An odd form of sadness welled up inside me as I glanced the pictures of NYC's new model of yellow cab. What didn't help were the images the Guardian had assembled from the archives of history and cinema, including one of a driver leaning against his cab during a strike through to De Niro's menacing anti-hero. But where were the images from Woody Allen's films? Some of the most memorable scenes are set inside the tatty interiors of the instantly recognisable yellow cab. One of my favourite lines uttered on screen from within these cabs occurs during a scene in which Allen plays a professor of creative writing whose attempt to woo a young female student is intermittently stalled (pardon the pun) by his usual habit of checking the rising fare: 'You're so beautiful I can hardly keep my eyes on the meter.'
Looking at the supersize Nissan model NYC has chosen just doesn't cut the cinematic mustard for me. It's difficult to imagine these SUV-like vehicles cruising across the big screen with anything like the rough'n'ready grace of the old beauties. Accompanying this likely loss to cinema is the sadness I feel for my friend whose first visit to NYC sometime in the future will have an old model-shaped hole at its centre. At the root of this melancholy is the idea of NYC's attachment to cinema - after all, the city is imagined as a cinematic reality before it becomes an actual one. The disappearance of formerly indelible markers of mediated reality such as the yellow cab pierce through the meaning of New York. It is hard to resist the thought that NYC is changing too fast at the behest of officialdom rather than as a result of the city's protean nature.
