the popularity of a recent video that has racked up more than 1.5 million views on Instagram. The eight-second clip shows a cockroach on a New York sidewalk, maneuvering a cigarette butt roughly the size of its own body into a small opening in a manhole cover. It’s an amusing spectacle that echoes the “Pizza Rat” video from 2015, in which a rodent was seen dragging a cheese slice down some subway steps.I'll spare you both of these, although I'm a New Yorker, so to me they're funny. But this isn't just about vermin videos.
The clip appeared on What Is New York, one of several popular Instagram feeds that specialize in a kind of urban vérité: photos and videos documenting the weirder, seamier side of city living. There are posts that capture people in bizarre costumes (and states of undress), posts that show commuters on wacky jury-rigged vehicles, posts that record deviant recreational pursuits — along with the blasé reactions of passers-by. In one video, ... the camera pans over a pothole that someone has filled to the brim with uneaten bagels.So far, so good. I'm happy to see a little publicity for these two feeds, which I've been following on Twitter. But Rosen wants to make this a story about urban anxiety and malaise.
... Rick McGuire, who runs What Is New York and its sister account Subway Creatures, receives hundreds of submissions each week, gathered by New Yorkers on the prowl for sight gags.
It may be no accident that such images are proliferating in today’s New York. Nearly three years into the Covid pandemic, there is a chaotic mood in the city — a feeling that pent-up energy is spilling into the streets and New Yorkers are more inclined to let their quirks, among other things, hang out. Old debates about public disorder have been fueled by the tabloid press and by politicians like Mayor Eric Adams, who has said he has “never witnessed crime at this level.” Statistics refute the idea that the city is experiencing unprecedented crime. (There were nearly 80 percent fewer murders last year than in 1990, when Adams worked as a transit cop.) But like many cities, New York in 2022 is facing overlapping crises in housing, health care and education, and neighborhoods across the boroughs show more visible signs of poverty and addiction. What Is New York aims for laughs, but it chronicles a population that is stretched and stressed.Yes, it's no accident that such images are proliferating in today’s New York, but that's only because everyone carries a phone. Our ability to visually document the city's eccentricity has become a lot easier in recent years, but New York has been like this forever. (For the record, Subway Creatures debuted on Twitter more than a decade ago, in 2011.)
There is a larger dread that creeps into such feeds. Many posts document extreme weather and crumbling infrastructure: rainwater cascading into subway stations, cars bobbing like gondolas on flooded expressways. Then there are the intrusive species: footage of not just roaches and rats but also swarms of bees and spotted lanternflies, skunks in alleyways, a deer rooting through a trash can, a wild turkey on a car outside a housing project. Individually, they’re curiosities; collectively, they seem like portents of collapse, telling a foreboding story about out-of-whack ecosystems or a city gone feral.I'm not sure the video of the deer (who's eating a discarded slice of pizza) was actually taken in the city, but if I see a deer or a wild turkey within the city limits, that doesn't fill me with dread -- it seems like magic.
And speaking of magic, watch this:
This is insanely dangerous. It's also thrilling to watch.
I don't know whether Rosen is consciously embracing the kind of "post-liberal" thinking that says excessive tolerance has turned cities into sinkholes of squalor and dirt, but those of us who feel at home in cities think it's frequently good to know that you can walk out into your world and see things you wouldn't have put there, because some of them will be awe-inspiring, preposterous, or both:
There's a political battle going on in America (and in many other countries) between people who don't want anything (or anyone) in their environment that makes them uncomfortable and people who don't want to be shielded from difference, messiness, or surprise, who know that intrusions of the unexpected might be unpleasant but can sometimes be amazing, while even most the unpleasant ones won't kill you.
Rosen gets this, somewhat:
What Is New York depicts the city in the romantic, self-flattering way many New Yorkers like to see it: as the world capital of weird, whose denizens are hard-bitten enough to find amusement in whatever craziness the city offers up.But do we respond to these images because we see ourselves as hard-bitten? I don't think so. I think it's just that we're accustomed to jostling our way through a world full of other people (and occasionally animals, including unpleasant ones) with conflicting agendas -- and it's okay not to have everything around you in perfect harmony with you. Sometimes you get a pizza rat, sometimes you get a human ostrich.
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