When I started coming into NYC for school (as a 14 year old) I was introduced to how to move around a crowded area by my father. On our way in through the Port Authority, he pointed out that one should stand on the right side of an escalator, and walk on the left.
After moving to NYC from a place where there was very little available public transportation, I now understand why people visiting NYC think New Yorkers are rude. It’s because they completely lack awareness of themselves and their surroundings, everything you mention below.
Later, on the sidewalk, when I stopped to tie my shoe, he told me to move over, into the lee of a mailbox, to get out of the way of the flow of people. I think about this a lot even though it's been almost 30 years.
I am very suspicious of sweeping declarations about The Way Things Have Changed but I feel this basic awareness and consideration of others' movement - of a collective movement - is largely gone in this city.
I blame mobile phones (though I am very suspicious of sweeping blame that is narrow in scope). I'm doing my monthly posts because this morning on a narrow subway stair someone in front of me just stopped to look at their phone and I thought about this again.
In a crowded city, they take people from the collective physical experience to an individual digital one. If I were an essayist for the op-ed section of a major newspaper I might write a tenuous extrapolation about how our entire Social And Political Situation can be tied to this...
To, you know, an erosion of collective sensibility, manifested in both small and large ways. But.
Things that are maybe useful metaphors aren't always explanations.
People who, as they age, long for a return to how things were should be viewed with suspicion, and I view myself with suspicion, but I also wish that my co people of nyc can return to the sacred knowledge of how to move around each other with an awareness of each other.