Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [39]
During the time we’ve been working on it, many friends and others here at CBS have been stopping me in the hallway to ask one question. It’s a question I haven’t mentioned so far in the broadcast . . .
But the answer, as of this morning . . . fourteen pounds.
In Praise of New York City
It’s been popular in recent years to suggest that Nature is the perfect condition, that people have done nothing to the earth since they got here but make a mess of it. Well, that’s true about some places but untrue about others.
New York City is as amazing in its own way as the Grand Canyon. As a matter of fact, you can’t help thinking that maybe Nature would have made New York City look the way it does if it had had the money and the know-how.
When people talk about New York City, they usually mean the part of the city called Manhattan. Manhattan is a narrow rock island twelve miles long. Being an island is an important thing about New York because even though no one thinks much about it from day to day, they have to go to quite a bit of trouble to get on it and off it. This makes being there something of an event and people don’t take it so lightly. New York isn’t like so many places that just sort of dwindle away until you’re out of town. In New York, it’s very definite. You’re either there or you aren’t there.
The twenty-eight bridges and tunnels don’t connect Manhattan with New Jersey and the four other boroughs. They’re for entering and leaving New York. Where from or where to is of secondary importance. It may be some indication of the significance of the event that it costs $1.50 to cross the George Washington Bridge entering New York, nothing to cross leaving it.
The Brooklyn Bridge is a cathedral among bridges. Coming to Manhattan across it every morning is like passing through the Sistine Chapel on your way to work. You couldn’t be going to an unimportant place.
Although two million people work on the little island, only half a million of those who work there live there. As a result, a million and a half people have to get on it every morning and off it every night. That’s a lot of people to push through twenty-eight little tunnels and bridges in an hour or so, but it’s this arterial ebb and flow that produces the rhythm to which this heartless city’s heart beats. There must be something worth coming for when all those people go to that much trouble to get there.
Although it isn’t the outstanding thing about it to the people who live or work there, New York is best known to strangers for what it looks like. And, of course, it looks tall.
The World Trade Center has two towers, each a quarter of a mile high. The New York office worker isn’t overwhelmed by the engineering implications of flushing a toilet 106 floors above the street.
The buildings of the city are best seen from above, as though they were on an architect’s easel. It’s strange that they were built to look best from an angle at which hardly anyone ever sees them. From the street where the people are, you can’t see the buildings for the city. The New Yorker doesn’t worry about it because he never looks up.
You have to talk about tall buildings when you talk about New York, but to anyone who has lived for very long with both, the people of the city are of more continuing interest than the architecture. There is some evidence, of course, that the New Yorker isn’t all that separate from his environment. If dogs and masters tend to look alike, so probably do cities and their citizens.
The New Yorker takes in New York air. For a short time it trades molecules with his bloodstream and he is part city. And then he exhales and the city is part him. They become inextricably mingled, and it would be strange if the people didn’t come to look like the city they inhabit. And to some extent like each other.
While the rest of the nation feels fiercely about New York—they love it or they hate it—New Yorkers feel nothing. They use the city like a familiar tool. They don’t defend it from love or hate. They shrug or nod in