In 2005 the tram to Roosevelt Island made headlines when seven passengers were stranded in a stalled car for six hours.  Although I know people who live on the island and rely on the tram to get back and forth the whole system seems inefficient and overblown, an outmoded nineteenth-century contraption.

But when walking cross-town along 59th Street one night last week the spectacle of the red cars crawling along the tracks overhead and then hovering in mid-air over First Avenue stopped me.  New York isn’t a hyper-modern city (super-dense, sprawling, ravaged) in the “Bladerunner” mold; it’s too porous and too orderly.  But for just a few minutes this stretch of the Upper East Side seemed implausibly futuristic.