If it's not the odor of garbage from the great mounds of green plastic bags waiting patiently at the curb to be collected, it's the pungent sting of urine rising up from a stairwell or floating out of an alley as you walk past it. New York is too crowded. The sidewalks writhe with people of all shapes, sizes, colors, and predilections rushing grimly past each other. They gush upwards out of the subway, spewing out onto the sidewalk where they slip and slide sideways and forward, like amoeba playing bumper cars in a frenzy of Brownian motion. New York is too loud.
Horns blare constantly as cabbies fight for possession of the curb.
People talk and shout, sometimes to each other, sometimes to themselves, mostly to their cell-phone. Loud music summons customers to enter tiny stores crammed with electronics. Providing a back beat to this rhythm of the streets is the percussive clamor of grinding bus gears, tires rattling over steel plates, carts loaded with boxes clattering over sidewalk cracks. Only in Greenwich Village is there surcease from the din, as the lonely notes of a sax drift across our cafe lattes while we dreamily watch the locals work their way up and down McDougal Street. We took in 3 shows and loved each one.