A thread for sharing about where you live, are from, or have been... Set the scene for us. What is the place like? The landscape? The people? The atmosphere? What are some interesting stories, traditions, or spots to visit? How does the place affect or change the people who live there?
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Right now I live in Jersey City, New Jersey. I moved here for school and work and it took me a LONG time to get used to this place. The dirty, cracked pavement seemed to stretch endlessly in all directions in a landscape devoid of comfort or reassurance.
When you walk and use public transportation, you get calluses on the bottom of your feet and get used to being too close for comfort with total strangers on the train. You pick up interesting stories and moments in lives you otherwise know nothing about, some joyful and some tragic. Just like in New York, you become immured to sights that might in the past have shocked or moved you. There's just no way to maintain the energy to respond fully to every sick, hungry, lost, or haunted person you encounter, so part of you learns to shut down, to build a wall, and you actively have to work against it to stay open.
Take the PATH to Newark to enter a landscape so bleak, especially as you take the bus down to the industrial area where the prisons are, that it seems like something out of a postapocalyptic movie. The cycles of chronic poverty, violence, and crime do nothing to lighten the mood, nor does the sight of black, polluted waterways on the train ride home. But yet, the lights shimmer on the surface of the water here too, and a mystic clarity can sometimes arise in the absence of comforting illusions.
Take the PATH to lower Manhattan and be awed by the nonstop energy and strange beauty of yet another concrete landscape, this one with more the feel of a wonderland than a waste... but even so, in a place with the sheen of opulent wealth, there are despairing sights of human suffering that cannot be turned away from by even those who can afford to insulate themselves from much of life's hardships. You are reminded constantly of the less fortunate, the way they suffer, how close any of us are to the same fate... just one turn of fortune's wheel is all it takes.
A car opens up the area a little bit, to places worth visiting again and places one would never visit again. I've never been in more of a hell-hole than Passaic, New Jersey, and I have no doubt if I died and went to hell, it would look a hell of a lot like Passaic.
But as I've started working in Staten Island, I've grown to love that strange island so often derided by New Yorkers from the other boroughs... It is a fascinating mix of cultures and is where some of "old New York" has fled as rents have gone up in Brooklyn and hipsters have invaded. The northern part of the island is more racially and culturally diverse, while the southern part, where I work, is predominantly Italian.
Many share stories of how they or their families moved themselves and/or their businesses from Brooklyn to Staten Island. Homemade mozzarella and specialty Italian foods just weren't selling the way they used to in Brooklyn, where many now flock to organic and health food stores. The Mafia remains a powerful cultural myth, not a 'myth' because it is not real, but in how it takes root in people's minds. Stories of gangsters and wannabe gangsters fill the pages of the local newspaper, the Staten Island Advance, as do complaints of traffic and endless potholes.
Living in this area has forever changed me. I've been weathered through nights of despair, but have also found tremendous strength and clarity. I now understand why my stepfather, who now lives in my hometown, can so readily say that he has no desire to return to New York, even after having grown to love the place in many years of living there. I too have grown to love this place, and the sight of the Jersey City and Manhattan skylines rising into view as I drive home on the Turnpike extension at night, all the lights of the city sparkling like gems in a velvet black nightscape,still thrills me every time, but part of me knows that the burden of life would feel so much lighter somewhere else... by Stephanie on January 30, 2010 8:56 AM Reply | 
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