Do you know New York? By heart ? Get back there quickly… The city has changed again. You believe her in yin, she is already in yang. Like a gigantic stomach, it can empty itself when the cold or a pandemic assail it. To better regain its place when inventors, creators, artists, or the curious from all over the world flock there. The collapse of its twin towers, repeated economic or real estate crises, a Republican president, fashions that are going out of fashion, delinquency, mass tourism fail to tarnish its legend. New York resembles the axolotl, this aquatic salamander that can regenerate different parts of its body.
To hold off its haters, it continues to attract talent and shoppers. French cooks and designers, Haitian taxis, Mexican entrepreneurs, Canadian booksellers, Italian grocers, Japanese start-ups, Chinese tourists, Ethiopian models, Swedish writers, athletes at the height of their glory, everyone wants to find refuge there and add their stone to this building. in eternal construction. A harmonious polyphony never out of breath and which knows how to silence its false notes and its dissonances.
New York never sleeps. It has neither the arrogance of Paris, nor the youth of Abu Dhabi, nor the permanence of London, nor the second life of Berlin, nor the gigantism of Beijing or São Paulo. Its constantly changing modernity does not destroy the traces of its yesterday’s pride. It is a literary city. Sempé and Salinger, Paul Auster and Truman Capote drew the best of their work from it. Even Patti Smith, the godmother of the punk movement, worked in her youth in the Strand Bookstore and Scribner’s, respectively located in the East Village and on 5th Avenue. As for Georges Simenon, in Maigret à New York, he pulled the commissioner out of his retirement from Meung-sur-Loire to entrust him with a thorny investigation in 1947, which he will come to the end of on the liner that brings him back to France. Alas, the grumpy policeman has hardly tasted the charms of New York life. He will return to Paris convinced of the cultural superiority of his country. So French!
