Escaparse de Nueva York

Time moves on. Cities change. As they change, people tend to get nostalgic for what used to be. Today, nostalgia for the “bad old days” of the NYC of the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s has almost reached the level of kitsch, it’s so prevalent. Luckily, your solution is only measured in distance, instead of time. Just hop on a flight to Sao Paulo.

I always describe Sao Paulo as New York in Portuguese in 1982 (and without the great public subway system I suppose). First of all, the town is huge - one of the five biggest cities in the world kind of huge. No city that isn’t at least a few million people can rightfully be compared to New York. Before anything else, the defining characteristic of the city is “big - really big.”

Second of all, like New York, Sao Paulo is an immigrant city. It has the biggest Japanese population outside of Japan, the biggest Lebanese population outside of Lebanon and (believe it or not, New Yorkers), the biggest Italian population outside of Italy. Like New York, anyone can walk the streets and not feel out of place. That is, of course, if you know how to walk like a Brazilian. The immigrant situation in Sao Paulo is different from New York in a very significant way. Sao Paulo is an old immigrant city. While 100 years ago it had a similar immigration story as New York, today it doesn’t attract substantial numbers at all. The Korean, Chinese, and Bolivian populations have all increased somewhat in recent years, but they’re the only newer groups of significance.

It’s similar to the early 80s in New York, when the old immigrant groups had already long since assimilated, but new immigrant groups had yet to arrive in large numbers. It’s as easy to tell a Japanese-Brazilian and a Japanese tourist apart as it is to tell a Italian-American and an Italian tourist apart for us. There is such a universal Brazilian identity and culture (the same as there’s a universal American culture I suppose) that despite the myriad kinds of different ethnicities, I noticed that people were Brazilian first, and only after if they were Afro-Brazilian, or Japanese-Brazilian, or whatever else.

I tried to wander around the town as much as I could, and see the different neighborhoods and populations. But there’s a problems - sizewise, Sao Paulo is ridiculously big, and doesn’t really have much of a subway system. There’s about 4 or 5 main business districts (they keep moving further and further south), which can be miles apart. I stuck mostly to the old downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. One, Bom Retiro, was the old Jewish neighborhood. Similarly to the Lower East Side of the 80s, it seems to be developing into the cosmopolitan neighborhood of the town, with old Jews, Bolivians, Koreans, Chinese, and Yuppies all living there today. The locals I talked to said generally said it was their favorite neighborhood.

Also like New York City in the 1980s, Sao Paulo has a somewhat overstated reputation for being extremely dirty and dangerous. Dirty? Sure - it’s a city. I wouldn’t say it’s any dirtier that any comparable city. Dangerous? Well, that’s always subjective. Generally speaking, if someone runs into trouble in any particular city they’ll say it’s dangerous, and if they don’t, they won’t. I felt perfectly comfortable there - maybe more comfortable than in any city outside of the United States. And I never ran into any trouble, or even felt that I was close to doing so. Still, it’s a far cry from the New York of today, and from talking to most of the locals I gathered it’s reputation for danger was somewhat undeserved - but not THAT undeserved.

Another thing the locals agreed upon was that the city was getting a little better every year. This is why I call it New York in 1982. There was a small period, post 1970s fiscal crisis, yet pre Crack and Aids, where New York - led by a still enormously popular Ed Koch - seemed to be on the upswing. Sao Paulo is better than yesterday - but still has yet to undergo the dramatic transformation that would let it take it’s rightful place as a world city.

Sao Paulo is the financial, and arguably cultural, capital of an entire continent. It’s by far the largest city in South America, and also happens to be one of the leading 4 or 5 fashion cities in the world. It’s cosmopolitan, has great nightlife, amazing restaurants, and every other service an international traveller could want. Yet it has an almost nonexistent tourist infrastructure. And needless to say, Sao Paulo is not exactly the first place off the lips of people when asked where they want to vacation.

Still, I’m betting on the town. Sao Paulo has, for lack of a better term, a certain coolness factor to it. Language is a barrier (who speaks Portuguese?), as is the perceived chaotic and dangerous nature of the city. But there is a certain energy in the town that’s an indescribable draw - an energy all too familiar to the inhabitants of New York City. In many ways, Berlin is the city I’ve been to that is most like New York. But in terms of sheer feeling, Sao Paulo is really the only place that comes close. Give the city 10 or 20 years - if it has a second great immigrant wave (a wave which saved New York City in the 80s and 90s), cleans up a bit, and manages to develop an easily recognized positive identity and character (I’m betting on supermodel paradise), I won’t be that surprised to hear the international jet set talk about it as a destination of choice - much like New York. I wonder though, if it will retain the same edge - if people will pine for the “bad old days” of Sao Paulo like they do for New York.

