By Yvonne Vávra
December what? This week I’ve been tottering around the Upper West Side in a state of calendar shock. Did this year really just whoosh past without giving me a moment to prep for my best 2025 self? Excuse me, I had plans. I haven’t even started.
There’s still a whole month, though. Plenty of time to gather myself, hustle, and at least start doing all the things I meant to do this year.
But absolutely not.
Stop. That impulse to rush and cram more things into time is exactly why the year went express in the first place. It didn’t disappear because there were too few days, but because we have a tendency to skim over the ones we have. So instead of a frantic December push, we might need a December pause—a break and a breath to finally pay attention to the moments and the life we’ve perhaps not been noticing as much as we meant to. December might never end.
Of course, “noticing your life” is a tall order, and I wouldn’t know how to help with that. But I do know how to start small: right here on the sidewalk. The Upper West Side is full of tiny invitations to pause, you just have to slow down enough to catch one.
Like I did the other day. I was walking up Columbus when my eyes landed on windows that had been put in jail. That’s right. There’s a building on Columbus between 89th and 90th Street that has some of its windows behind bars. Or, more accurately, in cages. They sit in front of certain windows, always two of them on every other floor, because … huh?
As I reached 100th Street, the cages were still tickling my brain, and back home in the 70s, I was no closer to a plausible explanation. So I took to the internet, and, of course, I wasn’t the first to obsess over this architectural quirk. I found a blog post that embarked on a full-blown quest to uncover everything about the window cages of 609 Columbus, also known as the Turin House. At last, a doorwoman who had been working in the building for 24 years had all the answers. She explained that the cages are a unique fire-escape system, allowing residents to flee their burning apartment through the window and into their neighbor’s—that’s hopefully not also on fire. And the reason the cages appear only on every other floor? All the apartments are duplexes.
Mystery solved. What’s just as mystifying, though, is that I must’ve passed this building a million times at least without ever noticing the cages. I suppose that’s only understandable as every reasonable pair of eyes crossing 89th or 90th Street wants to wander toward the El Dorado towers on Central Park West. I’m not blaming them.
There are so many things to notice in the neighborhood. Small buildings stubbornly holding their ground between tall ones, Legos and artists’ portraits on the sidewalk, or standpipes and ventilation ducts that often seem to huddle together, begging to tell a story. Once you start paying attention, their little dramas unfold. Some look like they’re gossiping, others stand protectively side by side, and others are sulking, post-argument. You’re not imagining it—they have a lot going on and plenty of personality. I’m sure of it. And the fact that so many actually have eyes drawn onto them (you’d be surprised how many!) only proves the point. They’re asking to come alive, and Upper West Siders have kind hearts.
Sometimes, we don’t even have to find the moments. They find us and grab us by the senses, right through the nose for example. And somehow, we often still don’t notice. Which is wild, considering ours is a profoundly smelly city.
I stumbled on a New York Times article from December 1923 that raved about the richness and depth of the New York smell, one with “the memory of mud in it,” the kind you wouldn’t find in other cities. “You’d know you were in New York if you were blindfolded,” it insisted. “If you give the matter any attention, you can tell by your nose whether you are in Whitehall Street or Columbus Avenue, for instance.”
Can we? Many of us have blocked out the scent of the streets entirely and consider it a winning strategy. But in reality, we’re depriving our senses of a sensational time, just ask the dogs. Luckily, now is a great time to retrain our noses to send information to the brain again. There’s a rare scent meandering around the Upper West Side that only appears once a year. So this month, don’t let a single moment go unnoticed when the blast of pine from the Christmas-tree stands hits you. Step a little closer, give your sniffer a lean-in, like I do, and have yourself a merry little moment.
Time stops whooshing once we actually notice it, and we still have three full weeks to practice. Let’s call it a year and show up for December—properly this time—so maybe 2026 can run local. A far better plan than the ones we never started, no?
Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.
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December is always last.