He lifts a NYC trash can, flips it, dumps garbage on his head and yells, “Knicks won!” He melts back into the crowd in the street waving orange and blue Knicks shirts. The bodega’s front gate screeches down. I turn and see my friend the owner. He points at the street party: “Time to close.” He’s Yemini, dark eyes under dark curly hair. “People are crazy tonight.” The gate shuts. He looks at the celebration: Cars honk, a man climbs the streetlight and pumps arms. “The city needed it.” He nods and gives me a beer. “You do too. Go!”

I watch bright drunk faces stream by and wait. “Go,” he nudges me to the street. And I do. Before I blink, a corn-rowed couple in Knicks jerseys pour rum down my throat. Traffic lights shine on us bumpin’ and grindin’. Steam rises o- silhouettes of dancers. The night’s pulse is 130 beats per minute. Music booms through our bones. Yes, New York needs this.

In summer 2026, New York was reborn. Under a hot sun, we took the city back. We took over sports and politics. We took the “story” of New York from the Sex and the City shit. The city isn’t a safari for horny socialites. Law and Order too. It’s not a zoo. We’re not animals to be caged.

The real New York is eight million people, most working class, who are forced by its speed and density to deal with each other. It makes certain truths visible. As in: We are more powerful than the police. We are more powerful than the state and its wealthy patrons. Need evidence? Exhibit # 1: Zohran Mamdani’s victory. Exhibit #2: All the illegal protests and dance parties. Exhibit #3: Families grilling on the sidewalk, sitting in chairs as Bad Bunny blares from a bright red car, its doors open like a frilled-neck lizard. Nearby, fresh graffiti and political flyers stuck on poles. Children play in the spray of gushing fire hydrants.

Why this? Why now? Everywhere I turn, the vibes are good. Friends lean in, whisper like criminals, “New York feels sooooo good.” We sit on the stoop feeling perplexed, our hands moving like double pan scales. In the end, we shrug. But there’s an answer. Right in our faces but we can’t see it.

On the July 4th weekend, I sit at the park and gaze at the Freedom Tower. It is a giant, 1776-foot-tall ballpoint pen writing our story in the sky. I take my phone and search an image of the Twin Towers, and hold it up. The iconic skyscrapers stand again on the horizon. I miss them. I miss those we lost. Children in the playground squeal happy little squeals. In the distance between the destruction of the Twin Towers and their playing is the answer.

Is the reason New Yorkers feel like family more than ever that since 9/11 we survived disaster after disaster? Blackouts. Hurricane Sandy. Covid-19. Trump. Canadian wildfires. Inflation. Trump again. Heatwaves. More Canadian wildfires. More heatwaves. Is this why we are so different from past New Yorkers, who were more tribal and racist and segregated? Has surviving disasters together forced us to turn to each other, not on each other? Is that why in a time of right-wing MAGA we voted for democratic socialism? It is the political expression of our lived truth: Life is disaster. We have to rescue each other.

I click off the Twin Towers photo and put the phone away. The Freedom Tower is beautiful. It is painted by sunset. It is a needle stitching closed the wound of 9/11. Breathing evening air, it’s clear that now is all we have. You and I live in a tiny window of New York history where we practice instinctual solidarity. The past 25 years show it. Summer 2026 shows it. We can make all the pain we endured meaningful.

Fireworks explode again. Families in the park oooh and point. High-pitch rockets pop and sparkle as multi-colored stars fall. Someone on the roof fires gunshots in the air. More music. More dancing. A police car speeds by. The people are peopling. And nothing is going to stop us.

Gotham

New York is a strangely intimate city. We live on top of each other. On the train, your nose could be in someone’s armpit. You hear people’s business. All. The. Time. This person’s cheating on that. Papi’s doing coke again. We smell piss in the street. It’s crazy. How do we not run into the street pulling hair and scratching our eyes out? Eight million people crawling over each other like an ant farm. Eight million of us in one million buildings in five boroughs. Manhattan is thirteen miles long. The sheer weight of the built city is 1.7 trillion pounds. Damn if some days you don’t feel each pound. Every New Yorker I know at some point has stopped in the street, stared up at the buildings and the clouds above, and sighed a heavy sigh.

New York is impossible. It should collapse from the weight of its extremes, but it doesn’t. For 400 years it has not.

How?

Kindness is the secret of New York. Kindness keeps the city alive. We lift strollers. We say, “Ma’am, you dropped your keys!” We hold train doors for the guy rushing in. We organize free food kitchens. We vote for socialists now instead of sell-out Democrats. We jump each other’s cars for free. We loan cash and say fuhgeddaboudit. We clean fallen tree branches after a hurricane. If we stopped being kind to each other, New York would grind to a halt.

We need kindness because New York is an abusive parent. It yells a lot. It’s on coke. It loves Wall Street, which means it has a gambling problem. Prices always inch up and you dig deeper into your wallet. It’s sticky hot in summer. It’s slippery black ice in winter. How many times have you been on a train and everyone looks defeated? Bedraggled hair. Rubbing temples. Drinking beer in a brown bag. Sleeping mouth open as tunnel lights flash. Too tired to even commit a crime. How many times did you sway in the subway, silent, just trying to keep it together?

