The way in which the GFC has impacted on people and cities is amply shown in two pieces.
First, Tom Englehardt on TomDispatch.com in "A Second 9/11 in Slow Motion" reflects on the change of NY on "on the street":
"Now, understand, in New York City, there's nothing strange about small businesses going down, or buildings going up. It's a city that, since birth, has regularly cannibalized itself.
What's strange in my experience -- a New Yorker born and bred -- is when storefronts, once emptied, aren't quickly repopulated.
Broadway in daylight now seems increasingly like an archeological dig in the making. Those storefronts with their fading decals ("Zagat rated") and their old signs look, for all the world, like teeth knocked out of a mouth. In a city in which a section of Broadway was once known as the Great White Way for its profligate use of electricity, and everything normally is aglow at any hour, these dead commercial spaces feel like so many tiny black holes. Get on the wrong set of streets -- Broadway's hardly the worst -- and New York can easily seem like a creeping vision of Hell, not as fire but as darkness slowly snuffing out the blaze of life."
Another dimension, the human one, is reflected in this piece "Are they depressed? Nowhere near" on IHT:
"It's a tragic and all too common sight now — a line of the jobless, snaking around the corner and down the block, their hopes and résumés in hand. "I've lost count of how many I've been to," said a man waiting grim-faced in the job-fair line. "Same sort of nothing when you e-mail your résumé to corporate Web pages — no one has the decency to even acknowledge receipt."
In the cold sunshine a block from Macy's, the line had intimations of a Depression-era dance marathon: gutsy stepping through the motions while job-fair managers delivered their Yowsa cheer. The survival instinct glinted; a laid-off paralegal slyly bucked the line, smiling all the way, to deliver her résumé inside at a government job kiosk.
"Nothing gets me down," she explained in Darwinian justification. "Everything is an emotion; you discipline yourself to be happy," she said, steel in her tone as she eyed the next job table.
Out on bustling Broadway, Paul Wax, a computer security specialist, inched forward and nodded toward lower Manhattan, where at that moment Bernard Madoff, Wall Street's master thief, was facing his comeuppance in court. "A new suit for him, with stripes," Wax said. Hardly comforted, he envisioned many more Wall Street bilkers walking free and rich. "CEOs and presidents should be on this line — they're the ones who failed at their jobs." Wax, a Vietnam veteran who put himself through night school and raised a family, was five years from retirement when the bottom fell out.
Salaried commerce bustled past the line with little time for empathy. Scraps of intent negotiations from hurrying cell-phone talkers. The deliverymen with office pizzas, entrepreneurs to be envied. Inside, a job-fair manager confided there would be fewer fairs because there were simply fewer jobs.
Applicants were spared this forecast. "Stay positive!" a fair manager boomed. "Keep a smile on your face!" Wax had heard that tune before. "I meditate," he said, looking strong and eminently employable. "Meditation works. So far."
First, Tom Englehardt on TomDispatch.com in "A Second 9/11 in Slow Motion" reflects on the change of NY on "on the street":
"Now, understand, in New York City, there's nothing strange about small businesses going down, or buildings going up. It's a city that, since birth, has regularly cannibalized itself.
What's strange in my experience -- a New Yorker born and bred -- is when storefronts, once emptied, aren't quickly repopulated.
Broadway in daylight now seems increasingly like an archeological dig in the making. Those storefronts with their fading decals ("Zagat rated") and their old signs look, for all the world, like teeth knocked out of a mouth. In a city in which a section of Broadway was once known as the Great White Way for its profligate use of electricity, and everything normally is aglow at any hour, these dead commercial spaces feel like so many tiny black holes. Get on the wrong set of streets -- Broadway's hardly the worst -- and New York can easily seem like a creeping vision of Hell, not as fire but as darkness slowly snuffing out the blaze of life."
Another dimension, the human one, is reflected in this piece "Are they depressed? Nowhere near" on IHT:
"It's a tragic and all too common sight now — a line of the jobless, snaking around the corner and down the block, their hopes and résumés in hand. "I've lost count of how many I've been to," said a man waiting grim-faced in the job-fair line. "Same sort of nothing when you e-mail your résumé to corporate Web pages — no one has the decency to even acknowledge receipt."
In the cold sunshine a block from Macy's, the line had intimations of a Depression-era dance marathon: gutsy stepping through the motions while job-fair managers delivered their Yowsa cheer. The survival instinct glinted; a laid-off paralegal slyly bucked the line, smiling all the way, to deliver her résumé inside at a government job kiosk.
"Nothing gets me down," she explained in Darwinian justification. "Everything is an emotion; you discipline yourself to be happy," she said, steel in her tone as she eyed the next job table.
Out on bustling Broadway, Paul Wax, a computer security specialist, inched forward and nodded toward lower Manhattan, where at that moment Bernard Madoff, Wall Street's master thief, was facing his comeuppance in court. "A new suit for him, with stripes," Wax said. Hardly comforted, he envisioned many more Wall Street bilkers walking free and rich. "CEOs and presidents should be on this line — they're the ones who failed at their jobs." Wax, a Vietnam veteran who put himself through night school and raised a family, was five years from retirement when the bottom fell out.
Salaried commerce bustled past the line with little time for empathy. Scraps of intent negotiations from hurrying cell-phone talkers. The deliverymen with office pizzas, entrepreneurs to be envied. Inside, a job-fair manager confided there would be fewer fairs because there were simply fewer jobs.
Applicants were spared this forecast. "Stay positive!" a fair manager boomed. "Keep a smile on your face!" Wax had heard that tune before. "I meditate," he said, looking strong and eminently employable. "Meditation works. So far."
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