What’s strange in my experience — a New Yorker born and bred — is when storefronts, once emptied, aren’t quickly repopulated. Broadway in daylight now seems increasingly like an archaeological dig in the making. Those storefronts with their fading decals (“Zagat rated”) and their old signs look, for all the world, like teeth knocked out of a mouth. In a city in which a section of Broadway was once known as the Great White Way for its profligate use of electricity, and everything normally is aglow at any hour, these dead commercial spaces feel like so many tiny black holes. Get on the wrong set of streets — Broadway’s hardly the worst — and New York can easily seem like a creeping vision of Hell, not as fire but as darkness slowly snuffing out the blaze of life.

still way too much crap in nyc. i await the day when urbanization progresses to the point that nyc actually has a useful population density. beijing is still ahead by a factor of 5.

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