A Tale of Two Cities

Has it always been like this? I go to the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side and climb blistered stairs. The apartments are preserved from the 19th century. One shows the Moores, a Black family that lived in tiny rooms. How does one live without hot water? How many got sick and died? I nervously bend my ticket. It’s a past I never want to return to.

Later I talk to my best friend, who canvassed for Mamdani. She knocked on dozens of doors. She saw poor families squished into a one-bedroom, kids spilling out into the stairwell. Water stains on the ceiling from burst pipes. Dirt. Garbage. As she talks, I take out the ticket to the Tenement Museum and look at it again.

New York would be impossible if it wasn’t for the people fighting for a better city. On the F train, I mull how immigrants forced the city to clean up the slums. At home, I snatch a white bedsheet and projector. On the roof, I clip the sheet on the stair bulkhead as a movie screen. The projector lights it like a blazing doorway to the past. I play New York: A Documentary Film. Early episodes show the slums and Jacob Riis photos of immigrant families: ruddy faces, sick, barefoot kids huddled for warmth. The actor David Ogden Stiers’ voice, heavy with gravitas, tells the story of the poor creating new lives, swirling in the streets, mixing, fighting, intermarrying. What guided them and sometimes blinded them was this dream of a better life.

I watch the documentary on the roof, occasionally looking at Manhattan. The faces of New York’s past rise on screen like ghosts fondly looking at their city from the afterlife. Here is an unnamed Italian family. Here, Al Smith. Here, La Guardia. Each float on the bright bedsheet screen, billowing in the night. On screen, I see immigrants build trains, bridges and tunnels. I see them demand parks, hospitals and schools. Again, I look at the city from the roof and see what past New Yorkers have left us now. What makes the city possible is this vast public infrastructure that lets us meet, play and remember who we are. They came searching for a dream and built it with calloused hands.

On the billowy bedsheet screen, rough-faced writer Peter Hamill says in a New York accent so thick you could serve pastrami on it, “The absolute demand of the city is that you get to know each other. You couldn’t stay in a ghetto and function.” He squints and tilts his head. “You had to go to Manhattan or Midtown or wherever. In the city that moved people around and put them up against each other. It led to conflict but that didn’t last long. The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And they fought the Jews until they started marrying them.”

Well, they all managed to hate Black people, I think. And the Puerto Ricans who came later, lot of hate for them too. Against my jadedness, I know he spoke a kernel of truth. Not all, but a lot of old school racism is now as unfashionable as a ’90s goatee, bowler hats and monogamy. Mixing is in vogue. I know whole neighborhoods where having a little Obama baby, half this half that, is a status symbol. If your kid’s genetic pools are separated by an ocean you get a free drink.

It’s why racists hate New York. It’s why conservatives of all stripes hate the city. It is like a pool table, our lives are different color balls colliding. The impact reveals our common humanity. Boom! Street slang combines languages. Pow! A new dance combines the races. Wham! Hasids and imams fan money at a strip club. Nothing is left pure. Mixing is the law. We take pride in it but it’s partly a lie. All that beautiful blending happens in a hard class hierarchy where, from the hood to the Hamptons, the street to the C suite, you mix but on your level. We live in two cities, one tribal and elitist, the other a street brew of violence and creativity. Always the poorer one is the more invisible. Until disaster strikes.

Jumping to Their Deaths

It’s wild to think how many millions of New Yorkers lived and died in obscurity, except when tragedy casts a light. It really hit during the scene of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire on March 25, 1911. On that day, mostly Italian and Jewish women labored in a dungeon-like clothing factory. It was on the 8th, 9th and 10th floor. A fire broke out like roses blossoming in heaps of cloth. The exit doors were locked shut. Skin-charring heat drove women to the windows and finally to jump. 146 died. The horror shocked the city. Voters forced politicians to pass workplace safety laws. More than that, their deaths made the invisible poor finally visible.

I pause the video and walk to the side of the roof to look at the Freedom Tower. Ninety years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, on September 11, 2001, we again stared in horror as people jumped from the fires blazing in the Twin Towers. They splattered like water balloons on the sidewalk. Our empathy kicked into high gear: we wanted to rescue them from that fate but could not.

Empathy cuts both ways. After the towers fell, the two faces of New York came to the surface. The ugly, tribal, vengeful one beat up Muslims. It surveilled mosques. It was the construction worker on the Q train, saying, “We gotta nuke the ragheads.” It cheered the US raining bombs and missiles on innocent human beings.

The humane and realistic New York protested the Iraq War. Hundreds of thousands rose in the street like a swelling tsunami of faces, signs and chants. It taught classes on U.S. Middle East policy. It protected neighbors. It knew that New York is the world’s nervous system. When the US bombs a wedding in Afghanistan, our neighbors weep. When the US bombed a girl’s school in Iran, a friend tells me she cried until her face was sore.

