A lady sporting a sandwich board advertising the jeans sale at Macy’s is improv rapping about it and snapping her fingers. She points in the direction of the store whenever someone stops for a second.

Some aspiring rappers get in the faces of my friends and me, begging us to buy their wares. Two of us do; it later turns out that one of the CDs is blank, although the other is quite good. They got talent.

In the concrete in Little Italy, someone has graffitied “HERE LIES JIMMY HOFFA.” Would that it were that simple…

A truck in Chinatown passes by. Someone has defaced it with the words “too many [expletive deleted]” and “war famine death.” I laugh boisterously.

I pass into an area with no Wi-Fi. This after coming from an area where I detected no less than eighteen networks.

I immerse myself in the crossroads of the world.

This city is America. It is alive, made of the hopes and dreams of the country.

Truly, this is the greatest city ever built.