New York is not burning, but there are signs that things are getting worse.
Hyperventilating pundits’ exaggerated claims aside, Adams’s New York is a far cry from Dinkins’s. The city reported 2,020 homicides in 1992 and 434 in 2022. Still, the total of seven major felonies has risen considerably from 95,593 in 2020 to 126,589 in 2022. There are other glaring indicators of decay, such as the homelessness and migrant crises, but there are subtler ones as well. Case in point: the orange ooze of the 42nd Street subway station that has been left to fester for three months.
When I began my internship on June 6, I took the F train from an undisclosed location in Brooklyn to 42nd Street for my first day in the National Review office.
I wish I had taken a photo of what I saw, but, in typical fashion, I was a little behind schedule and hurrying to work. Thanks to my hurry and lack of foresight, you’ll have to do with a description that’s decidedly less than “a thousand words”: As I sped through a dim, grimy hallway crowded by hundreds of commuters, I noticed an ambiguous pile of orange sludge oozing on top of a rusty drain running the length of the hall.
Gross.
I wasn’t entirely shocked. After all, the New York subway system comprises 665 miles and 472 stations; not every inch of it is going to be pristine 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
But now it’s August 17. More than ten weeks have passed, and my patience has run out. Although the bilious mass has shrunk, the unidentified fluorescent ooze (UFO) stubbornly refuses to subside. The time has come to complain about government ineptitude.
Sanitation workers must enter the 42nd Street subway station — with hazmat suits, if need be — and power wash, scrub, and decontaminate the hallway of this foul substance. It can be done. Not all of New York City is in such an abysmal state of disrepair, contrary to popular belief.
Bryant Park provides sharp contrast with 42nd Street station. The former is beautiful and, despite its massive foot traffic and patronage, is kept shockingly clean. The latter is dingy, dirty, and, depending on the half-life of the orange goo, potentially radioactive. The first is privately owned and operated, the latter is public and poorly managed.
Viewed together, the pair proves what Aristotle understood millennia ago: “What is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care.” Considering New York is common to 8.5 million New Yorkers, this does not bode well for its preservation. Nonetheless, under the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, New York demonstrated its capacity to pull itself together. It remains to be seen whether the world’s capital will rise to the occasion once again, or if it will descend further into filth, crime, and orange goop.