The silence of New York City in the summer, particularly on weekends, is not what it was. But it is still something to hear. Its sound is what the sun makes beating on the sidewalks. It is the heated sidewalks too and the emptiness and the dreams the emptiness fills. The only reason the summer silence is not quite its old self is because not as many people leave New York in the summertime as they did thirty or forty years ago.
Vacations are shorter.
Lots of folks work weekends. Stores stay open. And there's a so-called neighborhood festival every other block. In the Great Gatsby Fitzgerald wrote of summer Sundays in the city as seeming so bucolic one expected sheep to come around a corner. New York is not that rustic anymore, but the silences are still here and the sense of promise and longing contained in the silences.