I am in a love and hate relationship with this city. New York gets beautiful sunsets that nobody sees or knows about. Residents ask themselves daily why they inhabit this burly brimming ship and find solace in watching the flickering tourists from Baton Rouge—who would have loved to dress, walk, and spend like splendid New Yorkers. But I love Manhattan because it’s an island that least resembles an island, and because it was traded for goods equaling a meager 24 dollars—about the price of a modest entrée in a tiny Greenwich gourmet. Manhattan contains not a single patch of land unset by human hand—its lakes are reservoirs, coasts are beltways, its trees are imports. Folks live in clustered tiny flats, for a hundred dollars per square yard. If the bathtub is in the living room, real estate agents call it Mexican style. Hungry artists cling with their fingernails to 9th floors of old 12th Avenue apartments, places no tourist has been before.

Although these days most hoods look and speak alike, there remain pockets of color and tongues, and crazy folks that make Manhattan fantastic. A peek into the frantic fishmongers of Chinatown and behind the lace curtains a few steps up a stoop, a woman practices her incense-lit spells. A trip uptown and life slows down, leaning on buildings with plenty of time, people watch neighbors come and go, singing and fishing for ganja behind the wheels of parked cars. East Village dresses in graffiti and cobblestone, smoking a mystic pipe in its dives, gardens, depressed teenagers and empty lots. Bond Street is drunk with modern architecture. Saint Mark’s is the underground sliced open. Washington Square Park is full of junkies and homeless chess players. ‘Get your drugs, legal or illegal, and vacate the park’ the police car mutters at midnight, circling around the fountain like a saddled knight. Downtown at the tip of the island, scribed on modern glass walls are the names and stories of immigrants coming in from Ellis Island, renamed, courageous and ready to start life anew. I wonder if they’ll ever inscribe my name at JFK.

Last short weekend I did not set foot in Manhattan. I am a Brooklynite. If Manhattan is the Rockies, Brooklyn is the Great Plains. It is a vast lowland with foreign chatter and hopes that travel wider than higher. Brooklyn is at times beautiful, at times broken-hearted with its sad canning factories and abandoned trolley rails. Some come to Brooklyn because herein money buys more, but I prefer Brooklyn because I find nothing I want to buy in Manhattan.