Ever upward!
If you ask certain people about New York State’s official motto (Excelsior — Ever upward!), they’re liable to give you an explanation that includes height and work ethic. They’ll tell you about how the mighty Empire State Building reached new heights in the middle of the Great Depression and carry on about the value of hard work. This is all very nice and romantic, but I can assure you that the true meaning of Excelsior now refers mostly to the prices of things.
I most commonly come into contact with the motto in the subway station on Second Avenue near my apartment, where it is visible in great silver letters for anyone descending the stairs from the concourse level to the train platform. That it is only visible to those heading down into the tunnel to go downtown betrays that perhaps physical trajectory is not the most important part of the idea. Instead, it was installed (one assumes at the behest of the doomed Governor Cuomo) to commemorate Albany’s financial contribution to the digging of the three-station line on Second Avenue which, at an astonishing cost of $6.3 billion, was the highest price per mile of any subway line yet completed on this earth when it opened in 2017.
The same motto adorns the Moynihan Train Hall in Midtown ($1.6 billion) where it refers not just to the price, but to the posture of the passengers waiting for their trains — the project was finished on budget but did not include any chairs. Moynihan Hall is rather squat in comparison to the Empire State Building a few blocks away. I, having not visited the Empire State Building owing to the unjustifiable cost, cannot speak to the presence of the State’s motto there.
Even those rare New York artifacts that do not have Excelsior! carved into them seem to be increasing their prices lately. The first sign of trouble came some months ago when an orange sign appeared on the peanut vendor’s cart at the top of the subway stairs announcing that the cost of a bag of nuts had increased from $1 to $1.50 — an eye-watering increase of fifty percent. Fifty cents may not seem like much, but the introduction of quarters into the transaction has put me off of getting candied nuts on my way home from work for months now. Ever upward!
My economics class was the worst grade I ever got in college. The business majors who sat taking eager notes are surely able to identify the causes of this inflation (though they seem to have done very little to solve the problem so far), but it remains a mystery to me. This is almost more pleasurable because I can spin a narrative of my own oppression far more satisfying to me than any economic principle. Are complex global economic forces at play, or are my enemies out to get me? One answer is a great deal more interesting.
Elsewhere on Second Avenue, prices are rising. More signs have appeared on food trucks to apologize for the phenomenon. In my bodega, there was what seemed to be a week of calibration after their sign — scrawled in marker on the back of some Boar’s Head packaging — appeared on the glass deli case. The cashier, once so sure of the price when ringing up foil-wrapped sandwiches, now had to holler back to the counterman in their native language to confirm the price. The man who makes such a good grilled cheese, it turns out, is also the bodega’s chief economist. Ever upward!
The price of a load of laundry has also risen, which feels like a particularly personal blow. This is, again, a matter of quarters. On the larger machines, the prices now exceed what can be displayed on the tiny LCD screen next to the coin slot. Handwritten signs display the prices, but not in dollars. “45 QUARTERS!!” is written in colorful marker on the back of what was once a packing slip. There was no other acknowledgment of price change, but the sign still doubles the library of corporate communications ever produced by the laundromat, which used to consist only of “We will not be responsible for customer MISTAKE!” Ever upward!
Of course, the real trouble comes when the real corporate communications people get involved. “Increase,” “inflation,” and “apologize” have not yet worked their way into their lexicon, and they prefer to communicate by email instead of on the backs of scrap paper. Their missives tend to herald price “adjustments” measured not in quarters but in proportions of annual budgets. The first email came from the bike sharing company, which hid the message of their “change” amid news of service improvements to soften the blow. Ever upward!
Last week, the most horrible email of all arrived from the landlord, who prefers the term “renewal” and has, as a percentage, increased prices nearly in line with the peanut vendor. They claim to be sorry about the increase in property values, but I get the sense that they have not lost much sleep over the matter. The median price of an apartment on this island last month was $3,467, which at least makes me feel that I am getting a bargain. There is a sort of darkness, though, in thinking that the median renter lives in the median apartment just a few miles from here, pays all of that money, and probably has no garbage disposal. Ever upward!
