By Michael Glenn
You may have noticed that my byline wasn’t anywhere to be seen most of last week.
For the first time in two years, I was able to set down my laptop, turn it off and fly away… to Laguardia.
This past week, my parents took me and one of my best friends, Mary Newboles, to New York City. It was the first time I had been to the East Coast or to New York. I had always wanted to go, but it was just never feasible until now.
For the four days we were there, we toured four out of the five boroughs of New York (sorry, Brooklyn) and capstone our trip at Radio City Music Hall.
If you are a reader of my columns, you may remember me saying The Beatles are my favorite band of all time. Well, I was able to see one of them at the home of the Rockettes and in one of the most famous music venues of all time.
Ringo Starr and his All-Starr Band performed Friday evening, and Ringo did an excellent job entertaining and singing songs he performed when he was a little older than me, 60 years ago.
One of his most famous songs he sings, “With a Little Help from my Friends,” is my friend group’s de facto theme song. Hearing him perform the song almost brought a tear to my eye.
Besides Radio City Music Hall, we toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 30 Rockefeller Plaza (Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!,) the Ralph Lauren Flagship store and many more places. Truly, you could live in New York your entire life and still never visit everything there is to do in the Big Apple.
It’s truly a great city. I see why people say it’s the greatest city in the world.
Another aspect of the city I enjoyed is public transportation. You can walk down a flight of stairs, board a train and get anywhere you want in the city for $2.90. You can take a bus down the street or across the city.
Young people, people my age, are less likely to even own a driver’s license, so with a city booming with young professionals, it makes sense why NYC can be attractive.
I know New York has eight million people and is incredibly densely populated, but I think we back home can take a couple lessons from the city that never sleeps.
- Invest in public transportation: We could improve public transportation in Hutchinson by supporting the RCAT. This can be done by providing more funds to run more frequent routes with longer hours, hiring more staff and potentially changing the current routes. Changing the routes to allow for more bus transfers could allow riders to hop on buses and get where they need to be relatively quickly. Making an adequate public transportation system that is modern, accessible and understandable would have unthinkable benefits on Hutchinson. You want young people to move to Hutch? Build infrastructure that young people want to live around.
- Support attractions here: NYC does a great job of promoting and staffing its tourist attractions. Hutchinson is unique in the sense that a town of 40,000 people has a Smithsonian affiliate, the state’s fair, a salt museum and the NJCAA basketball tournament every year. We should continue marketing and supporting these organizations that put Hutch on the map.
But now, it’s back to work. My week back at work has been very packed, especially with the City’s proposition of a two-mill property tax increase and a ¾ sales tax increase. You can read some reporting we’ve done on it, and an investigative piece surrounding the tax increase that I’m proud of.
If you have any questions about the tax increase, let us know. The press’s job is to ensure that information that is being presented by the government is honest, accurate and fair.