To me, New York seems only fittingly documented by a hodgepodge of blog posts constantly updating and offering varied perspectives. This city is all about the teeming, diverse, and at times conflicting crowd that rushes down its bustling streets. Walt Whitman’s Broadway describes these “hurrying human tides” in the context of one of its busiest walkways.
Being a New Yorker, I consider myself far busier and hurried than any human in any other city on the planet, and accordingly avoid Broadway like the plague. Rife with tourists, ‘authentic’ cashmere scarves, and Rolexes for only $10, Broadway presents an altogether inefficient means of foot transportation. And for us New Yorkers, efficiency is paramount. I was prompted to revisit that abominable mass when I read Whitman’s characterization of Broadway as an “unspeakable show and lesson.” Despite myself, I agree with the sentiment. While sometimes walking down Broadway feels like trudging through a sea of human roadblocks, this trying experience offers both a show and a lesson.
It’s nearly impossible to walk a block on Broadway without visual and audio confirmation of the city’s incredible diversity. I’m lucky to live in a city where I can encounter several languages and multiple ethnicities on my 5-minute walk to class. Despite the different demographic distinctions I can employ to break down this crowd into neat chunks of a pie chart, the crowd as a whole offers an enticing array of opportunity. People to meet, things to learn, weird foods to try.
In this city of “myriad long-drawn lines and groups!” no distinctions can undermine the potential inherent in the chaotic masses that seem to pour incessantly out of the subways and storefronts to clog up the Broadway sidewalk. Even if a member of this crowd has only been in New York for an hour, they hold the latent prospect for one of the endless chance interactions through which this city teaches me every day- and what’s more New York than that?
I like the line that you quote in your final paragraph: "Thou portal--thou arena--thou of the myriad long-drawn lines and groups!" It makes me think that Whitman, in describing Broadway, is also describing his own poetry. As Philip Lopate suggests in Ric Burns's documentary New York, the formal qualities of Whitman's poetry, with its lines of various lengths, its ebbs and follows of feeling, its overwhelming catlogues make reading it an experience that is analogous to walking down the city's streets.
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