It seems there's only one famous person who lives on the Upper West Side: Pat Kiernan, a reporter on New York One, the local news channel. We've spotted him on three separate occasions.
Manhattan is made up of around twelve avenues and (if you go up to the top of the Park) 110 streets. (The word twelve comes up quite a bit in my blogs - the Tube goes under the Thames twelve times; I was presented with twelve different options of shrimp in Fairway. I'm glad I made the decision to use the word rather than the number.)
Bear with me for a moment. Let's say that First Avenue represents January, Second = February, Third = March, Lexington = April, Park = May, Madison = June, Fifth = July, Sixth = August, Seventh = September, Eighth = October, Ninth = November and Tenth = December. And each of the streets from Houston (0) to 99th Street represents its most recent equivalent year (Houston = 2000, First Street = 2001, Second Street = 2002, Third Street = 2003, Fourth Street = 2004, Fifth Street = 1905, Sixth Street = 1906 ... 98th Street = 1998, 99th Street = 1999).
Now imagine that New York imposes a law stating that you must live within one block of the birthday crossroads of someone in your household. For instance, as I was born in July 1973, I'd have to live within a block of Fifth Avenue and 73rd Street. I wonder what the consequences would be.
Areas of the city would go through trend cycles. At the moment, the trendy area would probably be between 74th and 84th Streets, which would be full of twenty-somethings. Meanwhile, the area around NYU would be full of geriatrics. Twenty years from now, NoHo would become hip again (I'm allowed to say "hip" as I'm now over 30), as the geriatrics died out and those born in the early 2000s took their place.
As well as living in areas full of people of a similar age, people on your avenue would have the same, or adjacent, star-signs, and birthdays would ripple across Manhattan from east to west. You'd have to do a bit of playing around with Central Park (it would be harsh to force people to live in the Park just because they were born in the autumn), but Manhattan becomes sufficiently wide up there to accommodate the twelve avenues, without the need for Sixth and Seventh. Also, you'd have to do a bit of artistry with the Greenwich area, in which the streets are less uniform. I'm not sure what you'd do with the area south of Houston, btw, or for that matter, the area north of 99th Street. Maybe they'd be saved for business activity.
The only ways to move to a different area of the city would be:
- to get together with someone with a different birthday month (in which case you could move across town)
- to get together with someone much older or younger (enabling you to move downtown to be with your aged partner or uptown to be with your toy-boy/female equivalent)
- to start a family and move to an area sprawling with kids. No doubt this area would be littered with toy shops and kindergartens.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I thought it was worth a quick ponder. I think the reality of the situation would result in unnecessarily densely populated areas (where the twenty- and thirty-somethings live) and more sedate areas (where the older people live). Maybe that's a good thing. It'd make a mean über-reality TV show!