There is a public toilet not 50 feet away. Even if I couldn’t make it that far, there’s a fairly well concealed public park right in front of me. But no, here I am peeing right on the street. Why? Well….

“What?! We are in France!” my companion for the night replied when I tell him I’m going to head down the block to the public toilets. “Here, I have to take a piss too.”

“You know what the most Latin country in the world is?” he asks me as he lets a stream go right on the sidewalk next to me. “Not Italy, not Spain. France.” My companion knows well of what he speaks. He’s been relying on that relaxed Latin “can’t be bothered” attitude for quite a while now.

My flight back to New York is out of Charles De Gaulle airport, so I’ve got a couple nights in Paris. Last year, we had quite the adventure journeying above , around, and especially below the City of Light. This time, while Paris wasn’t a priority, there were a few things I wanted to mop up. One character, who I had met before in New York, I arranged to do a little exploring with before I left. He was the one currently taking a piss right next to me in the middle of Rue Daguerre.

Paris is absolutely unlike any other city in the world when it comes to urban exploration. The combination of large, dedicated, fairly well-coordinated core groups of adventurers with the aforementioned incredibly relaxed attitude to recreational municipal trespassing (as well as pretty much anything else that would lead to a hassle on the authorities’ part), lead to probably the only major western city where you could get away with stuff like this.

While I’m sworn to secrecy as to our exact adventures that night, let’s just say the methods of entry and discovery are a far, far cry from the “wait until 3:00 AM, jump the fence, and pray you don’t get seen” kind of style we generally employ in New York. “What, you don’t have people working on the key problem? Or the alarm problem?” my companion asks incredulously.

Well, no we don’t. Maybe we should. But it’s not just the attitude of the authorities that’s the problem. Paris is a very old, and very stagnant city. The problem in places like New York is that it doesn’t have nearly the history needed to create a subterranean network like exists in Paris. Places get closed up (and less often, re-opened) in Paris all the time - it’s just part of the game. There’s always more than enough other stuff to occupy the hard-core explorers, casual cataphiles, and “rivioli” (as my companion calls the young and naive embryotic adventurers). In New York, if one of our favorite underground niches gets closed up, it’s a blow. There’s a very limited amount that are regularly accessible by your average curious bear, especially in this day and age. And the more people that know about them, the greater the chance they’ll get closed, so we tend to keep them pretty well under our hats - we certainly wouldn’t let the word get out to the amount of people needed to fill up a small movie theater, for instance.

The other problem is that Paris basically has not changed in about 300 years. Nothing new really gets built in the city proper, and historic preservation laws are draconian. In New York, you can’t count on an interesting space being there tomorrow, much less for the 18 months it took to set up the underground cinema. The town is always changing. Old things go, new things come, spaces get filled in, or dug up, or sealed off.

Still, the folks in Paris inspire me. There’s so much more we could do. Some folks in New York have been mildly successful going the legitimate route - ironically, that same Latin attitude that makes the clandestine route so easy in France makes the legal route next to impossible. And every once in a while someone manages to pull off a good, extralegal event without getting the place shut down. But for the most part it’s still a few folks, a nutty idea, a impromptu adventure, and that’s a wrap.

Maybe it’s laziness. Maybe it’s fear. Maybe it’s the dregs of the post 9-11 paranoia. Maybe it’s just the fact that we don’t have the positive feedback feedback loop France has - the more you pull off, the more people get into it, the more attempts are made, the more it becomes just a part of the city.

But mostly I think it’s just a different culture. New York is not really the type of city to have too many secret arty gatherings. That’s a Euro thing, and Paris is pretty much the definition of Euro. New York, at least at its best, is raw, dirty, and in your face. We’re much more likely to insult the mayor on the side of the Brooklyn Bridge (and not even make it look pretty), than throw a secret dinner party. The energy and effort that’s put into Guerilla Urbanism in Paris is put into one of our most famous cultural innovations - Graffiti - in New York City.

Of course, that’s not to say there isn’t graffiti in Europe, the same as there’s plenty of Guerilla Urbanism here in New York. And, of course, the two cultures intersect in both cities every once in a while. Euros still come here to paint trains, knowing full well they’ll never run. Now, part of this is because most young Euros desperately want to be from the Bronx in 1982 for some reason. But part of it is also a homage to the fact that despite the changes over the last years, NYC was, is, and always will be the origin, home, and personification of the graffiti bomber. The best way I can put it is that in Paris, they generally clean up after themselves, their goal being to leave no trace. Here in New York, the goal is always to make our mark.

Our adventure ended well past midnight. I wandered the streets of Paris for a few hours before hopping on the first train of the day to the airport, to catch my flight back to New York. Of course, I was only home for a little more than 24 hours. I still had another continent to conquer in the 7 weeks left of my trip.

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