On Saturday, I took my girlfriend to the top of the Empire State Building; one of those tourist attractions New Yorkers usually never go to. I figured it would be nice to do something different, to actually go visit a landmark in New York is rare, but worth it when you’re doing it. The view was awe-inspiring, incredible, and majestic, seeing all of New York City from all angles. Being able to see from Queens, Brooklyn, all of Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, New Jersey, and more, it was incredible. However, it made me understand how large New York really is, the incredible amount of people that live here and the myriad types of people. It hit me that I may know plenty of places in New York, but I don’t even have the slightest understanding of what goes on everyday in this huge city.
After reading Fanny Fern’s Tyrants of the Shop, I started to think about that view I saw over the weekend. That scene of a vast city with a plethora of unknown wonders, which most people will never see, or may never want to see. I thought about that quote, “it’s none of your business,” which is the New York attitude. We never want people nosing in our business, but hypocritically, we always want to know what’s going on. The picture above was exactly what I saw on Saturday, but I had to get a picture from the internet because my phone wasn’t working, but I thought this view that I saw captured the essence of how vast New York is. It may not seem it on a map or when you’re walking around, but from this view, you begin to understand this awesome city. Fern created a different ideal in my head about the different people that live in the city and all the different struggles that they face, while we have no idea. The women in the shops of that time, or the homeless and unemployed today, everyone faces a struggle in New York, but it is so large and vast that we may never know even a quarter of them. We always want to know other’s people business and never want others to know ours, but we never want to know about the struggles others feel because we have our own, even if their’s are worse. This is why people avoid the news or brush off newspapers because we don’t want to know about the bad even though we can probably help it, like Fern wrote in this article for the New York Ledger in 1867. The Empire State is one of the greatest places in the world, the Greatest City in the World, but if we really combed throughout the city and “minded other people’s business,” we could understand the real part of the city. New York needs people like Fern so that people all through out the city can understand not just their own lives, but the lives of New Yorkers that we’d never experience during our daily routines.
