The Thanksgiving 2021 Adventures – Part 2
Lost in Shadow
I gasped as my eyes adjusted to the bright blue sky of this frigid morning. Unlike Seattle’s balmy forty-seven degrees the day before, it was at best in the mid-thirties, and I was immediately relieved that I had brought my winter hat! I put it on and took stock of my surroundings. As I noted in my previous post, it had been twenty-eight years since I’d set foot in Manhattan. I’m not a big city guy, having grown up on the very edge of the Boston suburbs in an old colonial farm town, and I’ve always found true urban areas to be overwhelming; nonetheless, I couldn’t help but marvel at the sheer scale of the place.
Massive, densely packed buildings, representative of a variety of historical construction styles, stretched out as far as I could see in every direction, leaving me to wonder if there were any alleys left in the city at all. Rising far above the surrounding structures, the Empire State Building gleamed in the sunlight—an archaic steel and glass beacon. I wondered if there was some kind of ordinance limiting the height of any new construction within a certain radius of that iconic structure. I could have Googled the answer to that question, but I didn’t want to ruin the mystique. Having every shred of information at our fingertips is just no fun sometimes.
So, there I was in New York City, looking down the street at the Empire State Building, wondering what to do next. Successfully navigating the subway and taking that ride had been the first challenge, one I had clearly completed with expert finesse and skill. I decided to simply wander. Given the age of the Empire State Building, I figured more interesting architecture could be in the vicinity (being a total history nerd, I like that sort of thing), so I picked a random direction (and yes, I could have looked at my phone’s GPS, but again, where’s the fun in that?) and walked. I crossed several main streets, narrowly avoiding getting flattened twice by city busses as they tried to thread the needle of the traffic lights. I passed cops barking at both cars and people in the center of every main intersection and finally made my way into a maze of smaller side streets flanked on either side by much lower buildings.
As with the larger thoroughfares, every building brushed up against every other, but something else caught my attention. Despite the fact that it was a sunny late morning, the taller buildings blocked out the light, draping the more diminutive buildings in shadow. Stepping down that boulevard was like walking backward in time; a twenty-story (ish) Art Deco building, complete with its thin-lined yet ornate style, drained the light from a smaller turn-of-the-twentieth-century building fronted by a cement edifice. Next to that, an even smaller and older brick building huddled in the near dusk of a shadow within a shadow.
I paused to consider the street, the buildings and the story they told. Although not uniformly true, the older the construction, the shorter the building. I’m no architect, but it seems like the “important” people, the so-called captains of industry, want the buildings that house their centers of power to be taller, or somehow better, than the neighboring ones. They want them to say, “Look at me, I’m awesome!” In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, height was the bar. In the modern age, it’s not so much height as it is design; but in any case, none of these important people ever wants their evil lairs to be overshadowed by anyone else’s.
Each iteration of new, taller, and better-constructed structures stole the light as surely as an old sailing ship could steal the wind from another, casting the old into shadow. Sunlight shone down and splashed against these new ego-shrines, enshrouding them in its warm glow, as if the light of heaven itself bathed their prominence in some kind momentous ritual anointment. In turn, temples of the modern age cast shadows upon those structures that came before, plunging them into an eternal twilight. And as that cycle persisted, those shadows and that twilight coalesced into a new kind of night, one that exists outside of our human concept of time.
They say that over time pollution causes stone edifices to blacken, giving them a dirty and worn appearance, but looking at the aged scarring on the nearest of the Art Deco structures, I wondered if it could be something more. Perhaps, I thought, as the shadows emerged and intensified with each new arrival on the block, the absence of light caused the darkness itself to fuse with the solid reality of the buildings. Even beyond that, perhaps these egocentric power centers had spawned something malevolent—brought about by the self-absorbed and self-focused acts of our captains of industry—that cast its own shadow of greed, which clung to the buildings like dried slime.
Such thoughts brought me full circle to the current state of the world, especially the pandemic and how it has affected the modern workplace. With so many people working remote and companies slowly realizing that people no longer need to be confined to an office to do their jobs, physical work sites are going to become a thing of the past for many of us; the change is inevitable and it’s good. Consequently, some companies have been pushing back against this change by converting employees to “hybrids” who work on-site for X number of days per week, but still, such an alternative provides much more structure than will be needed or desired. The truth is, the virtual workplace is here to stay. And if the world truly goes virtual, how will the important people continue to prove to us how relevant they truly are? I suppose some of them will keep sending people into space in an ultimate act of self-aggrandizement while others will turn to flooding social media with half-truths and lies to remind us they still exist. Some will magnanimously donate millions of dollars (probably no more than six or seven dollars for the average person) to their pet nonprofits and projects and construct ever more buildings simply to advertise their own namesakes. Ultimately, I wonder if their efforts will be fleeting. The internet has taken on a life of its own, seemingly casting its own all-pervasive shadow—one that looms over the tallest of our buildings . . . one that even our captains of industry will be unable to escape.