#126: Planet Waves
On Tuesday, I rode my bike from Brooklyn into Manhattan and walked around Central Park for a few hours. Pausing at 59th and 5th Ave on my way back—a place that feels like the center of the universe under normal circumstances—there was a brief moment in which I couldn’t see a single car. Across the street, Apple’s iconic cube store, as empty as everything else, momentarily reminded me of this bizarre blog post calculating how the entire world population could fit inside a single cube that would itself sit comfortably in midtown Manhattan (using the same ambitious assumptions, the Empire State Building could hold 6.3 million people). The lesson of that exercise, of course, is how much space the world has for us, and the fact that so many of us still cram into big cities and skyscrapers only means that other parts of the world are even more desolate. From within the five boroughs, the world seems like a crowded place—especially if you spend all your time here—but the city’s current sense of emptiness reveals something that’s always true but usually less obvious: There are two parallel Americas, a crowded one and a spacious one, each determined more by its inhabitants’ resources than their domiciles. New York is a zone where the two overlap.
A couple weeks into quarantine, in late March, Chris Arnade listed off the various “pandemic classes” in a Twitter thread, ranging from “very wealthy: in mansions making annoying as fuck videos” down to “very poor: in shelters, public housing, on streets, or Section 8,” a group for whom many of the usual public haunts have now become inaccessible. In between these two extremes, Arnade identifies several other tiers, each defined by the amount of private space it commands: Some people own or rent multiple residences; others can afford an extended Airbnb stay; and many more have remained in their single comfortable home, not having to share their living space with too many family members or roommates. But pandemic-empty NYC is still crowded for many, despite offering others plenty of room even in its busiest moments. This distinction, of course, raises more questions about how we allocate space—a process defined as much by what’s absent as what’s present and thus harder to see than a misallocation of food or health care. Sometimes market forces clear people out of a place to make way for emptiness.
A year ago I wrote a newsletter about the absurd phenomenon of New York real estate developers designing high-rise residential towers with 160-foot tall “mechanical voids” at their bases in order to inflate those apartments’ value by lifting them further off the ground. Right now, the joke appears to be on the developers, as elevator-dependent high rises are specifically what people don’t want. But that doesn’t change the original fact that humans get pushed out of desirable locations to make room for someone else’s empty space, and while that dynamic will likely become more horizontal for a while, it will keep happening and might even intensify. While crowdedness is one thing that various classes experience differently, another is mobility, which has become more equal under quarantine: Normally, “an elite packs unlimited distance into a lifetime of pampered travel, while the majority spend a bigger slice of their existence on unwanted trips,” a statement Ivan Illich made in 1973 that only became more true in the years since. With vacations and (most) commutes currently paused, domestic space gains proportional importance, but that stasis also means we’re not using much oil, and fully-loaded tankers are loitering on the open sea as the oversupply grows with nowhere to put it. Another market distortion that leaves a strange spatial footprint: With the activities that normally consume them on hold, commodities roam the earth aimlessly and people finally stay home.
Reads:
Aaron Gordon on how coronavirus is causing more New Yorkers to consider buying cars.
How Grubhub hijacks restaurants’ phone numbers and charges them for incoming calls.
A DC restaurant plans to reopen at half capacity with mannequins terrifyingly occupying the empty tables to make it feel full (thanks John).