Even for New Yorkers, a people for whom complaining is a thrilling pastime, the rent increases have been dreadful enough that they bring down the mood and make for bad complaining. Instead, the talk of the town has been of electric bills.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine on a different billing cycle asked if I had gotten my electric bill yet. I had not. “Oh,” she said, “Never mind.” As if to give me the pleasure of a few last beautiful days without the knowledge of what was to come.
The fateful envelope arrived from Consolidated Edison this week. As somebody with steam heat who uses electricity only for three LED lamps and a tea kettle, the increase was equivalent to one jazz club cover charge. I was lucky. A friend with electric heat saw a fourfold increase equivalent to a cheap flight to Europe. “We called my roommate’s dad and he thought it was an electrical short in the wall.” It was not.
If anyone has gotten an exact handle on what caused the increase in prices, I am not interested in finding out. Con Ed has blamed it on “a spike in [energy supply] costs” (no kidding). Some people blame the increase in natural gas prices related to tensions with the Russians and the closure of a nuclear plant upstate. That’s all very academic, but not terribly interesting. For all its worldliness, New York can be quite provincial, and most New Yorkers are not particularly captivated by the condition of our relationships with distant lands like upstate — and that’s not to mention Russia (though, when my lights dimmed for a second the other day — perhaps just from a neighbor turning on a vacuum cleaner — my mind turned in an instant of anxiety to Vladimir Putin and what I imagine to be his army of teenage hackers).
“I heard it had something to do with bitcoin,” a friend offered at dinner the other day. This seems plausible to me — what with the resource-heavy process of bitcoin mining — and allows me to be even more irritated with the bitcoin people than I already am. Consequently, it is now the theory to which I subscribe in the matter of the electric rate hike. The Mayor, for his part, took his first three paychecks in bitcoin and lost, by some estimates, thousands of dollars on the unfortunate stunt. Ever upward!
The last thing in New York to go without a price hike, it seems, is the subway. In fact, the Transit Authority announced new programs to make fares more affordable this week. $2.75 is, as ever, all you need to have a pretty good time in this city, which almost makes everything else seem palatable. That is, as long as you don’t mind stairs — the up escalator at my station is out of service until next month. Excelsior indeed.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
West Side Story — yes, the new one.
I was incensed when I first heard about Steven Spielberg’s intention to film a new West Side Story. I do not have a great personal stake in the 1961 film but, as a person who is always suspicious of new things, I was horrified.
Last weekend, I ventured out to a movie theater for the first time in months, nearly hit my credit limit buying a bag of popcorn and a slushee, and steeled myself for disappointment as I took my seat in the second row from the front.
If only it was always so pleasurable to be proven wrong! Every detail — down to the civil defense signs on the buildings being demolished to make way for Lincoln Center, was flawless. It’s a period piece now, and the uneasiness of the Robert Moses era and the Cold War are layered in as much as anything else — mutually assured destruction and Romeo and Juliet are a good match. Every character felt richer, which made the ending only more agonizing. The music — even the “reworked orchestrations” that had terrified me when I read about them — was electric. Thirty years after his death, Leonard Bernstein still doesn’t miss.
Maybe, after having walked in an ice storm to one of the few remaining theaters still screening West Side Story, I was susceptible to anything that included people dancing in warm light with leafy trees and open windows in the background, but I still walked out into the lobby slack-jawed and without even a hint of the disappointment for which I had hoped.
“Please, World, in a Time of Infinite Darkness, Just Let Us Have Wordle” by Sarah Schmelling in McSweeney’s.
Wordle at its core was just a good and nice thing to keep us occupied and happy during a terrible time. Now it has been taken by the New York Times for a sum “in the low seven figures” (something something excelsior). It is free — for now. Even so, a corporation has taken Wordle from us, just as Schmelling predicted. It only makes this piece from the halcyon days of a few weeks ago seem more bitter.