Gotham City Soul

I pay rent instead of a mortgage, and can only afford to live in Manhattan because I was lucky enough to get into a rent stabilized apartment. Without that apartment, I would not be able to afford to live here. My salary has remained the same for years. Yet I pay the same increasingly higher prices for everything that everyone else on Main Street U.S.A. does. The one thing I don’t have to worry about is gas prices—I don’t own a car. I don’t need one in this city because it has a terrific public transportation system. I also don’t have children. But that doesn ’t mean I don’t have financial responsibilities to children, and other people in my life. I do. When I take vacations, they are modest ones. I don’t have closets full of clothes like Carrie on Sex in the City . I don’t have a giant apartment like the folks on Seinfeld and Friends . My apartment is 450 square feet at the most. It is in a fifth floor walk up. It is comfortable, but there is nothing luxurious about it. There are onl

So as usual, I was looking around on the Internet, for what, I do not remember when I came upon the book Lights and Shadows of New York Life or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City written by James Dabney McCabe and published in 1872 or thereabouts. I looked up the author and his biography was so boring I stopped reading it and decided not to bore you with any of it here. The only thing you might bear in mi nd is that he was a Southerner, and a Confederate sympathizer before he moved North. I’m much enamored of the title, which gives off a certain mysterious energy. The excerpt I’ve included here is essentially a complaint that never goes out of style--that the city is too damn expensive. I’ve included the amounts of things in today’s dollars (converted on this calculator for a greater understanding of McCabe's frustration. I came to the realization that if I had my 2008 salary back in 1872, I’d be rich. But that ’s not how this works. I converted my salary today to 1872