Melting

How cities show us who we are -- and I'm happy to be back on your radar

I live in a place where I can walk safely in the dead of night, smelling sweet air under starry skies and stay ‘til dawn, if I wish, to listen to the birds wake up. I haven’t always had that luxury. I came to this place from Chicago where solitary night walking was high risk behavior. Yet, inside this country bumpkin lives a city girl who loves the charge of metropolitan life.

I remember walking in a Chicago subway tunnel with crowds of others heading for work, all of us moving to the beat of buskers whose music echoed with the natural amplification of concrete. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods divided by race and ethnicity...and class. When Chicagoans ask where you live, they’re aiming to identify your heritage and your economic status. Chicago’s personality is a bit of the Midwest curmudgeon with a tinge of racism.

It’s called The Windy City, not for its frigid winter winds off Lake Michigan, but for its blustery politics and verbose politicians. Over the years, my years, Chicago has cleaned up its act. Capitalizing on its already stellar history and art museums, the Lake front is a glorious sweep of glimmering concert shells, foot and bike trails...and still featuring museums so vast they cannot be consumed in one lifetime.

Chicagoans are proud of their art and architecture. That started when commercial travel happened on the Chicago River and builders designed structures to show their best sides to the waterway. To this day, the best way to see Chicago’s famed architecture is on a river tour.

While Chicago’s Achilles heel is its racist divisions, among my greatest joys in life is what I learned from growing up with Italians, Jews, Black people and Poles...and, oh, the food! Once, on a group bike ride through the city that started at midnight on the lakefront, I rode through neighborhoods watching the partiers emerge from the closing bars, through the sleepy town homes and ancient apartment buildings in Old Town to the smell of bagels cooking in the Jewish delis as the sun rose over Lake Michigan, which always told me which way is East.

Since my kids moved West, I’ve spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, the City of Angels. Angelenos as are not all angels, but the city vibe is one of sparkling high energy.

When my kids lived in old Venice, it was ‘the hood,’ with plenty of gang action. My older son, trained in CPR, once held a young Black man as he tried desperately to save his life from gunshot wounds to his chest. As the boy’s mother watched, the crowd waited anxiously for the ambulance to arrive, but the authorities were not inclined to hurry to that neighborhood and the young man died in my son’s arms.

That’s the underbelly of Los Angeles. The city’s personality is sunny. Everybody goes to the beach. Sunday at Venice Beach and the Santa Monica Pier are festivals of multiple languages and every imaginable body type exposed to the glory of the sun and the majesty of the sea.

Film is the town industry making its impact everywhere. From East LAs hood through beach communities, inland towns like West LA with its bodacious gay vibe to trendy Culver City, posh Beverly Hills, downtown LA and Hollywood, life is happening outdoors and often for show. Most Angelenos don’t come from LA. Many have arrived in this tinsel town from anywhereville with big dreams that fit the sprawling grid that is this city. And LA style has been imitated across the country since the movies’ heyday in the 40s. There’s a definite ‘look at me’ fashion in LA born of movieland aesthetics. It morphs from Gangsta glitz to the elegant fashion show in Beverly Hills and the studied casualness of the Santa Monica Market where movie stars try to blend in.

With all its glitz and glamour, Los Angeles is a working community. Class divisions melt away when it’s time to get a job done. Never was that more evident than after the tragic 2025 fires in Malibu, Palisades and Alta Dena. Neighbors there, from the wealthy to the not so, banned together to help each other recover from the devastation, and they still are.

Neither does LAs glitzy façade try to hide its problems of homelessness and crime. It’s just too big. Angelenos may seem cold and self-possessed, but they show up for those in need at food banks, in protests and in solidarity with their diverse neighbors. Of course, nothing can match the beauty of LA county hills and the stunning drive along Highway 101.

Then there’s New York.

I’ve only spent short spurts in the City That Never Sleeps, but the love lingers.

The first thing I noticed about New York is New Yorkers. Contrary to their reputation, they are friendly, outgoing, always ready for a lively conversation and proud to be New Yorkers. From the grandeur of The Met to the lush green of Central Park to the buoyancy of The Village, New York is ALIVE. Its history is the genesis of our nation. It was our country’s first capital, and it remains so in finance, fashion, art, theatre and academia.

Walking New York is like strolling around the globe through ethnic neighborhoods proudly illuminating their various cultures in shops, restaurants and music. You don’t need a car in Manhattan, in fact, it’s a burden. (You do need an umbrella though. A New York thunderstorm can sweep you off your feet and drown you in a subway tunnel.) Manhattan’s public transit system is a model that should have been adopted across the country. The subway and bus routes go everywhere for anyone willing to learn the system. For everyone else there are taxis, and the art of hailing same.

I’ve never felt alone in New York where I’ve meet and befriended fellow theatre lovers for a night of post play jazz clubbing. I learned about an Italian maître ’ds entire family history over a lovely dinner in The Village and walked for a mile in Central Park with a friendly lawyer and her furry companion. All these were brief encounters never to be repeated, but that linger in my sense of our shared human community...happy to be in New York.

These American cities are melting pots of humanity at its best and its worst. Yet they function generally well in defiance of the human instinct to isolate by tribe. They are a testament to what we can be.

These elegant collections of humanity ARE America complete with beloved distinctions and valiant efforts to embrace them all. They are working remarkably well as examples of the messiness of democracy in a pluralistic society. They are NOT places to be turned into civil war zones. They are national treasures, each with distinct personalities and each showing us what America can be.

New York, The Met on a summer Sunday afternoon