NEW YORK – “Agrypnia excitata” is the clinical definition of a genetic pathology: Its symptoms are insomnia related to an abnormal nervous energy, a state of high pressure and the sensation you’re dreaming with your eyes open. A frantic and creative somnambulism. If you’re talking about an individual, there’s no doubt: It’s an illness. But if it’s an entire metropolis that is affected by it, then it becomes a prodigy, an ecstasy, a pleasure.
There’s no doubt Manhattan suffers from agrypnia excitata. As in the famous song “New York, New York” from the movie “The City That Never Sleeps,” made immortal by Liza Minnelli and Frank Sinatra, Manhattan nights are dense, nervous, wonderful and exhausting, like its days. Anything is possible, anything is allowed at any time of night in the overexcited heart of the Big Apple, enlightened by skyscrapers that don’t care about saving energy.
It’s an old story, after all. In 1959, a 32-year-old disc jockey named Peter Tripp went down in history after launching an epic challenge in a club at Times Square: to stay awake for 201 hours in a row, overflowing the beating heart of Broadway with non-stop music. The entire U.S. followed his exploit; curious people would gather in front of his club to see that nut. At that time, Times Square was already a special place, with rhythms that are absurd for the rest of the world. It was the universal center of “neon” commercials (today replaced by laser rays and other luminous energies projected towards the stratosphere). Tripp challenged the laws of physical resistance, shocked the natural borders between light and darkness, between wake and sleep, those rhythms that should rule the existence of us day animals. The chronicles say that at the end of his musical marathon, the disc-jockey slept for (only) 13 hours in a row, and woke up asking for fried eggs, bacon and a new copy of the New York Times. Who would make a big deal out of it today?
“Sleep deprivation,” that forced lack of sleep that was used by the Guantanamo torturers, is normal in Manhattan. The New York Times has a special blog, “All-Nighters,” where sleepless readers tell how they spend their nights. And nothing is ordinary. Forget about the Madrid or Buenos Aires scenes, there’s no contest here. Forget about the red-light districts in Hong Kong and Manila, the club-spa brothels open 24/7. Banal. Manhattan offers this and much, much more. The time when an indescribable human flow gets out of the theaters on Broadway (and off-Broadway, and off-off- Broadway) and gets overwhelmed with the lights in Times Square is just the prelude of the beginning. It’s the moment when the uninitiated, already satisfied with the show’s offer, find out that the true life is just about to begin. Music clubs where the Jazz or the Blues begin at midnight, such as in the Village Vanguard, the Stone, Smoke, Zinc Bar, are respectable bridges into the real night.
The peculiarity of Manhattan isn’t just its never-ending rhythm of entertainment. Nowhere else in the world will you find so many restaurants open all night long, not to mention the chains of “diners,” steakhouses and Five Napkins Hamburgers. It’s even more a New York tradition to go search for falafels and shish-kebabs: Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis, Lebanese, who garrison the pavements with their mobile huts from which columns of smoke and intoxicating aromas rise. Each of these vendors has its loyal clientele of night owls: The long queues that form at this or that corner of the 5th or 7th Avenue from 1am to 4am are a signal of the ever-changing ranking of gourmets, a Zagat guide constantly updated to catch up with the news of a high cuisine, made on the hot stoves in the high asphalt jungle.
But what is obvious is this: to have fun, listen to music, drink, eat and dance. Manhattan by night is much more than this though. It’s a place where anything, just anything, is possible at any time. Fitness clubs such as Equinox are frequented by treadmill fanatics who work out obsessively at three, four o’clock in the morning, and run 20 miles to train for the marathon, sweating in a gym lit by Millennium New Year’s Eve bulbs. Naturally, Equinox is always exposed through a glass window, because the whole nightlife in Manhattan is a public show, a shared effort, a collective ritual.
Even the most trivial act of daily life, such as buying groceries, takes place as if it were normal to do at two or three in the morning: The entire city is guarded by Duane Reade, a drugstore open 24/7, which the inexperienced European tourist confuses with a pharmacy. They’re actually big stores (the biggest aisles are underground): milk and cereals, pasta and tomato sauce, detergents or shampoos, pretzels or frozen lasagna. What wouldn’t you need when the rest of the planet is asleep?
The first light of dawn is preceded by an army of joggers who run in Central Park and even on the High Line, an old overhead railway station turned into a splendid roof garden with a view over the Hudson River and the coast of New Jersey. While commuter trains bring an army of traders ready to invade Wall Street to perpetrate financial global disasters to Grand Central Station, the bankers in pinstriped suits bump into the sleepless people, who slowly, reluctantly, go home. At night in the public gardens, there are benches reserved for the readers’ clubs; some generous soul always leaves newspapers, books and magazines for the sleepless of this insomnia culture.
The hedonistic insomnia of Manhattan is perhaps the last stage of imperial decadence. Like Berlin and Vienna in the ’30s, like Paris and London in the ’60s, like a dying star that emits a glow that stretches millions of light years, so is consumption, in this permanent sparkle, the last vitality of a civilization that has given the best of itself and doesn’t accept any nostalgia. New York can’t surrender to darkness because if the eyes are kept open, the dream never seems to end.