New York, becoming

Like every great city, New York is always becoming something else. Something better, hopefully, more modern and new, bigger, and all that... But mainly, just something else. New York, we feel, when we're walking around and thinking about this, would always rather leave itself - all its old selves, in fact - behind, decamping to some more now place... Someplace as now and new as it was, when the Dutch first came, or at least something as now and new as it seemed, when we first came, and as it has always seemed for every new New Yorker, arriving on the wooded shores of Manhattan, or at Ellis Island, or JFK, or the Port Authority Bus Terminal. But it can't, of course, leave those old selves behind - and so it stays, becoming something else on top of itself. Which is admirable - think of the effort that takes! - and yet also sad, what with so many old New Yorks, strewn about, unloved yet undiscarded. Thankfully, Valeri Larko is there to paint them, to love and cherish them and enable us to do the same, before they - and we, old New Yorkers now too - are shuffled off, or just fade away.