Mes Dépêches

Where are they all going?

A glance down Madison Avenue on this dreary Saturday reveals a parade of bouncing umbrellas, never in unison and often rappelling off of one another. A village of idiots, each lost in his own head, roaming the filthy streets blindly in the absence of anything else to do, I say.

Who needs to be out at eight on a Saturday? Not me. I’ll stay dry in my slippers, safely on the sofa.

News folk humbly bellow their evidence of the city’s decline, mostly the luddites of Fox who embrace the bad bleach-and-bob of the heartland but recoil in horror at the similarly ridiculous sight of a Brooklyn teen with a purple streak. “Socialists push the work-from-home culture! The city will die from laziness!” The relentless parade of morning umbrellas would suggest that any calling of New York’s death is, at best, premature.

The city is different than in 2019, no question. Weekdays feel more like weekends, but then again the city was never dead on weekends. Empty storefronts litter this same Madison Avenue on which the lemmings collide, legions of homeless standing sentry in the dark doors once occupied by judgmental shopkeepers.

A rash of shoplifting, spreading throughout the country like syphilis from a traveling whore, takes advantage of the slower pace of cities these days. Target is closing a store in Manhattan; thankfully not mine, though I manage a hint of sympathy for the East Harlemites now regressing back to a life of bodegas. Many more are closing in the deflated Bay Area and Portland, so we take solace in our superiority to at least a few.

The solution is simple, say the banks. Go into the city’s apartments, shove the lazy serfs back into their cheap suits and chain ‘em to the desk. Diners back on the streets, paying subway fares to cover the system’s mind-numbing losses, pushing the meth-crazed sidewalk creatures back into the dark – manufacture the critical mass! We did it for a century before Covid, by God, so why would we stop?

Perhaps the better question is why did we do it to begin with? So many days of trekking through rain and sleet and snow, only to sit and stare at the wall while aloof parents shared their doorknob-licking child’s latest prized virus. I still recall at twenty-two or twenty-three, supposedly at the peak of physical health, when my boss at the time coughed a child virus directly into my nostrils, with sufficient force and aim to penetrate the bloodstream. Two months later, I was still sneezing.

No, the thought of going back to that misery, just to prop up banks who made ill bets on office space: it’s lunacy. Connection and mentorship, my ass. Want to connect with me? Head to the bar.

And maybe that’s another point. I wasn’t alive to see 1960s corporate culture, but I have watched an episode of Mad Men. Lowly mid-managers of that day had offices and a whiskey cabinet. Post-Financial Crisis cost cutting tossed most folks onto trade desks for the past decade, and Covid cost cutting largely swapped those for the “hotel,” or shared, variety… loud, ketchup-stained (err, hopefully ketchup), temporary, insulting trade desks. Want to recoup your investment, sir banker? Bring back the office walls. And the whiskey.

Is that the trade-off? The only option? Do your patriotic duty by filling the desk, or endure a city overrun with violent cretins? Surely the center of the capitalist world possesses more creativity.

As it happens, in contrast to the histrionics of Roger Ailes’ hand-rubbed Aryan caricatures, a solution does appear to be in the offing, one that doesn’t require a consultant’s PowerPoint skills to see. With each year that passes, the world quietly, slowly retreats toward the normal we knew before, and the city which in 2021 appeared a gaunt whisper of its former self begins to fill out the stretchy pants again. A recent Post survey showed that nearly three-quarters of workers were back in the office at least three days a week. Subway traffic is climbing in parallel.

Inertia is a powerful force, one never to be underappreciated, and here we feel a touch of it. Companies continue to downsize office space as leases expire, taking advantage of an opportunity to shed cost in advance of a potential recession, meaning a return to a five-day commute is likely not plausible unless and until we hit meaningful layoffs.

But even I must admit that sitting alone for all five days is about as socially fulfilling as talking to Tom Hanks’ volleyball, and decidedly less than professionally motivating.

So it is that even without a mandate from the author of my paycheck, the inertia of drives both personal and professional push me back to the subway, back to the insulting shared trade desk, back to walks over the homeless and through the dog excrement for a coffee, back to my old daily burrito bowl routine at Chipotle that apparently comprised two inches of my pre-pandemic waistline. And, given that its on my terms, even I must admit to not hating it.

The rain is lifting now, the earliest hints of autumn show. With proof in any number of aging rom coms, everyone knows this is New York’s season. But however comfortable my sliders, the season cannot be enjoyed inside, removed. Ideally it would be enjoyed in the comfort of a company-supplied town car, decked in Barney’s and Bergdorf, zipping down a leafy Fifth Avenue to a busy office in the style of Miranda Priestly… but I suppose I mentioned cost cutting.

It may take a few years, and perhaps a few meth heads camp out next to my Whole Foods forever, but each time the leaves turn, a few more people show up, a bit of the city returns.