There must be a rate at which one forgets, and as long as a city changes at that rate or a slower one, change registers but it doesn’t disorient, for there are sufficient points of orientation and triggers of recollection. […] Every city changes, and walking through a slowly changing city is like walking through an organic landscape during various seasons; leaves and even trees fall, birds migrate, but the forest stands: familiarity anchors the changes. But if the pace of change accelerates, a disjuncture between memory and actuality arises and one moves through a city of phantoms, of the disappeared, a city that is lonely and disorienting.
-- Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City
No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet café plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.
-- Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York
