Thalyann Olivo

Finding Peace in the City that Never Sleeps

A cold blast of air sends a shiver up my spine, blinded by the glare of bright snow and city lights, but the barren streets, to me, are worth the trouble. The masses are either shopping for the holiday season or in the shelter of their homes trading up exploration for comfort, leaving me to peacefully roam as I please. Those that still make their way onto the streets shudder at the sight of sheets of ice forming on the sidewalk and the slush rolling across the ground as cars chew it into a dark paste, but I enjoy being able to have an excuse to lunge carelessly over these obstacles like a forest creature.

This is the time where it doesn't matter if you look ridiculous while traversing anything that seems easy enough to walk through because, well, everyone is expected to look a bit silly in the snow. It is the hilarity of living in a big city. When it is especially high there are always small trains of people following in the valleys of trodden heaps of ice, which makes no sense to me as I watch them because they're bound to slip in the compact slush; I take my chances walking over fresh, fluffy sheets instead. The snow's presence presents me with the rare opportunity to travel in silence for the day seems still and empty, the exception of the

occasional bus crunching over rock salt on the street. This reminds me that I am still in what is known as "the city", something that Colston Whitehead refers to as being more than one thing; "There are eight million naked cities in this naked city--the New York you live in is not my New York city."(6)

My New York city begins walking through the old, weathered gates of a New York City park; it's the kind that screams "city park", a look all New Yorkers are familiar with, the kind of gate with the chipped black or dark green paint, sandy-red peeking from behind peeled attempts to guess the structure's actual age. The snow usually does a good job of hiding this fact though, transforming a typical park entrance into a borderland, a sudden division separating the civil world from the small patch of wilderness that is surrounded by it. This part of New York belongs to me now. I conquer it with every uneasy step I take on the ground that lay before me. I can walk around unnoticed and uninterrupted, cloaked in my layers of clothing as I observe my surroundings; my eyes always lingering in the same pattern, tracing the silhouette of the treetops for anything moving, working their way down to other particular objects and then finally the small selection of man-made paths before me, the heaps of snow doing little to erase the existence of such paths.

Tourists wander like misguided fawns, fawning over every unusual sight they encounter; their amazement is always a little humorous to me. It is as if they choose to ignore the natural beauty around them. In Emma Wisniewski's essay, "Mapping", the author notices a similar

unfortunate realization. People come to visit her New York, The Pointz, and sees the place as a pit stop, "suggestion(s) of where to go from here, every street a potential trail to someplace else."(128) No one can see what binds her to this place -- the graffiti, the art. It highlights places for her to avoid and marks important times of her life, like "the gold stars on a map". Others overlook this particular aspect of the graffiti of the Pointz just as tourists do in parks; no one else seems to notice the variety, the contents of their designs or the minute details that makes one place very distinct from another. The city offers me this selection of mini-biomes to explore and without them I would be lost and overwhelmed by the thousands of other New Yorkers I share my city with; I would be lost without my "gold stars". For some, the parks do nothing about giving the illusion of escaping the city for a while; my gold stars are not everyone elses gold stas. In Colston Whitehead's essay "Central Park" his city park is the cite of many typical scenarios of typical New York drama. It is the site of romantic comedies and a competition just like any other part of NYC. What I may find pleasant, like the feeling of walking on an unpaved trail is a nuisance to Whitehead; right from the start, his writing was far from enthusiastic about the "spring fever" to head to the park that every New Yorker seems to get, ending the brief description of this "biological imperative"(37) with a "snap", as if the sound itself were a nuisance. It was an interesting point of view in his book though nonetheless, considering that his perspective is much different from mine. He focuses more on the people in the park rather than the park itself, which is what lead me to believe that he definitely wasn't going to be looking at anything I cared about, especially by referring to it as "The Park. The one place they forgot to pave over." (Whitehead 37)

It unsettles me to hear parks be referred to in such a way; they are the plots of land that were spared the misery of having to be suffocated under tons of lifeless, grey structures. I had a summer job working for the NYC Parks and Recreations and so I've had the chance to really see the life that is placed ever so carefully in every park. I am aware that all of these special little biomes are man-made, that they are not "natural" wonders, but the works of art that come of such beautiful landscapes can only lead me to believe that they are.

They are the graffiti of Emma Wisniewski's world, carefully thought out pieces of art concentrated in certain places. They require a keen eye to observe, but are often overlooked for "bigger, cleaner and shiner things."(128) Emma, however, can see the importance of these details, highlighting past events like saying her goodbyes to a boy she knew; to her, the graffiti that makes up her corner of the world in the Pointz is equivalent to a living museum. The "layering" and "overlapping" of the graffiti and artistic representation of her own timeline doing the same. Wherever she goes, she sees a piece of art that always brings her back to some other place in time; a memory. The graffiti adds variation in her otherwise linear life and, like my parks, they are the portals that she escapes into. For her, it transports her into the past; for me, to entirely different places.

One park in particular that is close to where I live, Forest Park, is my little get-away from my own neighborhood. It has a very tiny hiking trail in this remote patch of forest and, by now, I know it like the back of my hand. But what it lacks in size it makes up for with actual wilderness. I can see toads and tadpoles interacting at the edge of the man-made pond, watch red-tailed hawks perch from above (when I can find them) and walk through a swarm of admiral butterflies that just happened to all be standing in my path. The fast-paced and exciting sequences of events in Colston's "Central Park" are nothing compared to the miniature ecosystems each park supports; there is much more to see than just the people. This place and so many other parks have so much to be discovered and explored, it is what keeps me here, knowing that I can still take a stroll through a forest by walking a few concrete blocks.

A concrete jungle is no jungle of mine, but for Emma Wisniewski that, as well as the graffiti that marks it, is what she is familiar with. The people who walk up and down crosswalks and intersections are all seeing through different lens, each looking differently at the same picture. Wisniewski views her beloved graffiti art to be just that; art. Many can say the same, but for their own reasons. Colston pieces together the typical New York, breaking down idealized notions and showing his lens, his lack of rose-colored glasses. Much of his perspective of New York is satirical and condescending (to me at least, though it is what makes it funny to read), but that is his New York and he's "sticking to it." I only have eyes for the parks of New York. The stresses of being surrounded by so many different personalities, while interesting, is sometimes too much to bear for me. It builds until I need a place to breathe for a while, forget

a few faces for a moment and relax in what I imagine to be the closest thing to wilderness I will be able to experience for the time being.

I stay knowing that my little slices of paradise are all over the place hidden and tucked away neatly behind silvery-grey buildings. The tourists that wander wide-eyed and in awe never catch onto why I've lived here so peacefully for so long. They miss the whole picture, the parks that dot the city, all of the parks, yet they continue to photograph the smallest of things, like a snowy park bench or a frozen lake, topics of discussion for later, shallow discussions of a place they've never fully examined. But I see the entirety of a masterpiece. I see the fine dust of snow hovering over the ground, stirred up and swirled about by the wind. I hear the creaking of the branches of the park's Linden Plains, a kind of tree whose leaf is the NYC Park's Department's logo. I feel free from the New York that is familiar to everyone else and into the New York I love. The wild New York. The quiet New York. My New York.

____________________ WORKS CITED Whitehead, Colson. The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Print. WIsniewski, Emma. "Mapping." Web. <http://www.nyu.edu/cas/ewp/wisniewskimapping09.pdf>