The two New Yorks have struggled but for now, our better half won. It won because since 9/11, we have rescued each other from disaster. Covid. Trump. ICE. Hurricanes. Blizzards. Blackouts. We learned to survive with each other. The better angels of our nature won, because the city forces us to see behind the mask. The Muslim and the transgender, the street hustler and the Hasid, the bodega owner and the cop, the Section 8 parent and the socialite, you, me, everyone, we are more than our masks. We are flawed souls, capable of immense grace. And courage.

I turn the projector on and stare at the city. The skyscrapers blink in the night. The past and present mix. I remember two years after 9/11, my car battery died at a highway rest stop in Delaware. A man with a NYFD shirt insignia walked by. I asked for a jump. He got his cables and jolted my car engine. I asked him about being a firefighter, and if he lost anyone on 9/11. Blinking and tear choked, he nodded. “All I want to do now,” he wiped his face, “is help people, you know.” I said: I do.

I blink back the memory and breathe. No one wants to learn how fragile life is by seeing friends die or homes get swept to sea or terrorist attacks. But we have. What meaning does it have?

The New New York

“If you knocked on doors for Mamdani,” she says to us, “raise your hand!” Hundreds of arms rise and hands wave, some snap fingers. Their faces glow. Almost religious. I look around the DSA victory party. The energy is so high, my Con Ed bill got paid just by standing there. One year after Zohran’s victory shocked the world, the socialists have done it again, sweeping races across the city, leaving the political establishment in a panic.

The DSA winners take the stage, and in a preacherly cadence hit the policies to shape New York’s future. Rent freeze. Childcare. A!ordable housing. Each idea lifts their faces into a shining hope. The last time I saw this glow was at Occupy Wall Street. You can’t fake it. Hope begins in the body, in the gut, in experience, and zaps the brain. It makes eyes glow like evening street lamps in the playground. Time to go home.

Home for them was the people. Year after year, they held DSA palm cards and knocked on doors, talked and listened, saw and sensed the weight New Yorkers endured. They felt the solidarity and strength in everyday people surviving disaster. Some of it was told in stories at the door. Some in the way a man holds his dignity while leaning on a cane. Or in how a worker’s hard eyes soften when told, Yes, you are seen. In those face-toface moments, all the street level solidarity, all that unwritten history of New York poured into these activists, who now must make it mean something.

I study the DSA victory party, and one thing is clear. If this incredibly special and hard-won moment of populist solidarity in New York’s history leads to real change, it will be because of the activists here.

I shut my eyes as they cheer and imagine attending a future victory party held at the Great Lawn in Central Park. Imagine tens of thousands of New Yorkers streaming in from all five boroughs. Signs bobbing like machetes, ready to cut the past away. Ready to cut sell-out Democrats from power. Nuyoricans in broccoli haircuts. Black MTA workers. White leftists and white union members.

Caribbean lawyers, musicians and nannies. Asian dads with kids rocking on their shoulders. Mexican construction workers in paint splattered overalls. Each arrival stands in the vast crowd, faces turned toward Mayor Mamdani, whose voice booms over the speakers, saying Democratic Socialists have won a majority of the New York State Senate and Assembly. Money is coming. Money for new housing. Money for new train lines. Money to switch from oil to
solar panels.

People stomp feet. Everything old seems to shake and fall apart. The future, the one we want but have only glimpsed, is close enough to touch.

Some Difficult Days Ahead

Days after the DSA victory party, I go to the Freedom Tower. “All the way up,” as Fat Joe would say. My ears pop on the elevator ride leading to the upper floors. Door open to a sunbathed observatory deck. God it’s beautiful here. Clouds float like faces in a baby sonogram. The city up here looks more like an endless series of sandcastles, hues of brown, gray, black compacted squares like what kids make at Coney Island. Everything dissolves in time. Even cities.

I was born here, as was my son. Here is where my mother died. Here is where I loved and lost. New York is for us a cradle and a grave. And again, we are at the cutting edge of the future. It can go so many ways. Trump, terrified of losing, may try to hijack the midterms. ICE or the police or the F.B.I. could be ordered to round up Democrats and leftists, activists and protesters. The oil shock from the Iran war may leave our grocery stores empty. Global warming will send more storms to smash our city. We will need New York’s spirit even more.

I take out a photo of my mom. She died after Covid. My best friend’s mom did too. I rub my eyes and see my neighbors taken in ambulances. I hear the gunshots. I remember them rolling up pants to show the scars. I see the homeless sleeping on the street, blinking in agony in the sun, holding out hands for food. Every day is a challenge for so many in New York. The workers and the poor, the invisible.

And now there’s a chance to stop it. We have the popular will. We have the DSA.

I walk to the window and look down. Soon, the Towers of Light will cut the night like a pair of scissors. For a time, a luminous afterlife will beam into our world. I want so badly for those lights to expose the disaster we live with every day: all the poverty, all the grief and loss of life from violence, all the strain and sickness. The people deserve that sacred light. I’ll bring Mom’s photo. I want everyone to bring an image of whomever they have lost to New York’s wealthy elite, those opulent few who refuse to share with the many starving and homeless and struggling.

No one has to die from poverty here. They were killed by our own ruling class. Let their loved ones bring a photo on September 11 so the Towers of Light can shine on their faces too.