One occupation that never fails to fill a little time pleasantly is to perch on the rickety blue ladder/stool next to the narrow window in my tiny kitchen, coffee cup in hand, and crane my neck to observe the passing parade on 37th Street, five floors below.
Which parade, as a result of the great wisdom of New York’s founding city planners, flows in two directions on the major crosstown thoroughfares, such as 34th and 42nd Streets. But on the narrower four-lane east-west streets crossing those two specific arteries, the two lanes of moving traffic alternate direction between parked cars on either side. Everything on 36th and 38th (even-numbered) Streets moves from west to east, everything on 37th beneath my window (and on all odd-numbered streets) from east to west.
Thus I sat at that window with my coffee at noon on Sunday, October 30, 2011, idly entertaining myself with this small segment of the city’s transit. And, watching, I became bemused by the extraordinary number of taxicabs passing below. Unlike smaller towns, in which one must phone to order a cab and then await its arrival, New York City has become the kind of metropolis in which the pedestrian must take care to avoid being hit by one of them.
From my vantage point five floors above, the street became a wriggling, squirming, speeding kaleidoscope of cabs with rooftop messages:
“Broadway.com SKYRIM” (a show? This was not clear from the sign.)
“Flashdancer Gentlemen’s Club”
“Eau de Parfum”
“Put your brand on top.”
“All new episodes” (referring to the Stiller and Murphy TV comedy)
I was easily able to tally the number of passing cabs for the first half hour–thirty short minutes–between Noon and 12:30. Of those minutes, the first 15 were busier: 32 cabs choked the lanes then, declining to 30 for the second 15 minutes. Sixty-two cabs in a half hour. Slightly more than two per minute. One hundred twenty-four per hour. Almost 1,000 in eight hours. When a red light stopped traffic at Fifth Avenue to the west, there might be five or six Yellow Cabs in the street at once, idling their motors, ready to move at the first sign of green. A far cry from Chattanooga, Tennessee, where, when I left home on a beautiful bluff above the Tennessee River, for the lovely old Read House hotel downtown, where I would spend the night before moving back to New York the next day, I phoned a cab and then waited for probably twenty minutes.
By 12:30, my coffee and my allotted time were gone. There were things to do, and I turned away from the window to take care of them. As I busied myself at my desk, all those diversions on the street were out of sight. But not out of earshot nor out of mind. In the street five floors below, from early morning until late at night, honking horns and shifting gears and accelerating engines are the background music that keeps me awake, alert, and entertained—or lulled to sleep—in my tiny apartment.
Ann Moore: Inside Out 