Serendipity as Urban Curator

For years I’ve ridden the N or Q train into Times Square from Brooklyn, across the Manhattan Bridge, which provides one of the greatest cheap visual feasts in America. For the price of a ride you’re suspended 135 feet above the city, looking out the windows to the southwest across the mouth of the East River toward the choiring strings of the Brooklyn Bridge and, far beyond, the brilliant oxidized green of the Statue of Liberty. In an illusion created by the perspective of the moving subway car, she appears to be gliding along the deck of the bridge — the world’s most famous hunk of French neo-Classicism, disco skating backward into Manhattan.