Subways of New York

Subway tracks in Brooklyn

"If pressed, I’d have to say that what I love most about the subways of New York is what they do not do. One may spend a lifetime looking back—whether regretfully or wistfully, with shame or fondness or sorrow—and thinking how, given the chance, you might have done things differently. But when you enter a subway car and the doors close, you have no choice but to give yourself over to where it is headed. The subway only goes one way: forward."
Bill Hayes, Insomniac City

Living in New York

East 13th Street

"I once said to someone that one doesn't come to New York for beauty. I said that's what Paris, or Iceland, is for. I said one comes to New York to live in New York, with all its noise and trash and rats in the subway and taxicabs stuck in crosstown traffic jams."
Bill Hayes, Insomniac City

So Much Love

Williamsburg

"She loved New York so much she couldn't bear the thought of it going on without her."
Bill Hayes, Insomniac City

Kindness

"Not everyone awake at this hour is an insomniac. The city is alive with doormen, delivery boys on bikes, street sweepers, homeless people, hustlers, prep cooks popping up out of trap doors in the sidewalk. I make a point of waving  or nodding hello when I can. I have come to believe that kindness is repaid in unexpected ways and that if you are lonely or bonetired or blue, you need only come down from your perch and step outside. New York—which is to say, New Yorkers—will take care of you.
Bill Hayes, Insomniac City

Diagnosis

Midtown Manhattan

"If New York were a patient, it would be diagnosed with agrypnia excitata, a rare genetic condition characterized by insomnia, nervous energy, constant twitching, and dream enactment. An apt description of a city that never sleeps, a place where one comes to reinvent himself."
Bill Hayes, Insomniac City