Pocket Dispatch from The Big Intersection at Happy Hour
Photo by Levi Jackson
The beating heart of my neighborhood is a six-way intersection where a number of flatiron buildings are arranged like a sun dial. Below their loft dance studios and hair salons, their ground floors contain establishments with drink specials and views of the ceaseless activity outside.
Photo by the author.
Each time the traffic lights change, new chaos begins, accelerating throughout the traffic cycle, often to the point of actual danger when the green lights turn yellow and drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists make a final, desperate dash to avoid more waiting.
Photo by the author.
I come here for the waiting.
There is a railing next to an accessible ramp on one corner where I like to perch with my camera when the weather is nice, shooting photos of fashionable and interesting strangers. The rest of the time, I take a window seat at the counter in the posh bodega on the adjacent corner and just watch the action unfold.
The people around me paw their phones or take Zoom meetings and phone calls, talking more loudly than they realize while sipping lattes. I could drown them out with headphones, but they are in fact part of the scenery I’ve come to observe.
Sometimes it takes a strange kind of discipline to waste my precious free moments here between dropping off my three-year-old at preschool and picking him up three hours later. Most days, that’s all the time I really have to get things done. But I also have to stop and breathe sometime, and remember to enjoy the place I live and the other humans who inhabit it beside me.