Walking around Bowery over break, I noticed a small open place across the street with the NYC Parks symbol on the side. There was a statue of a Chinese man and a small memorial. Even from across the wide & busy Bowery, I could read the inscription on the memorial, which read: “In memory of Americans of Chinese ancestry who lost their lives in defense of freedom and democracy.” As soon as I turned the corner, it dawned upon me how many people that small memorial was commemorating. This tiny place, probably not much bigger than my dorm room, is of incredible significance to the hundreds of thousands of Chinese New Yorkers whose ancestors died in our wars.
I started thinking about anything small in the city that has any significance to me or my friends. The eagles outside of Penn Station represent a lot of history to me, just like the few other remaining relics of the old Penn Station. The park under the Triboro Bridge, where I go to a drill competition every August, is a highway flyover to 99% of the tri-state area, but it’s a sports arena to me. A coffee shop near my high school used to be where my teammates and I went after practice everyday, but to most people it’s just any other coffee shop, no different than the thousands, maybe even millions, of other coffee shops in the city. Obviously, none of these examples mean as much as a veterans’ memorial, but they still mean something more to me than what the naked eye sees.
I’m sure there are many other people who have some type of attachment to seemingly normal things. This isn’t unique to New York, as I’m sure that people in any other city in the country, even the world, have similar feelings about seemingly normal places or things in their city. However, the memorial made me think about how small these types of things are in somewhere as dense as the city. Based on my experience, it is probably the density. In the small town on Long Island where I grew up, the memorial is much larger than the one in Chinatown. In regards to the drill competition under the Triboro Bridge, there’s a similar competition in Texas, but their venue is always nicer than the shadow of a bridge. Once again, because our city is so dense, we have to cram everything wherever we can. I’ve only given examples of the things that are significant to me, but there are 8.4 million other people in the city, and 20 million in the tri-state area. There are that many more small things that mean a lot to people. This actually somewhat tweaks my perspective of everything I pass by in the city, because even though most of the things I pass by hold little to no significance to me, it still changes my perspective knowing that it means something to someone.
