Michael Hoffman Photography

Streets of New York

Wandering the nameless and grid-like streets of New York, you feel like a particle trapped in some kind of computer system. The streets are streams of data rushing relentlessly through the motherboard. On the way to midtown, the houses become ever more significant, and you seem to be increasingly irrelevant, a lost particle in a perfectly structured system. After some time, you reach the square-shaped central park, which looks like the green chip on the motherboard. The last refuge of mother nature on the island of Manhattan gives you a break, and you may reflect upon the differences between it and European cities. By comparison, they seem more naturally grown, shaped by history and necessity with dwindling roads and overgrown parks, more human and less grid-like. They are designed as well, of course, but their artificiality seems to be hidden behind history, individuality, and to be more human in size. But suppose the buildings seem to touch the sky, and the roads are endless grids. In that case, everything may be possible in the end, and that’s the secret of the so-called American dream: To escape the motherboard, to be more than a nameless particle, you need to find a way through the grid and climb the sky.