[Living in downtown Manhattan is rather like being in the Walled City of Kowloon]
The place where I live, specifically, the few blocks where I live in New York’s financial district, resembles the fabled Walled City of Kowloon having the highest population density in the world. It is known affectionately as ‘The Canyons’, on account of the combination of an 18th Century organic, narrow street pattern and 20th Century skyscrapers.
[The street where I live, in the canyons.]
During weekdays, every horizontal surface takes a beating that compares to a continuous exodus from a stadium event. Road surfaces are a patchwork quilt of tarred repairs, near indestructible travertine slabs outside corporate HQs are cracked and worn and the Fulton St. subway looks like an abandoned ruin, on account of the fact that it is the exact opposite. Even the cookie-cut design of the Starbucks on the corner next to J & R shows signs of decay in the varnish that has worn from the floorboards, rendering it unlike the sanitized Starbucks elsewhere that are stamped from exactly the same mold.