Love Song

One of my favorite things about New York is the ferment of ideas, of viewpoints, of goals, of strategies, into which I have felt thrust since childhood. It has seemed clear to me that New York, and cities like it around the world, are at the epicenter of innovation and its attendant excitement.  So I was not surprised when my friend Joanne Feltman recently sent me a fascinating article about the historic role of cities in innovation (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/where-the-skills-are/8628/#.TndgAZNxUVo.email).  The article posits that the gathering together of people in cities, more than almost any other factor, are responsible for civilization’s great leaps forward, that the ferment of interaction, ideas, and viewpoints in cities advances our cultural agenda like nowhere else.  Cities tend to be where the most innovative jobs are, where the most significant breakthroughs are made, and where the compensation levels are highest. It has been this way for thousands of years.

Reading this article did not surprise me. Living here is just so INTERESTING. I go from my job, surrounded by people of different ethnicities, with different histories, levels of education, and perspectives, out into the world of theater, of music new and old, of movies, of readings, of outdoor concerts and athletic events and impromptu socializing in dog runs, in playgrounds, and on street corners. I watch my fellow citizens help the legions of tourists who are constantly asking questions: where is the subway, how do I get to the Metropolitan Museum, where am I (I get this one most often in Central Park)? Where did the notion come from that New Yorkers are not friendly? We are as friendly and opened-minded as we could possibly be!

There is not much room for prejudice when we live surrounded by such diversity. There is not much room for intellectual stagnation when we are constantly surrounded by opportunity, none of it requiring a car. I love the concept, articulated in the article, that social networking, one of the buzz phrases of today’s world, is, in its most basic, face to face form, one of the primary drivers of civilization. I profoundly agree that education needs to encompass social skills which encourage us to debate and discuss, preferably with people of differing perspectives. In the city, you are always in the agora, the marketplace. Your brain is jiggled, you are challenged, solutions pop forth. This is how we build the world, and it is happening right here, right now, day after day.

Walt Whitman, our city’s greatest poet, wrote:
Keep your splendid, silent sun;             
Keep your woods, O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods;      
Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards;   
Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields, where the Ninth-month bees hum;   
Give me faces and streets! give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs!       
Give me interminable eyes! give me women! give me comrades and lovers by the thousand!          
Let me see new ones every day! let me hold new ones by the hand every day!        
Give me such shows! give me the streets of Manhattan!

I’m with Whitman. This is the New York we at Warburg are selling every day to those lucky enough to be a part of it.