rose-sculpture-beetle-closeroses-sculpture-tree-vertroses-sculpture-arches

Today I’m making a big, bright red Valentine for the city I live in and love: New York. I’ve lived in other big towns and visited cities on three continents, but New York was the first place I felt completely at home from the get go. Prior to New York, I often felt like a visitor in the gritty, industrial Connecticut city where I grew up in a poor neighborhood bordering a cemetery and in the wealthy suburban town where we moved when I was a teenager.

In both places I felt a lack of connection, a need to keep my thoughts to myself. Plus there were no oddballs wandering around. When I started art school in New York, it turned out I liked oddballs. Observing them in action was one of my favorite things to do.

Of course San Francisco where I also lived for nine months had its own share of oddballs, but they were different than the New York kind. They were somehow sadder, weighed down, like their backs were up against the Pacific. Unlike New York City oddballs who dotted the super-charged cityscape as naturally as trees, they appeared out of place in the wide open California space and fry-your-brains-out sun.

Its’ hills steep as mountains, San Francisco was also a tough city to walk around in. People loved their cars more than walking. Often I found myself a solitary pedestrian on empty neighborhood streets. With a paltry street life, there were no jolts of energy waiting outside lobby doors to instantly re-charge you .

Another thing that appealed to me about New York was the never-ending parade of surprises. Some of these surprises, it’s true, were not so hot like the cavernous pothole that gobbled me up and broke a bone in my foot, but these were often covered by good surprises, like the solicitous stranger who sat beside me on a sidewalk for almost an hour waiting for a city ambulance that never came. But hey — no problem. She simply flagged down a passing Hatzolah ambulance that serviced our Orthodox Jewish neighbors. And after delivering me to the Emergency Room, did the Hatzolah volunteer drivers dump stranger-non-Orthodox-Jewish me at the hospital doors and take a fast powder. No, they stuck with me for ages till a doctor materialized.

On 9/11 I discovered just how much I loved New York. After the horrors of that morning when public transportation had ceased, I was walking home from mid-town in a silent procession of dazed New Yorkers. Earlier in the morning we had all spoken to each other on the street and the bus sharing information as events unfolded, trying to take in and grasp what was happening. But now it was over. We had watched the towers collapse and the cyclone of choking smoke that swallowed lower Manhattan. Numb, cocooned in shock, I shambled along, thinking how awful it would have been to be out of town, to have not been there to share the surreal enormity of the day’s events and pain.

But as always, no matter what happens, New York life chugged on. And this winter at the end of January, one of the Big Apple’s loveliest surprises popped up on Park Avenue. Suddenly in the snow, slush and freezing winds, massive pink and red roses (shown here) up to 25 feet tall bloomed on the esplanade from 57th to 67th Street. A cheery Valentine Gift created by sculptor Will Ryman. Now I ask you, where else in the world are you going to find ten blocks of gigantic roses to brighten the spirits of a snow battered city and to remind us that Spring tulips will soon be planted among them.

More Love and NYC Chronicles: