1: Everyday Cartographies
My time in NYC is short; just a year, so I take shortcuts to acquaint myself with the university and neighbourhood. Stories do not arrive for me as they did in the past, unravelling themselves over wine with my professors at Oxford or clumsily translating information panels about authors and musicians in the Parisian metro after yet another Ligne 4 delay after class. The books I buy unfurl from Manhattan as a core, often from south-to-north: the AIA Guide to New York City begins from Lower Manhattan, my then-partner picks up Walking Manhattan: 30 Strolls that start in Battery City.
I am from Singapore, that other great paean to buildings that reach the clouds, and food from all sorts of cultures saturating the streets, and thus my cartography is culinary too. Recommendations are flung at me when I mention I’m new to the city, and each make it onto a list (‘NY Rumours’), such that the inevitable Google map every citizen here seems to wind up with, my pockmarked five boroughs, reflects not just my heatmap but the adventures of strangers, friends, classmates. In this digital ecosystem that ranks sites – bakeries, restaurants, bars, museums – out of five stars, those falling into the <4* danger zone might even be culled, such that one’s geography of the worthwhile is also a product of the background forces of anonymous, aggregate reviews. In the digital detritus that accumulates, one sifts through the microhistories of restaurants – menus with pre-COVID prices, well-beloved servers identified by name, the occasional factoid churned out by Google’s AI – for signs of reliability, sometimes verified by the little plaques by restaurant entrances or in conversations with chatty proprietors. Critics generate their own quests too. The New York Times defines the city in 57 sandwiches, which an internet user helpfully Google-fies.1 Depending on what my body needs, I toggle between these two maps and one detailing the city’s public toilets. The city’s infrastructure is designed around consumption and circulation, but never what leaves the body.
Less crude: the map of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, where the Bronx seems depopulated of sandwiches and noteworthy sites.
A friend from high school comes to visit me two weeks into the semester, swapping London’s grey skies and tsunami of legal work for New York. For this homesick Singaporean, our first stop is Chinatown, and I indulge him. Stepping into Canal Street, the first thing that hits one straight from the A train is the smell of something cooking – skewers of meat, fish, shrimp, vegetables, doused in cumin and chili powder. Street carts like this don’t exist any more in London, in Hong Kong (where my mother is from, and where I’ve spent years cumulatively), and certainly not in Singapore, where even the pavements are strictly regulated. Soon after Singapore’s independence in 1965, the high modernist state’s vision of a hygienist, rational modernity extended even to the microcosm of the pushcart, and between 1971 to 1986, 18,000 ‘hawkers’ – the coloniality of the term used for sellers of street food only stands out to me as I type these words – were subject to a licensing scheme and relocated to “back lanes, car parks, and vacant plots of land”, and then, to “markets and hawker centres with proper amenities”. For the historian Gregory Clancey, the early days of Singaporean independence were the dying days of political alternatives: “By the time the left took to the streets for one last bid for power in the 1960s, “the street” was already in the process of disappearing”.2 With the disappearance of the street, at least as one knew it, came the disappearance of street food. Little wonder, then, that my friend was surprised to find it on the streets.
- The New York Times. “57 Sandwiches That Define New York City.” June 18, 2024, sec. Food. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/dining/best-nyc-sandwiches.html. Amongst the comments on a Reddit thread debating the merits of, say, excluding Pisillo, NYT Staff Engineer Hubert Mandeville drops this handy list: https://maps.app.goo.gl/4CJ9HceV2Rhvrprt5. ↩︎
- Clancey, Gregory. “Toward a Spatial History of Emergency: Notes from Singapore.” In Beyond Description, p.62. Routledge, 2004. ↩︎
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