Faye Wong at the Mall

The fluorescent light at the end of the walkway cutting through the Enterprise Center was blinking eerily when I got to it last night. I had to ask myself whether this was part of some hastily planned Halloween celebration for the building’s residents I was unaware of (the people of this neighborhood are uncharacteristically fond of this season), or whether the fluorescent rod has just fallen into disuse, like the walkway itself which two years into the pandemic still feels unfamiliarly deserted. A couple of days ago, when I passed by it walking home from Greenbelt, it was blinking, too, I remember. In some other lifetime I would have stopped at the threshold and tried to decipher what those blips had meant but the curfew meant I had no time to spare.

I have always been fond of that part of the city, especially during the weekend when, devoid of the hustle and bustle of its many commuters, it becomes a ghost town: or almost. (The pandemic has again mooted this distinction, and now the weekends and the weekdays in the area are essentially indistinguishable.) I never had the same fascination when I am walking in BGC—a place equally gentrified, equally empty, even—perhaps because the latter does not bother to present itself as authentic, instead reveling at how synthetic and characterless everything about it is: the streets, the trees, the people.

I am not naïve, however: I know that the appreciation of these liminal urban landscapes requires turning a blind eye to the gentrification that has made these spaces possible. These spaces are meant to be looked at, not lived in. Still there is something in the calm brought by the evening breeze and the muffled hum of the traffic three blocks away that makes me want, even momentarily, to be complicit.