Spotlight – September 2019

RUBRIKTITEL x/2019 Spotlight 29

N

ew York City is a clock. At every minute,

it changes — unique, transformed, never

again to be what it was. They say you can’t

set foot in the same river twice, and cities

are the same. A favorite local pastime is

complaining about the ways in which the

city has changed since “the old days,” which always means the

decade in which the speaker arrived here. Yet it still contains liv-

ing fossils, links in a continuous chain stretching into the past.

If you know where to look, the past is alive here, with previous

versions of the city contained within the current one

If you haven’t been,

you’ve got to go: New York

City is a metropolis that

constantly reinvents itself

pastime [(pÄstaIm]

, Zeitvertreib