The Cities and Moods Edition

On urban magic, timing, and coming together

Colin here. Cities have moods. This shouldn’t surprise — a metropolis operates on collective human energy, right down to the cellular level. Weather, politics, sport, labor negotiations, traffic: all of it mingles into something that is either working or it isn’t. What’s interesting is how macro forces shift the whole organism.

Last January, I caught lightning in a bottle in Melbourne. The city comes alive during the Australian Open, the ticketed tennis event functioning as a porous membrane to a broader urban energy: people out later under long summer light, some ambiently catching matches at a café, others in expansive corporate boxes overlooking the river.

By sheer coincidence, Nick Cave was doing a homecoming tour. He’s a local hero, and it was the emotional double-bounce on the trampoline — delightfully incongruent, too, since Cave is known for dark, sometimes feral ballads. His sound drifted from the riverside park into the warm night, lightly mingling with the distant tennis ambience. It felt purely Melbourne. A once-in-a-lifetime convergence, not easily replicated.

I had the same feeling landing in New York last week for a series of meetings. The overlaps were happening again. A beautiful stretch of weather — mid-seventies, delicate breeze — had left the city feeling freshly pressure-washed, scrubbed clean for the international arrivals landing for the World Cup. The Knicks won the NBA championship, and long-suffering supporters like Spike Lee were visibly emotional.

Outside Aldo Sohm wine bar on 51st Street, people sat with glasses of Grüner watching France play Senegal on a large screen. A stroll on the High Line after dinner turned up an international mix of visitors and residents, all smiling, while a lone saxophonist played under an overpass near the Standard — the acoustics just right, the melodies pitch-perfect for a summer evening. Children walked barefoot through a water fountain. Tourists leaned from the Whitney’s rooftop perch as the sun stayed out unusually long.

Why is this interesting?

Ordinarily, street busking is an irritant. The L train runs cheek-to-jowl. Trash smells mingle with thick summer humidity and New Yorkers are gruff in the usual and familiar ways. The Van Wyck Expressway remains under construction, as it has been since I was a student at NYU in the years after September 11th. The N train still runs with its lurid orange and yellow color scheme. It’s Showtime! (if you know you know). There is much to fix, and much still to complain about.

But given the emotional tenor of the city — a sporting run generating real civic electricity, World Cup fixtures underway, and a large swath of the population feeling optimism — the complaints could be set aside for a moment. Not indefinitely. Just gently, briefly, the way you let a difficult friend off the hook on a good day.

It might have only been a week, but it was profoundly noticeable. A friend sitting in Australia messaged me: “New York seems pumping right now.” Perceptible through the algorithms and airwaves, even from the other side of the planet.

Being on the ground to feel it was something else entirely. I’m confident my next visit will restore the usual mental accounting — the critiques, the infrastructure grievances, the long list of things that drive me mad about the city. But for a fleeting moment, everything was beautiful in an immensely complicated metropolis.