New York, New York
THE last time I was in New York, a balmy summer three years ago, I went to see the statue of Alice in Central Park. She is with the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse and Dinah while the Cheshire Cat watches on. “We’re all mad here,” he will tell her. She sits on a giant mushroom - the one that makes you bigger if you take a bite from one side, and smaller if you take a bite from the other. It made me think of the extremes of New York, the extremes of any city, of any place: the rich and the poor, the open spaces and crowded buildings, the world above ground and the one below. I was thinking of extremes again this time, of the big and the small. I was thinking of the extremes of temperature outside (it was 25 degrees in early November when I arrived) and in: there is a New York heating law that means all buildings must be a certain temperature, but there is no real way to control it. The heating blasting from the pipe in my room mostly escaped through the window I had open all
